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Information

• Member: MiniGendo
• Title: Radio Free Bugrom
• Premiered: 2003-05-21
• Categories:
  • Comedy
  • Character Profile
  • Fun
• Song:
  • Blizzard Entertainment Radio Free Zerg
• Anime:
  • El Hazard: The Magnificent World (1st OVA)
  • El Hazard: The Magnificent World (2nd OVA)
  • StarCraft
• Participation:
  • Animazement AMV Contest, Animazement AMV Contest (2003-05-23)
• Comments: Edit 1/11/07
  Received this as a quick comment: 2006-12-18 01:47:31no clips from the thing from which is the original music, please.
  To clear something up, Radio Free Zerg is a bgm track for the game. At no part does it play during the cinemas, therefore it's not using the original clips. I do wish quick comments had a respond feature, but I guess that would defeate the purpose of them.
  
  (Post posting note: 250 downloads seemed a good place to stop. This project has necessitated the complete destruction of my college webspace, and while no one ever visited that particular page, it's a matter of pride that it stay up. I am working to secure another host, but you can never tell with these things. As it is, if anyone really really really wants to watch the video, drop me a line and I'll see what we can work out. My thanks to everyone who submitted an opinion, it's nice to know that one out of every 50 of you have the coutesy, although I did have to beg for those so... just ignore that last sentence.)
  
  (Post Post Posting note: Radio Free Bugrom was awarded honarable mention at Animazement 2003. Go me... yay....)
  
  Well, here it is, my third and much delayed attempt in to the wonderful world of video making. I started this way back near the beginning of summer, and thanks to college, and college by products, have only recently finished. It's been a rough trip, and I feel I've learned a lot. Whether or not that will lend itself to my video's popularity is doubtful, but such is life. As things stand, this is the last gasp of my tortured music video editing system. Imagine if you will, an ancient TV capture card taking in DVD footage onto a venerable Gateway desktop. Then the video was shipped via LAN to my slightly faster Toshiba laptop for the editing stage. The card itself drops roughly half of what it shouold be capturing, and the resolution was abysmal... but enough whining, on to the video itself.
  
  Basically, this all started when long ago I started playing multiplayer starcraft. I was forced to think up an apporpriate Battlenet name. Favoring as I did the zerg, and El Hazard having always been a favorite of mine I chose the name Katsuhiko. Years later, someone forced me to listen to Blizzards Radio Free zerg, and I got a somewhat stupid idea that, as stupid ideas always do seemed like a good idea at the time. The song was semi humorous, had a beat and well I don't know, a human leading an army of giant insects and a former human leading an army of giant insects just went click inside my head.
  
  As for the technique used in the video itself, its a bizarre biproduct of my attendence of the local anime con last year. The winner of the music video contest at said con was Frontier psychiatrist, which in my mind was not the best video there. It seemed to feature many repeated scenes, and to my mind at that time, the only thing really spiffy about it was the lip synching. So I made a vow that my next video, this video would also have lypsynching. I attempted to lip synch every verse in the song, and did not include any footage with talking, so all the footage is I guess lip synched.
  
  It had originally been my intention to carry the entire thing through with only El Hazard footage, but I found that there were some scenes that the music just didn't seem to fit any of the available footage, namely those pieces featuring armies of giant insects. In the end I turned to the good people at Blizzard and used a few scenes with their giant insects. The dream sequence was perfect for the quiter parts of the music, and some scenes, such as the wrecked city parts, seemed to fit in well with the El Hazard bits I had already done. The hard part though, as the Starcraft footage was a bit of a tack on, was to include enough of it to make it not seem random. i don;'t know how successful in that endeavor, but ehh... you know. Additionally, the starcraft footage was letterboxed, which was at odds with the rest of the footage from El Hazard. After my inital attempt at using AVIsynth failed horribly, I've yet to get it working, I had to use artifice. I switched my DVD player to 9 by 16 format, making the footage appear less letterboxed at the coss of stretching things out some. As my footage was all of inhuman monsters anyway I don't think it was really too obvious.
  
  The main purpose of this video was to tell a story, or kinda of profile the career of one Katsuhiko Jinnai. The video basically follows him through his early ascension as "lord god" of the Bugrom empire, then moves on to his initial successes, and then breaks for his preparation for the big assault. In the preparation phase I tried to include Starcrafty elements, such as the bugrom mining, resting, gathering troops, spawing more overlords as it were. The egg at the beginning does have a connection with the eggs in the middle. The whole premise was supposed to be that these were new recruits hatching, and being indoctrinated into the swarm. When they hatch near the middle it's supposed to be Jinnai's getting ready to send the newly spawned bugs off to fight and die. Anyway, after the break, Jinnai launches his huge, and highly successful final assault, which is going well until he gets nuked, the enemy calling in the strike on themselves, destroying one of their bases and most of Jinnai's forces, a catastrophic setback. For any of you who have seen the El Hazard series, you should recognise this pattern as being typical of Jinnai's exploits. He does really well up till the end, when everything just kind of falls apart on him, usually in one big sweep. This was also a call back to my starcraft days. I remember as the terrans using nukes to open the doors of enemy bases, or conversly to call them down on my own base to take out invaders. The nuke was always horribly effective against the zerg.
  
  Saddly, a nifty concept is a nifty concept, but a boring song is a boring song, and this was made somewhat apparent to me after listening to it ... the number escapes me, number of times. I had to spice it up a bit. Hence the flashing words. These trite and somewhat bizzare phrases were chosen to be a strange little aside, changing with each flash to keep from being bored. Once more I was going for the whole indoctrination bit. The hive shots behind the text were chosen to go in such an order as to appear to be getting closer and closer, the final one taking place in side of the hive. I realized that these attempts weren't helping much, so I fell back to trying to synchronize everything, and I certainly made the attempt. Bugrom, jump, dance, and attack to the beat. The camera and scenes change... on the beat. The text changes on the beat, if you watch carefully, in one scene where mutalisks are flying across the sky, when the wings of one block out the sun, a certain sound is heard.
  
  At one point I thought I might turn this in for a local college multimedia festival. I thought I could get a good kick out of seeing them attempt to rationalize it. Saddly, I missed the deadline, but there is always next year. However, it did force me to think, if I was cornered and forced to implant some kind of artistic value onto this thing... how would I go about it. Then it hit me, all I had to do was claim this was a war protest, and badda bing badda boom, I had genuine completely aritificial artistic merit. While I never plan on doing such a thing.... then again, like i said before... there is always next year.
  
  My initial polling on the quality of my work left me a little amazed. Not amazed in the good way by everyone liking my project, no, what amazed me was the similarity of everyone's response. the average crowd watched quietly, at least respectfully quiet, with completely emotionless faces. Afterwords I received polite applause. When questioned, and this is the freaky part, everyone bar none has said the exact same words, "well...it was good" Now I am always glad to take a compliment, but the uniformity of response has me looking for the pods of the body snatchers here. Hopefully the good people here will give me some statement other than good, some negative but constructive criticism would be most appreciated.
  
  Regardless, this is the first video that I will attempt to share with the people at this site, and I hope they enjoy it. I apologise for the length of this message, but this stopped being for other people long ago and became more of a venting forum for me, I having mispent a considerable portion of my time on this project. I apologise for that, but I doubt anyone has read down this far, so I don't feel to terrible about it.