The end of AMVs: a look back

[seasons]

inspired by jt_x's post in this thread (quoted below), looking to collect more stuff like this:

Hello, I didn't know you. I just went through your journal and I thought that this post you made in 2003 was interesting:

AMV's as an art form are dead. Gone are the days of community, gone are the days learning from each other, but saddest of all, gone are the days when actual editing meant something.
In its place we now have a flood of mindless drivel, completely self absorbed egotists, and videos that poor in by the second consisting of nothing more than glitz and masking or lumps of nothing featuring a flavor of the month anime/song, with not so much as even an after thought to pacing, continuity, theme, mood or above all any editing whatsoever.

Day by day more and more 13 year olds flood onto the scene, never contributing, never critiquing, but simply sucking down bandwidth and idolizing any video that happens to have their favorite song.
A good friend of mine said, "99% of people only watch AMV's simply to watch their favorite anime put to their favorite song". This is profoundly true, but hasn't always been the case.
Its horrifying how few people even consider anything more than "does it use a character/song I like?", casting away any efforts of any creators that dare go out of bounds and not mask fucking Love Hina onto Narotu or whatever the flavor of the month may be.
More and more of these videos come in, to where my bar has been set so low that if somebody can hit a simple beat, I go download everything they have ever done simply in hopes of finding some glimmer of hope in this mass of shit.

AMVs today seem to be trapped in the 80's. Flash and favorites have squarely taken the place of story telling, editing, and emotion.

Part of this decline is in my opinion due to the Carrot. One of the main things that always kept allot of the morons away was you had to go about figuring out and finding your own hosting, making people really stop to think if all the effort was actually worth it. Now anyone has a golden ticket.
Part of this also of course is simply the growing popularity of AMVs as a whole. The more people know about it, the greater the % of worthless people find their way here, but it seems to have grown exponentially.

Oh well, there is no changing it, but I sure as hell can be disgusted about it. I will continue to make AMVs for myself, which is why I started in the first place. I am sad though that I am finding so few new people that actually create, and take pride, and effort in their creations. People who don’t think "I know, this will be sure to win a con", people who don’t say "I will outdo so and so by making a better version of their video" and people who don't base all things off the amount you post on a forum.

To all of you who do such things, who have turned this art form into a cheap pop fest, I say, fuck you.

To all of you who continue to make vids for themselves, who constantly try to better themselves, and who don’t view AMVs simply as a popularity contest, please keep on keeping on, even if you feel nobody is watching.

reminded me this blog post talking about sub cultures being invaded. Also those 13 year olds are now 26.

[seasons]

from 2002: https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15436

AMV's have become a Fad. Everyone who has access to even basic editing software and some anime whether or not it's good footage puts out a video to a song and calls it a AMV. It used to be a art form...now it's just something to do. All the newbie videos look the same.

Now that Kris has turned animemusicvideos.org into a file server, newbies are coming out of the woodwork. It's really killing the AMV community. This is the main reason that a lot of the Known AMV creators have left the community. Here's why Eric (FlyHighStudios) left the AMV world.

I'm also sick of the way the AMV community has gotten in the past year. I've been creating videos for about 2 years (4 years total counting the "behind the scenes" help I have given to other creators and friends) and when I started making them, it was a fun and not overly popular thing to do. Well withen the past year, I have seen a MAJOR influx of new "creator's" that do nothing but rip ideas from other creators, rip video footage from other videos (mine included - MANY times I might add...), and an unbelievable influx of VERY BAD videos drowning out the "good" ones. Don't get me wrong, I'm NOT saying "MY" videos are "great" and I'm not being conceited. Far from it... but making MV's is like drawing. Some people can... and some people can't. Granted, we all like to share our work but enough is enough people! I'm ALSO getting REALLY fed up with a lot of the creators coming on board nowadays. Tooooo many of them bicker and argue over what they thought were "good" videos and "bad" videos. I've also seen a lot of whining about the fact "Well, I think MY video should have won the contest..." PEOPLE!! STOP BEING SO DAMN SELFISH! Contests were suppose to be fun... not something that to brag about or get upset about! It's small things like this on a LONG list of things that have disgusted me and made me go into "hermit" mode.

Whew... ok, time to stop and reconstruct my thoughts... got a little askew there. Basicly it boils down to this... I am pulling my files off the net and abandoning this website. I WILL continue to edit on my own time and distribute my video's to close friends but don't expect to see many place's where you can download them for yourself. My hope is that once the "fad" of Anime and making music videos to it has died down that I will return. And once it has died down, we will see just who are the "real" fans and who were the "fad boys".

[Mol]

The longer you edit the less you care.. I think . Well it kinda turned around when yt started org started to become "minority" over time. Thought most of ppl i know retired because of lack of time o:.

[Kionon]

AMVs are a dying Brad.

[Sephiroth]

Only thing that was dying was the org. Just the org.

[Kionon]

I find the whole idea of Org as needing to be the end-all, be-all silly anyway. It's a small community in a big hobby, and that's perfectly okay. Why does it need to be any thing else?

[Mol]

^It needs subs duh.
I thought amvs are a retiring kevin caldwell o:

[Castor Troy]

Holy crap, I remember ALL of this.

[Kionon]

Happy Birthday, Castor! YOU'RE OLD! (so am I...)

[Castor Troy]

Happy Birthday, Castor! YOU'RE OLD! (so am I...)

Back in my day, we made amvs with DVDs uphill in the snow both ways.... them kids and their fancy blu rays and digisubs.