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Information

• Member: Kai Stromler
• Studio: Shin Hatsubai/Kuroi Kenshi
• Title: six signs the circle
• Premiered: 2010-04-02
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Other
• Song:
  • Kreator Lucretia (My Reflection)
• Anime:
  • Otogi Zoshi (TV)
• Participation:
  • Anime Boston 2010 Music Video Contest, Anime Boston 2010 Music Video Contest (2010-04-02)
• Comments: SH114, premiering at Anime Boston, was intended to mark the SH return to competition after an approximately 3 1/2 year layoff, and continues the tradition of SH showing up to this con with weird, deep videos cut out of unconventional sources, which in this case resulted in the video going into the overflow rather than the main competition, as probably should have been expected.
  
  This is a fairly old idea, going back several years at least, that was waiting mostly on the time and level of coordination to actually watch Otogi Zoshi (still haven't watched the first half of the show), confirm that the idea didn't suck, and then sit down and crank out a video. It has more in common with SH070 and SH064 than just the Tokyo locations that are within easy walking distance of the Production I.G offices for directorial reference, but doesn't really form any kind of continuity with these older videos. It went to AniBo as Drama, but fit almost none of the requirements for their 'drama' category, and remains difficult to classify even under the more flexible .org system. There's a reason the "Other" tag is there.
  
  The effects in this video are obvious at the start, then seem -- but just seem -- to peter out. The intention was, in several places, to mislead the audience as to what is native in-source and what has been added; any given suspected effects cut is likely six of one, half a dozen of the other. I did more with using clips as alpha masks in this video than I anticipated, and as a result there is one from the texture library that is actually from one of the Galaxy Express 999 movies; no content from said film makes it to the screen, but the pattern is used as a mask to enturbulate the video from the main source. Most of the effects cuts are actually from source, but are going to be going into the textures bin so that I can abuse them on future projects as well.
  
  Shin Hats self-grade: B+. This video isn't quite all that I wanted it to be, but I'm not sure that what I wanted it to be wasn't a 20th Century Boys video, or failing that something a lot longer and more ambitious. As an Otogi Zoshi video or an accessible Kreator video, though, it works just fine.
  stats: # clips: 254. average length: 1.26 seconds. total time: 35 hours.
  
  About the anime: Otogi Zoshi is a TV anime by Production I.G dealing with karma, political struggles in the Heian period, and, overwhelmingly, exoteric Buddhist and traditional Japanese occult practices. This super explains why this video is set almost completely in modern times, and in Tokyo. The series is split, 13 episodes each, into an "Edo" and a "Tokyo" arc, the first in the past and the second in the present, featuring the reborn characters finishing what was not finished 900 years before in the first half of the show. This AMV cuts exclusively from the Tokyo arc on account of the urban and modernistic music, and any anachronistic bits are woven in, as they are in the show, to recall things past and forgotten.
  
  Sadly, the anime is not quite as well animated, overall, at it appears to be in this video.
  
  About the music: This song was originally written and performed by The Sisters of Mercy, but this version is by Kreator, opening their '90s-best-of collection Voices of Transgression. Those with only a passing acquaintance with Kreator may wonder exactly what they did between Coma of Souls and Violent Revolution that was worth looking back on, but this collection, at least to my estimation, provides a positive and affirmative answer to that, solid evidence that Mille & co. did not just absolutely waste the 1990s. As I get older, Kreator becomes for me more of an 'index band'; that the worth of any new band, especially in thrash metal, is decided largely by how much they sound like Kreator.
  
  other stuff:
  The title is taken from a poem that features in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, a favorite of mine as a preteen and teenager in the process of discovering heathenism, and a good book in its own right. There are, of course, only five signs in the video, but that neither references nor alliterates. The music under the credits is the intro to "Voices of the Dead" off Kreator's awesome Enemy of God album.
  
  
  Both the local and indirect are MPEG-4 files; if you have difficulties playing them back, you might look into Mplayer/MPUI. If your main video playback station is Mac or Unix-based, you should have native support.