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Win some, lose some
2003-01-24 12:38:34
Got home late last night and there waiting for me were volumes 2 and 3 of the Hellsing DVDs. Much sooner than I expected - dvdsoon.com claimed to have shipped them on Tuesday, and that was itself earlier than they had predicted they'd be available. W00t!
I don't know if a plug is welcome, but I have to say I'm very pleased with dvdsoon. They ship from Canada, so I don't have to deal with cross-border silliness, and so far all the stuff I've bought from them has arrived earlier than I expected. I did notice that they had filled out a customs declaration (unnecessary for shipping within Canada, but it's probably a general policy because they ship to the US too) saying that the discs were worth $12 each and were gifts - in other words, lying through their teeth in order to reduce the chance of Customs trying to charge duty on it. If I were in the US I'd be pleased not to have to pay duty, but concerned that Customs might figure it out and confiscate the discs entirely.
There's only one episode on these that I haven't seen at least once already (number 9, "Red Rose Vertigo"), and since I'll be missing the club showing where it'll run, I went ahead and watched it straight off. All I can say is "w00t" again - not to spoil the plot, but it's got, like, hawt girl-on-girl action. (Integral, not Seras. Sorry.)
Unfortunately, what do I find out first thing this morning but that my university is going to cut off my free Internet access. (Not me personally, they're cutting off everyone because they think they can no longer afford to provide it.) It was never very good free Internet access, and I'm probably one of the very few who was willing to put up with it instead of buying a cablemodem or something, but having to go deal with a slimy commercial system is going to raise my blood pressure.
AMVs? What about AMVs? Well, I still have some more work to do on my Boogiepop project. And I still have to pick a name for it. Maybe if all goes well I'll finish it this weekend - who cares about laundry and grocery shopping? -
Journal^.Init;
2003-01-21 13:25:26
So, 177 people have downloaded my first video and I've had zero feedback, not just here but also on the other places I've posted it. The guy I gave a CD to telling him, "Show it at the club show, or not, and give me back the disc when you're done with it" has just kept the disc and done nothing and not said a word to me about it. I don't know if y'all think it sucked, or if you're eagerly awaiting my next one, but just in case you *are* eagerly awaiting my next one, I've been spending a lot of time on it and figure I might as well post progress updates and try to attract some attention.
My next video involves Boogiepop Phantom and the song "On the other side" by Janis Ian. It's close to finished - I just need to make about a dozen more edits, as well as go back and replace any edits that suck in the part I've already done. On the technical side, I've gotten a lot more ambitious with multitracks and so on. Still using Cinelerra, the same package I used on my first one. It is truly painful on my dual Celeron 433, but it does work. It hardly crashes much anymore at all now that I've figured out that it needs an extra gig of swap space. (I have 192Meg real RAM; a new computer is due to be purchased soon.) Anyway, I'm doing some tricky things now with multiple overlaid video tracks and just last week I finally figured out how to get "masks" to work. I'm doing a couple brief sequences where I divide the screen diagonally with a jagged boundary and have two different things going on, all done using masks and multi-track.
I also took the plunge (thanks, aokakesu, for the idea!) and edited the audio this time - there's a segment at the end where they repeat the same seven-bar sequence SIX TIMES IN A ROW, in Latin, with slightly varying accompaniment for like a minute and a half. It's almost as bad as "Take it to the limit". Just listening to the song it's fine because you can sort of go into an hypnotic state through that part, but I can't imagine an audience sitting through it even if I could program an interesting 42 bars of anime over solid repetitive Latin gibberish. So I clipped it down to two repeats; which really goes against my artistic sensibilities wrt. the song, but I think it'll make for better video. Cinelerra let me do a nifty little fast cross-fade which along with the reptitive nature of the original makes the edit sound just perfect.
Artistically, I still have mixed feelings about this video, which is really the reason it isn't finished already (and the reason for my comment about replacing edits that suck). I didn't have a clear story in mind apart from following the song, but I don't want to do what I did with Perfect Red which was to basically just grab words out of the lyrics and find pictures to illustrate them. ("Oh, it says 'A picture of the people you've impressed?' Fine, I'll find a picture of the people she impressed and stick that in.") I'm proudest of the bits of Perfect Red where there is a definite sequence or storyline through a series of edits, and I've done a bit of that with my new project but not as much as I'd really like. On the other hand, I think I've 100% captured the wacky nonlinear feeling of Boogiepop Phantom, so if you like the anime you should like my video too.
I'm still looking for a title for the Boogiepop music video. Really, no idea there.
Something I've noticed is that there's a definite feeling of discovery when I get something right. I spent a long time wondering what music to use for Boogiepop, and then I listened to "On the other side" and thought, "Oh, that's obviously it". Not just "This is a good song for this project," but "This is *the* right song for this project, and it's obvious that nothing else would be as good." I felt the same way about the song I chose for my next project, although since I don't even have the DVDs for that one yet, I think I'll hold off on announcing it. Similarly, there are sequences in both videos where I look at the images and think, "Yes, those are the right clips - no others would do." But I want to feel that way about every single clip, and at the moment, it's more like 20%.
JOURNAL: koronoru (Kevin Oronoru)
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