Grievous AKA The Girl Who Travels Samsara AKA Cruel AMV

[SQ]

Incubators conduct experiments to contradict the effects of entropy. There are many universes (anime) in which this took place, perhaps several outcomes before the use of magical girls were decided.
Now what if Kira (from Death Note) is but one such type of previous contract? The girl who travels samsara will end him, and incubators, and all.

---

I'm not entirely happy with this, but I have let it sit for so long, I wanted to get it to "finished, not perfect" status so I could move on to other projects.

Personal goals:
- No blood
- No gore
- Don't go the easy route (overused popular/obvious scenes)
- If I do use a popular scene/anime, infer most the action to avoid use of said specific scene. Or change it some way.
- Homage to some of my most liked moments in old anime
- Retain some semblance of story rather than just a cruel montage

I think I did okay. The blood thing proved especially limiting.
I wanted to avoid Death Note entirely in the beginning, but to focus on story I re-added it. I have avoided almost all the expected scenes, however.
I've remade portions of this at least 3 times, several anime were considered, added, then removed. In the end I am mostly happy with this. My biggest complaint is that the cruelty of the Dildandau character in Vision of Escaflowne (my favorite anime) is not conveyed well in animation and so likely gets lost among the madness of the AMV unless you're familiar with the anime. This "implied cruelty" is the same for some other points, but I think those specific anime are so well-known that the message is clear anyway, even among those who have not seen those anime, they probably know what it refers to.

Overall this was a challenge, it is my first full-length AMV in many years, and is also one of my first various anime AMVs. I think I will stick to single anime AMVs from now on, hah.


There is an unaccounted for video source in here. The "game start", dice, game stat page things, and a couple random scenes are from a Korean webtoon called "DICE: The Cube That Changes Everything".

Special thanks to Tirazel, Requieet, Replay, and Mango.




Thank you for watching. =]

[vkamv]

Visual/Audio: The visual quality was good. I thought you did a great job color correcting the different anime sources to make them blend into each other. Some of the effects, particularly a few of the masks, however felt pretty rough and stood out too much. I feel some blurring of the background or edges would have benefited for blending. The Kyubey at the beginning in particularly felt really out of place. The effects were good. A nice balance of masks, overlays, and cross fades. The song was good choice. A nice beat with good emotion.

Synchronization: I thought your sync work was pretty solid. The visual kept pace with the tempo of the song and you did a good job using effects to accentuate the various beats.

Theme/Story: I watched the AMV without reading the description and doing so felt pretty lost. I didn’t see any real story or plot but a mixture of scenes that had a similar emotion tones and theme but no apparent plot or story. It just felt to me that you were matching different scenes from various anime to fix the lyrics but they were not actually connected to each other.

[SQ]

Some of the effects, particularly a few of the masks, however felt pretty rough and stood out too much. I feel some blurring of the background or edges would have benefited for blending.

Could you explain what you mean by blurring of the edges? Like feathering the mask or more of a vignette-type deal?

Theme/Story: [...] but no apparent plot or story.

Yeah, ti definitely failed here. There was a solid attempt(s), but I will admit I got tired of trying to make it work and wanted to move on to other projects.

Thank you for the feedback!

[Mol]

Well i feel you were pretty close to nailing theme just not sure about the anime you picked up , probably trying to drop out few maybe would have helped a bit, but it's pretty hard call if you didn't have any other visions. Anyway it's alright vid i think

[seasons]

I didn't "enjoy" this but I think the overtly unpleasant subject manner kind of influenced that reaction. And the fact that I don't really care for Death Parade and the song and... I could go on and on, anyway I think my opinions were kind of stacked against you from the outset here.

This AMV was edited very well, I think you did a very effective job of bringing these sources together and making them work both in terms of establishing a theme and just creating a video that flowed effectively. I remember seeing a very early draft of this and the final version here feels MUCH more cohesive and vastly improved.

I guess my reaction to this is kind of complicated, I'm definitely keeping this, though, and I'm glad you made it.