main menu

• Members Main Page
• Search for AMVs
• Forum
• How-To Guides
• Site FAQ
• About us
• Login

Information

• Member: jhfong
• Studio: Ingress Productions
• Title: All Is Full of Geist
• Premiered: 2003-04-13
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
  • Serious
• Song:
  • Bjork All is full of Love
• Anime:
  • Key the Metal Idol
• Comments: (Reprinted from :)
  
  WARNING: This video and the following discussion of it contain serious spoilers for Key the Metal Idol.
  
  To be frank, I have to say I'm disappointed that this video didn't get screened at the Sakura Con 2003 AMV contest, even more so than with "First Contact" two years before. Of course, I'm glad I won an award, but having already won for "'Cause I'm a Blonde", I made it my goal to win an award for something other than a comedy -- that was why I didn't submit any comedy videos in the 2002 contest. The contests for 2002 and 2003 made it clear to me just how competitive the Drama category usually is. I wouldn't have minded if they passed over "Pikadiator" to show this video instead, because I'd put more effort into it, but from the perspective of the contest I can see that there was a shortage of comedy entries compared to the other categories.
  
  I was motivated to make this video by the appropriateness of the concept: on one level, the lyrics match up with the anime's theme of Key's quest to find 30,000 friends whose love will unlock the "geist" (Viz's translation of _omoi_), or life force, stored within her. But what's more, the style of the technology in the anme, and particularly the vision of the white-shelled robot Key emerging from the water in the OP sequence, also fits very well with the "lesbian robots" in the real music video for "All Is Full of Love" directed by Chris Cunningham (see ). In his video, Cunningham uses the sound of the strumming koto to go into a closeup of the machinery around the robots, and I tried to imitate this here with shots of Ajo Heavy Industries' robotics technology. The clip of water dripping off Key's face played backwards at 0:50 is a homage to the backwards-dripping milk that appears in Cunningham's video.
  
  I began the video with a summary of Key's life, mostly taken from episode 14 of the series, starting with her birth in the ruins of the Mima family shrine, the display of her telekinetic powers at the age of five that led her grandfather to hide within her the trove of geist produced by her mother, and how this sealed away her personality and gave her the delusion that she's a robot. Throughout this sequence, I used After Effects' noise and desaturation filters, gradually ramping down so that image becomes cleaner and more colorful as events move toward the present day. (I made an exception for the bright magenta of the gel tank Key was immersed in, in order to establish the color of geist, which will be seen again throughout the video.) As the bass line of the music begins, I've got a montage of Key's enemies, Ajo, Sergei and the PPORs, that segues back to Key as the lyrics begin at 0:40. The first part of the video emphasizes Key's loneliness until the introduction of the line "All is full of love" at 1:46, where I start developing Sakura's friendship with Key.
  
  I'm pleased by the editing of the scene at 1:57, where Key's offering of the rose to Miho at her concert is superimposed over her offering of the bouquet to Sakura, the choice of footage for "Your phone is off the hook / Your doors are shut" at 2:09-2:19, and Key's eyeblinks and the flash at 2:22 that transition into the last half of the song. This part of the song is very repetitive, and I tried to use it to convey an impression of Key becoming more human as she acceps geist from the friends she makes. There are 45 seconds cut out of the song at 3:26, but I tried to make it unnoticeable by synchronizing the beats and crossfading over a long transition period.
  
  This video was my first attempt at making extensive use of After Effects. I used it to make all the overlay effects, although I think I spent too much effort to try to match up the timing between Premiere and After Effects, and in retrospect I should have just done all the overlays in Premiere, as I did with "Purple Haze". After Effects did come in handy with the color treatment for the opening, mentioned above, and the diffusion effects I added in synchrony with the beat by overlaying a blurred copy of the footage (but perhaps I should have increased the contrast of the overlay before blurring it.) The ending of the video, beginning at 3:49, uses two still images translated and rotated in After Effects, with the pulsating diffusion added to give a little more life to them, and the noise filter gradually ramping up toward the end as it fades out. I'm worried that the ending might be too boring, but I couldn't think of a graceful way of shortening it.