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Whew, another year at Anime Boston! Let's wrap up!
2012-04-08 21:38:19
This is such a weird con for me. I look forward to it all year, but have varying degrees of fun and was not planning to attend this year unless I had a video in the finals (which I did). I am so glad I went this weekend, because I had a really good time...IN SPITE OF coming down with food poisoning. Not the worst I've ever had, but definitely enough to make sitting through an otherwise enjoyable AMV contest rather...well...anxious. Even made my vertigo come back for awhile, which was even more unpleasant and aggravating.
On the positive side, when you get food poisoning at a con, you spend less money on meals!! :D
Yah, so....what to recap. OK! Bashar and Lantis invited Shin and I to join the AMV panels Friday afternoon as surprise guest panelists, which was fun and - as I said at the time - absolutely not a place I ever, ever thought I'd be. So many years spent in the audience, gazing hungrily up at the "pro" editors and cursing my ineptitude. Holy cow, what can I possibly contribute to their panel?! Wasn't sure at the time, but hopefully I did ok...apologies for any confusion or asinine statements which were made by moi. -_- I do not and will probably never claim to be a "pro" editor who should be sitting on an AMV panel. Hopefully they will invite other people in the future, if they need guest panelists. I got to meet a bunch of AMV folks, thanks to that panel, and that's something I've never really done before at AB.
And then, it was the contest, and all was right with the world ('cept for the food poisoning et al). I managed to call the winner, not only of the "other" category, but - as it turned out - Best in Show. Ironically, due to AB's rules about Best of Show not being a category winner, this caused me to become the "Other" category winner as runner-up to Bye: The Sea, another fantastically simple yet wonderfully executed AMV by Borihei.
I will state right now that I was quite disappointed in my AMV. It looked bad on screen, it felt slow and a little out of synch because the audio cues weren't coming through clearly, and it just did not seem at all to me like something that I had done a good job with. Among other things. *shrug* Obviously some others in the audience liked it well enough, but I personally was not all very happy with it. MeliChan923's trailer Evil Island kicked L.F.S.'s butt - it is extremely well done and won the Editor's Choice award and I couldn't agree more with that. I will be rooting for her AMV for "Best Trailer" in the VCA's next year (unless something more kick butt comes along - gotta be fair). But yes...
Most horrible thing I saw at the con this year was going to be the overweight girl in the thin yellow dress which showed every bit of cellulite and the thong she was wearing, UNTIL I saw the person with - as far as I could tell - the authentic, full-size wolf pelt (complete with head, paws and tail) thrown over their body. I'm sorry, I've skinned chipmunks for their pelts, but those are aggravating, over-abundant rodents my cat kills. I had a coyote head pelt, once upon a time, and was proud of it. But a full WOLF CARCASS AT AN ANIME CONVENTION??? What. The. Hell?
*sigh* What I took away from Anime Boston this year is that I need to do a lot better as an AMV editor. I wish, I wish, I wish XII was possible for me to make, the video which I've ripped footage for three or four times and then given up in fits of rage/misery/despair. I thought maybe I was properly inspired/motivated to make a Cosmic Love video, but fear of failure is setting in, now. There's a line between pushing your limits and knowing your limits, though, and I see it quite clearly. Maybe I will try...I guess the problem is, that when I try something, failure isn't something I consider to be an option. This may be contrary to Master Yoda's teachings, but I prefer to pick my battles where I can win them. I don't have anything fundamentally against such tactics, however unpopular or non-politically correct that may be. I do prefer a challenge, though, and I like pushing myself to do things I'm not sure I can.
Such a lot of typing and wishy washiness. :| -
@Castor
2012-04-02 20:24:26
I think I'm looking forward to your video more than the possible end of the world. This is so great! :D
@_@ maybe they're one and the same.... - Oh right, it's April 1 at the .Org 2012-04-01 10:20:37 Why do I forget about this every year until it's too late? LOL
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Feels weird not to be recording any hours of work.
2012-03-29 22:14:09
So it's been about a week since my first AMV in more than three years went up. It's been kind of a strange experience. I was definitely less hyped up about releasing it than the others, but that makes sense, since I'm not nearly as attached to it as the rest. I got far less critical feedback on it than the others, which is quite disappointing...but that's attributable to a variety of things, some of which are depressing, others of which are just the way things are.
But! I was quite surprised and honored to win Best Technical at Tekkoshocon - THAT was something I certainly didn't see coming! I'd very much like to know what the audience thought. Did they laugh? Did they yawn? Did they gasp? Did they talk during my video?! (I HATE it when people do that, even if a video is boring as hell...it's just rude.) I make these things for the purpose of entertaining others, and that's more important to me than anything else. Guess I'll be finding out firsthand next weekend at Anime Boston...*chews fingernails*
And speaking of cons, I also was very happy this week to learn that I made the finals in Sakura-Con! This year it's the same weekend as AB - talk about a double dose of AMV anxiety!! Seems like there's a handful of the same videos being shown at both cons, so I suppose if I squint really hard, I can pretend I'm on the West Coast instead of the East.
Oh yes, and CodeZTM has invited me to discuss "The Making of" L.F.S. during one of his upcoming Lip Flapper sessions, which is REALLY cool. I'm quite curious to find out what he wants to know, in particular (the non-particulars are already recorded for posterity here); he seems to ask excellent questions of folks. Hopefully I can keep my answers short and to the point. ^_^
Whew, so I guess it has been kind of an eventful week. My dog's also invented a new game, called "Roll the treat ball under the futon so Lauren has to fetch it out and interact with me." She is EXCELLENT at it, but she's a Corgi, so she's got brains and creativity to spare. -
Oh yes, and about those VCA Merchandise Contest entries I made...
2012-03-25 13:31:56
Not 100% sure of this, but apparently there were no other entries into the contest, so they're offering a t-shirt with one of my designs. It's cool that the admins did this - I certainly wasn't expecting them to - but competition is a good thing and I hope that if this contest is ever run again, more people enter.
Check out the site store here: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/store/
Given how the contest turned out, I wanted to throw this out: we've got enough people with ideas and enough other people with ability around here to pool our resources, if necessary. Why should someone have to come up with both with the idea and the artwork? A collaborative kind of contest might be fun and encourage a more community involvement, if that is the end goal (fun & community spirit).
Two ideas:
Cartoon strip where people fill in 3-5 blocks with their own images for a given theme. You could also do one where people are asked to provide a caption (or captions) that go along with a general image. Sort of like the contest in The New Yorker where readers come up with their own concept of what is being shown in the cartoon, and everyone votes on the one they like the best.
Leverage http://www.wordle.net It's how I generated most of the components for my entries. Maybe when the VCAs roll around next time, a month or so prior there could be a contest to generate Word Cloud images for each category. You could either give people the text they should use, or let them do whatever they want. It would give the VCAs a little extra air of fun and games, maybe some more (positive) attention and make the various threads for each category have a cool looking theme. Wordle is actually kind of addictive, one you start playing with it...like Bejeweled, only without victory music.
Anybody else have ideas?
JOURNAL: DriftRoot (Lauren C.)
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