Evangelion : Spanish Sahara

[exkcal]

I am new to creating AMVs. What do you guys thing of this? I put around 5-6 hours of work in to it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2thh6CUtaY0

[King Redeem]

I actually really like the pairing of this song and anime... I feel strangely at peace with your pacing (for the first half of the song)... No noticeable issues with the video quality... this is a good thing. Your beat sync is mostly on point... Good job! A few guitar strums that are missing a cut... would also recommend more use of transitions, like simple fade to black/fade to white. You use them sometimes but not enough.

The main thing I want to bring to your attention is using lyric sync... something that took me a few AMVs before I understood. Basically, making a cut at the start of each lyric of the singer's voice, as compared to cutting at the beat of the music. This will help add some variety to your cuts... so they don't become too predictable. Watch some really high level AMVs and watch for where they make their cuts... you'll see that many happen on either the beat or the start of a lyric. The combination of both in your AMVs will really help take you to the next level.

The build-up to this song is really slow, but has a great pay-off. My issue is that you do not do justice to the climax of the song (starting at 4:10). I want to see the pace pick up. At the cymbal crash at 4:11, you had the chance to choose a clip that would really POP, but missed it. ENERGIZE IT!! Increase the amount of cuts and make them shorter (using both lyric sync and beat sync). DAZZLE ME!!

Overall, I like the mood you create in the first half... want to see you employ more lyric sync to help energize the second half/finale. Hope this helps!

[exkcal]

You should have seen how poor the original ending was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEbiWjf5AO8

[exkcal]

You should have seen how poor the original ending was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEbiWjf5AO8

[seasons]

Interesting selection of clips here, and I say that even though there's some here that I've seen more times than I can count and a couple that I never really wanted to see in any AMV ever again, AND the fact that there's no part of me left that really feels the need to watch another End of Evangelion video (and I'm actually a big Eva fan). This really caught me off guard and was a lot more interesting than I was expecting. From the beginning you honed in on a mood that few videos in this genre ever shoot for. I appreciated the simple cuts and transitions in this, which fit the song pretty well, especially with the guitar chords at the beginning. Simple editing and longer shots do the clips you chose a favor; when the time is right, sometimes it's best to let the visuals speak for themselves.

I appreciated how you started out with very small, quiet moments and slowly/steadily built up to the big scenes. I always had the sensation that this AMV was going somewhere, and in a 6-minute AMV, that's kind of important. This was an unexpected blend of "thoughtful" Eva and "epic" Eva that worked really well and is one of the more interesting interpretations of the series film that I've seen in a while.

The build-up to this song is really slow, but has a great pay-off. My issue is that you do not do justice to the climax of the song (starting at 4:10). I want to see the pace pick up. At the cymbal crash at 4:11, you had the chance to choose a clip that would really POP, but missed it.

The pace of the cuts start to noticeably pick up about 30 seconds before that as the music gradually builds towards that moment. I'm not saying this video is a masterpiece but I thought that was a subtle and brilliantly effective sequence. So much so that I didn't mind the anticlimax that followed, which wasn't what we were expecting or possibly hoping for in the moment but still worked well enough for me (how to sustain a big climax when there's still 2 minutes of song left is another issue I wouldn't know where to start with). Maybe everything after that was cool clips from the end of the movie in a random order -- getting this whole thing done in 5-6 hours makes me wonder if there's truth to that -- but this is the first time in a while that watching something like that has made me feel anything.

[exkcal]

getting this whole thing done in 5-6 hours makes me wonder if there's truth to that -- but this is the first time in a while that watching something like that has made me feel anything.

I just watched the movie twice and went at it. The original cut I did took 6 hours but re doing the last two minutes might have added a couple more... I tried my best to exclude the giant robots in this one lol

[King Redeem]

This really caught me off guard and was a lot more interesting than I was expecting. From the beginning you honed in on a mood that few videos in this genre ever shoot for.

I very much agree with this.

[CrackTheSky]

I pretty much echo the general sentiments behind seasons' and King Redeem's comments. In my opinion, there definitely needed to be something -- a cut, internal sync, something -- that happened at the climax around 4:11. The fact that nothing did happen really, really bothered me and kept me from being fully invested in the video pretty much from that point on. It's a shame too because, as the others have mentioned, you built everything else up spectacularly, but failed to release the energy when you should have. I get seasons' point about having to maintain that energy for the entirety of the song after that, and I agree that it would have been difficult to do, but I think it would have elevated this video above a lot of others that have tried to do this same kind of thing.

I thought the editing in the video was pretty nondescript -- nothing about it really took my breath away or made me look twice, so to speak. It felt kind of plain and lazy at some points, but what I did appreciate about the video was the great mood you set in other, more subtle ways -- scene selection, mainly. This wasn't a very tightly synced video but I don't think it needed to be, because you nailed the mood pretty well. There were some scenes that I wish you had played around with a little more; the sequence from 3:18 - 3:27 had a cool idea behind it but it felt really choppy and didn't work nearly as well as I wish it did.

In general I liked this quite a bit, but more for what it represented what you're capable of as an editor rather than what it actually is. You're on the right track, and I think if you invest some more time in the editing process, and maybe consult a couple beta testers before releasing your next video you could really make something awesome.

Also, I just want to express my appreciation to you for having the balls to actually edit with a six and a half minute song and NOT cut it...this is an extreme rarity these days, when people's attention span for AMVs rarely seems to pass the three-minute mark. I like that you took on an idea this big and gave it a shot, even if it didn't always feel fully completed. It has a whisper of epicness that I want so badly to have been fully expressed...I expect better things in the future though

[exkcal]

http://www.mediafire.com/watch/crb2qddf ... iafire.mp4

== CANCELLED ==

This is a link to my current project if any of you want to check it out. I've put probably 2x the effort into but i've gone over it so many times I can't even judge it without being biased. I still have a lot of cross fades to fix and an 'ending' to procure but some general thoughts would be appreciated. I might throw this up as a subject in the opinion exchange forum later.