Information
- Member: Legionair
- Title: Sorrow
- Premiered: 2001-07-29
- Categories:
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Songs:
- Pink Floyd A New Machine Pt.2
- Pink Floyd Sorrow
- Anime:
- Participation:
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Comments:
This was one of those videos that I just had to do. The video assembled itself in my mind and then just screamed to be released. Doesn't happen often, but when it does, I usually go with the flow. I happened to feel the urge to rewatch Grave of the Fireflies...and then ended up listening to Pink Floyd's "Momentary Lapse of Reason" on my drive to work the next day. From that point on the video just unfolded in my head. The little movie theatre in my head just kept playing the video over and over again until I finally assembled it in reality.
The audio...
The first song I chose to use was "Sorrow,' which makes up the majority of the video. The lyrics matched just perfectly. It almost seemed like it was written after watching the anime. The audio effects that were already present on the song, particularly the distortion used on the lead guitar, made it sound both haunting and tragic. The heaviness of the guitar also seemed to match well with the war backdrop used in the anime.
I listened to the song repeatedly, to make sure I had all the nuances of it. On one particular pass I decided to listen to the CD in it's entirety, to make sure I had the full impact of the song in mind. That's when the secondary song, "A New Machine Pt. 2" caught my mind. I realized that it was perfect to use as the intro to the video.
That's when I ran into my first problem... Both songs together clock in at close to ten minutes. And while I was tempted to make use of the whole thing I knew that no one would be able to sit through something so long. So I set into the songs pretty heavily. Casual listeners will hopefully not notice the audio edits, but diehard Pink Floyd fans will.
"A New Machine Pt. 2" - I only cut down the long silences between the stanzas. While I liked the fade to black effect, I didn't want to leave too much dead air. It was very useful for setting the mood though.
"Sorrow" - I heavily cut down this song, even in places where I really didn't want to. The guitar solo that dominates the first minute or two of the song was the first to go. I left the second guitar solo in place, but clipped out a third one that was close to a minute long. Finally I taper off the end of the song, causing it to fade out. I decided to fade out of on an upbeat portion of the song, to give it a more lamentful end.
The video...
I took the footage directly from the Grave of the Fireflies DVD using my DVD-ROM drive. Unfortunately, the quality of the footage there already seemed degraded. I only hope that this doesn't mean that the master tape has been destroyed. Hopefully a better quality DVD will be released eventually.
I used very few special effects in this video. Most of which would be missed unless you really looked for them. A couple of the ones I'm particularly proud of...
The long aerial shot where Setsuko is hunched over (and sleeping) and the bystanders slowly fade in around him. This shot didn't exist in the source. I took two clips of the same scene. I digitally removed the bystanders from one. Then I faded between the two to make them appear as if they were ghosts coming into view.
The very first sepia tone shot of Setsuko does not exist in the source either. I took a standard color shot and was able to custom filter it to make the color tones appear to match the other sepia tone shots. The standard sepia tone filter did not match what was used in the other shots in the source.
The video took about a week of mental storyboarding and research. After that it took about a week of work to actually make it a reality.
All in all, this video was a labor of love and I'm glad that it was well received by the audience at AFO. I was worried the tragic tone of the video was going to cause it to tank with the very happy audience. Thankfully that didn't happen.