Lucky Star/Haruhi Opening Parody- Unlikely Star

Ashyukun · Post by **Ashyukun** » Sat Jul 28, 2007 11:55 am

Unlikely Star was a quick little opening parody I put together initially as an exhibition entry for ACen, and eventually it was sent to AnimeNEXT to help fill out their Parody/Trailer category as well. It's nothing revolutionary or exceptional- just a fun little parody of the Lucky Star opening using the opening/ending animation sequences from The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi. Enjoy!

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Sat Jul 28, 2007 1:42 pm

Fun little video, but I honestly felt like it had a ton of untapped potential.

WC Annihilus · Post by **WC Annihilus** » Sat Jul 28, 2007 2:00 pm

Agreed. As you said, wasn't exceptional. Wasn't horrible but wasn't great either. Still fun, but there was a lot more you probably could have done.

Bakadeshi · Post by **Bakadeshi** » Sat Jul 28, 2007 10:16 pm

haha I had thought of doing this at one point also ;p (I mean Kyoani parodies alot of stuff from the haruhi opening to begin with)

/downloading

Lok1990 · Post by **Lok1990** » Sat Jul 28, 2007 10:57 pm

there are many others parts you see synch to make it better, anyways still fun to watch ^^

jade_eyed_angel · Post by **jade_eyed_angel** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 10:26 am

cute O:

dj_ultima_the_great · Post by **dj_ultima_the_great** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 2:21 pm

This was a cute video, and I actually think it was interesting that you used un-doctored up footage from Haruhi to make an opening. While I love those M@D-ish effects-ridden versions of parody openings, it's fun to see what you can do without that.

I guess the only other thing I have to say is... my Cod. Is that really the opening music? That's gotta be the most awful opening I've ever heard, not to mention nonsensical. ~_~;;

- Jen

Org Profile · Post by **GloryQuestor** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 3:26 pm

dj_ultima_the_great wrote:I guess the only other thing I have to say is... my Cod. Is that really the opening music? That's gotta be the most awful opening I've ever heard, not to mention nonsensical. ~_~;;

- Jen

Lucky Star reminds me of a marriage betwen Excel Saga and uber-fandom (as the in-jokes are extremely obscure).

btw, Ashyukun, the video was good. My only question would be why you left in the op/ed katakana credit titling, but otherwise, it was pretty amusing.

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Mon Jul 30, 2007 6:11 am

Since I've just watched Lucky Star 16 subbed and 17 raw, I have the opening fresh in my mind. Having said that, I find your editing and scene selections interesting. Probably not what I would have done, but certain parts, like at 0:42 where the original has a shot of the main cast's legs you used the still segments from the Haruhi ending, worked. Also, the segment at 1:44 mimicked the feel of the original scene as well. Unfortunately, I wasn't as enamored of the segment from 0:49 to the "tunnel scene" at 1:01.

Technical issue: what's with the 720 x 360 resolution? If I make it 16:9 with Media Player Classic the main video looks correct, but the intro SOS-Dan logo looks off.

Overall, a decent parody considering you didn't manipulate any footage (at least not that I could tell), but I was hoping for a bit more.

Ashyukun · Post by **Ashyukun** » Mon Jul 30, 2007 9:11 am

I'm glad that overall people seem to be enjoying it.

I set out to make this largely on a whim (and because I'd gotten the Lucky Star opening theme stuck in my head a few too many times and figured making a video with it would help alleviate that

), and spent about 2 hours total on the actual video editing portion of it- adding in the song titles in AE would actually end up taking me longer to do than I spent editing the video in Premiere.

This was just a quick, fun little project to blow the proverbial cobwebs off my editing skills after having not touched Premiere in nearly a year, so I didn't expect wondrous things out of it. Paraphrasing a joke I heard a Yakitate Japan cosplayer make at Otakon, "I'm only using one-quarter of my editing power!"

I didn't have either the full-length ending sequence or the clean (no credit) version of the OP or ED to work with, which is why they still have the credits there. If I'd had the extended ending sequence it would have worked out a bit differently since I would have had more footage to work with- as it was though, I had a fairly limited amount and had to work with that. Not re-using footage with only having roughly twice the length of footage than the video I was making was challenging but a good exercise, I thought. This challenge was helped a lot by the fact that as Bakadeshi pointed out, the Lucky Star opening itself parodies the Haruhi ED heavily, so there were enough parallels to make it easier.

Yes, that very much is the actual Lucky Star opening music- and the actual lyrics/translation to them. It's completely insane, nonsensical, and very addictive... especially the break strain in the middle (tunnel sequence in my video, cheerleading sequence in the original). An interesting note- I have the CD single of the song, and the off-vocal (Karaoke) version of the song is actually really interesting- it's quite neat hearing just how much of the song is carried by the lyrics vs. the instrumental background.

As for having not gone all-out effects wise in trying to make it a perfect recreation of the original- I did consider it, it's not like I've not done something similar before (Samurai Windu), but ultimately it wasn't the aim in making this so I really only used After Effects for the song subtitling and my usual bugging (though ironically I goofed when I made the final encodes and didn't use the bugged version- so this is the first video in 4 years that doesn't have an Afro Ken hidden in it).

Hmmm. I'm not sure why you're having problems with the resolution, Willen- both the SOS-Dan logo and the footage look fine when I play them back in VLC. You shouldn't need to make it any special PAR, its encoded for computer playback so its 1:1...

Thanks to all for checking it out and for the feedback!