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a grave in the frozen air
2010-04-01 10:45:44
Today, Shin Hatubai goes dark. It has been a long time, nearly nine years, but after a lot of frustration in the current project, and really, most of the other ones since picking up the hobby again, the conclusion is inescapable that I really can't do this any more, and what's more, don't want to. The easiest and most worthwhile path is to put down tools and let what I've done to date have what little effect it can have. In terms of attempting to be transformational, that's been a resounding failure; just as the Connecticut Yankee was able to bring 19th-century mechanization to Camelot but not the 1500 years of social and intellectual progress required for them to actually improve their lives with it, anything I've tried to bring in in terms of new musical ideas, ZCoA, or whatnot can't dictate the soil it falls on, and has not led to much. Those who will pick up the torch and follow after have gotten their ideas from somewhere else and developed along parallel lines rather than by direct descent.
It's been a journey in more ways than one, of time as a 20-year-old grew into a 29-year-old with all the attendant maturation (or maybe just hardening), and in space, played out everywhere from spartan student apartments to German laundromats to the penthouse suite in a Beijing hotel, but at the end, what comes back, harder and stronger than anything else, is the concluding line to Emperor's "With Strength I Burn": "And even though/nothing I learned". This is the great secret of AMV: that there is no great secret, and an enormous amount of progress can be attested to by changing toolsets. What I've changed in nine years is how I set about the process of turning source into AMV, not how I *make videos*. This is unchanging and perhaps unchangeable; attempts to do different lead only to disaster.
To those who can, and maybe there really are some of those out there; bravo! You may actually have a talent unrelated to digital collage, and may go on to do something, in or out of this form, that's actually worth seeing. The rest are doomed to follow this path: to either lose interest gradually or come to this kind of watershed realization that, even more so than a lot of other things we do to fill the span between between birth and death, they've been wasting their time. This is a form for the young, not the old not because anime is for the young, or entirely because we become ossified in our ways (and in large measure our source selection), but because the young have an inherently greater capacity for self-delusion to the extent that they are able to put off the confrontation with their own inconsequence.
Faced with fighting against the sources to produce a video that, if and when it got finished, was already going to be past its expiration date, was the last straw, the bold-face indicator that the dream is dead. (Fitting, that; a collapse into sludge much more reminiscent of Type O's "Drunk In Paris" than any kind of last tango.) I don't do anything else with film or visual media, and continuing to hack away at something that, frankly, I am not that good at, was distracting from both my social life and the creative endeavors that I suck less at. Push comes to shove, something has to get cut, and why not the one hobby where I continue to ask myself, whenever I sit down to practice it, why the hell I continue to put myself through this? I don't even have the time to really watch anime any more, much less recut it into something cogent that's going to have an implication for anyone else. All that I do with AMV, to about 95% completeness, I can replicate by pulling out a DVD and singing along in my head as I watch it. Once you hit that level, the enormous effort involved to pass the song and scenes along to others who ignore or misunderstand it invalidates itself.
The idea of closing the circle has a strong appeal; I wanted to hold out and finish something for the end of May, to tie off nine years evenly, but at that point, why not hold on till May 2011 and ten years, etc, and then I'm locked in to an even more restrictive cycle of additional work I don't want to fulfill a form, overvaluing a zero in a certain place to shackle myself to zeroes everywhere. Death doesn't happen like that, short of suicide: no, it happens like this, where unnanounced and with bad timing things just stop.
SH114, then, is going to be convention-exclusive. This is the end of the road for SH, and personal vanity, more than anything else, demands a pretension to legend. Bug the AniBo guys if you want a copy, I've run my last render.
--Kai out (and this time, for real)
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and follow the way
2010-03-30 10:56:03
SH115:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 12/13
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 8/13
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
The last burst of cutting will go in tonight; thankfully, the DVDs cut last night and on the plate for today are much less mutilated, both in terms of picture and of data structure, so things are going swimmingly in that regard. Also assisting is the fundamental fact that this video cuts substantially against the source, giving me the ability to skip through a lot of cuts without looking closely at them. If something has no place in the final video, it's not worth cutting into the source pool only to come to that decision further down the line.
Once this is done, I have to go "down among the deadmen"; dead protocols, dead software, unified and reified into a shambling corpse of a trollvideo. Current prognostications see a completion sometime before the end of next weekend, but this may be delayed by the need to do up promo graphics for SH114 and the usual bouts of fuckitidontwannaworkonthisitis.
The fact that the cut has gone so quick (under 7 hours so far, so the final video is almost certain to come in under 20) means that I kind of also have to start looking at the projects ahead. SH116 has a concept and an audio source, but no video source as yet, since the one I was looking at previously is stupidly overused, and I don't even own it in the first place. I'm looking at some other prospects, but if nothing comes good, it may be another ILS video while I get the source for the current SH117 watched. Slowly but slowly, the list is getting ground through and I get closer to the end.
--Kai out
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of a time in life
2010-03-29 10:24:38
SH115:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 8/13
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 4/13
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
The realization over the weekend that this video was already retro, and shortly to become, in all likelihood, totally irrelevant, has acted as a strong kick up the ass to actually work on it. This led to just under two hours of stress and boredom last night cutting up the rest of the first DVD, at which point I now have about 3 GB of source, well enough to do this thing, and due to the nature of the material I need out of the remaining 2 DVDs and change (and, of course, the lack of it in-source), I may be able to finish cutting over the next couple nights as the purported floodmageddon (and of course, being on call, which means I can't go out anyways) radically cuts down other post-work options.
After that, I still have to do some graphics work to tidy it up, but not a lot; partly because I'm lazy and don't have the world's best resources for such, and partly because this video, with its song, its source, its choice of theme, and the one significant joke that I'm adding outside the source material, is very much a product of five to six years ago, and it'd be weird if it looked like a late-decade video rather than mid-decade work. Given my lack of editing, generally, since 2006, this is not very hard, but in this case, the laziness is thematically appropriate, and I'm still going to get frustrated and pound on it if it gets difficult or looks like crap.
SH114 premieres Friday; if, like me, you aren't able to go to AniBo, either because you're not in the area or because you have family and death metal commitments, it will go live on Friday morning. If you're at the convention, you'll probably be able to get the video as well, and in advance, since it's in the overflow rather than the contest.
--Kai out
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just to stay alive
2010-03-16 10:02:57
No progress since the last, but I should really get cranking, because of the following:
- Anime Boston continues to make selections true to form. The meaning of this should be clear to those who were around seven years ago.
- Because of this, I kind of have to go to AniBo this year, provided that it doesn't conflict with Overkill and/or Sonata Arctica. (I think that's that weekend.)
- I'm going to have to show up in a shirt with a cock on it. Probably. The meaning of this should be completely opaque to nearly everyone.
There's trolling, and then there's brilliant accidents like this. Probably have to get more flyers/stickers now too....
--Kai out
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let them all fare better
2010-03-08 09:22:12
SH115:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 4/12
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 1/12
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
The print on this title really sucks. Seriously, to the point of making it hard to get things done. Worse, the scripts I'm using tend to break when loaded into VDub, crashing the program and necessitating a tiresome rebuild of the filtering. This is probably a major reason why so many of the videos with this title are lo-fi on purpose; it does not take a lot to look at this print, throw up your hands, and say fuckit, the source thematics are all lo-fi, I don't need to kill myself making this not look like it's got overhead projector burn.
The most bizarre part about this is that there are photographic artifacts in this title: dust on the film, blank spots, and the like. This would not be unusual if this anime was five years older, but that's the rub: this is a digitally animated title and there are photographic artifacts in it. Maybe the backgrounds were painted by hand and photographed in to save money, but that's still not a really adequate explanation as to why this is now the worst of both worlds.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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