WIP - Wake Up FLCL vid - beat/emo

[sircrackpot]

http://www.mediafire.com/?l6cucxeda45bwpn

Name: Wake Up Naota
Anime: FLCL
Song: Wake Up by The Arcade Fire
Format: MP4

I thought the song perfectly described Naota's behavior of wanting to be older and throwing away painful things. His relationship with Haruka and Mamimi being a complex and filled with both pain and comfort at the same time. The fade out transitions were more of a experiment...I thought it ended up being pretty cool and didn't hinder the video, IMO.

How is it so far? If I continue on as is...is it worth watching? In the end, it's for myself, but I do love fresh perspectives. Even Arcade Fire itself was a band I normally wouldn't listen to and ended up looking into it do to other people mentioning other of their songs.

I want to follow the lyrics but not to the letter. The flow is most important to me and lyrics just happen to closely describe Naota. For big upswings in the music, I want to toss in a little bit of action to capture that mood shift. Also showing Naota's evolution into being independent and out of his brother's shadow while also shifting his emotions from Mamimi to Haruka.

Ambitious project seeing as the song is decently long. Thus thus far already had me sinking in over 8 hours. (Damn frame-by-frame fade-ins take a bit to make look right)

[sircrackpot]

...Lesson learned when doing beat-ish work. Use headphones. Christ. *continues to evolve*

[sircrackpot]

http://www.mediafire.com/?7o8fa1jnekc5h9v

Okay, fixed some timing issues and made some sacrifices related to the sexy fade outs. I wanna throw in robot fights, though. Damn my choice in deep music for this vid.

[Davis 51]

You seem to rely a lot on fades to black. I gotta admit, many of these look ugly as sin (don't take that as a knock, I'm just pointing out what I see). A lot of these fades start very early in the clip and don't really match the beat. Much of the syncing relies on this, and while you do sync on the beats, there is no consistency to which part of the beat you sync to. Arcade Fire is a complex band, that has multiple rhythms and beat layers in all their songs. You need to identify one or two of those layers and stick with them, switching layers to sync to only when thematically appropriate.

You took on a great challenge when you selected a high-energy, highly kinetic, very long song, and decided to use a series like FLCL, which is only 6 episodes long. As a result, the pacing of the events in the video and the music don't quite match up. You may want to seriously consider adding more Gainax source material.

I worked on a music video with this song for literally over a year, so I am a bit biased (it's Avatar: The Last Airbender, so its not hosted anywhere here, though you can check it out via the link in my sig, albeit shrunk down to youtube quality.) You can look at it if you want ideas on how I would do something like this, though mine was very effects heavy, yours does not have to be. You just need to work on timing and pacing, that's all.

Happy editing!