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Information

• Member: vellure
• Title: Gun X Saga
• Premiered: 2007-11-22
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Parody
  • Serious
  • Trailer
  • Instrumental
• Song:
  • Nakagawa Koutarou feat. Ondekoza GUNXSWORD opening theme
• Anime:
  • Xenogears (PSX)
  • Xenosaga (PS2)
  • Xenosaga Episode II
  • Xenosaga III (PS2)
• Comments: Not really my first AMV but definitely my first Xenosaga AMV done independently with Adobe After Effects. I've been waiting for the moment I grab on a decent version After Effects and finally get the GUN X SWORD parody done.
  
  GUNXSWORD's opening theme depicts a lot of great elements. An awesome orchestration that had depth, drama, and passion. I never watched cause I thought the few episodes I catched in G4TECH sucked ass. The first time I saw the opening theme 7 months ago, I knew I had to orchestrate this theme with Xenosaga.
  
  
  Effect:
  
  The effects used are all simple. There's a lot masking and shatter material trick effects used such as the cherry blossoms and the feathers and I have to thank ayato@web for that. By the second half of the video, I was very dependent with the fractal noise effect it almost made the video look cheap. The pale round radio waves that appear for transition is done with a normal circle material effect, I could've used the radio wave effect easily for description purposes but I feel the circle material was easier to control. The ripple effects that's present on the video are done with the wave world.
  
  What I had fun doin was the dove and eagle silloute effect. Normally you'd shoot a seperate footage for these scenes and key them(very time consuming). Instead, I used animated gifs such as a single dove flying. Cheaply done with google search, I was able to get a fluid flying dove and eagle animated gif. Created a new composition and multiplied the number of characters and control their movement accompanied with zero background and effects such as fractal noise, glow, blur and echo for much more fluid animation and presto you a have a flying bird composition good for transitions and random effects. The shining particles used here are (believe or not) demos in AE. So to cheaply take out the permanent X mark for demo effects, I used the scale, multiply layers, and key trick to eliminate the X mark.
  
  I thought the ending would look crappy because I didn't really focus on rendering my titles properly. So I accompanied it with a wiggle and exploding particle effect to someone imitate what GUN X SWORD's title did. there's a hint of bulging for the pink wave that comes in the end and dash of blue lightning and tada its the end.
  
  
  Conclusion:
  
  Keying and masking 3d models is NO CAKE, thats why i gave up masking alot of 3d motions. I honestly visioned the whole parody differently, it surprised me the moment i finished the project, it turned out to be better than my original plan. The whole project began on Oct 28, 07, the draft ended on Nov 21, and the final polish today Dec 01. for a month project I though it wasn't bad. Not perfect, but enough to make it special.
  
  
  Programs used:
  
  Adobe After Effects V7
  Adobe Photoshop CS