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Information

• Member: seasons
• Title: Leeway
• Premiered: 2017-09-09
• Categories:
  • Other
  • Instrumental
• Song:
  • To Rococo Rot Die Dinge des Lebens
• Anime:
  • Pilot Candidate (Candidate for Goddess)
• Participation:
  • Anime Weekend Atlanta 23, The Professional Awards (2017-09-30)
• Comments: I. Pilot Candidate is a tremendously flawed and derivative work. It's unbelievably tone-deaf and seems completely unaware of the depths of the absurdity of its presentation. One assumes there are layers of quality control involved in both the production and re-dubbing of anime, so its existence as it came into the world through Bandai Entertainment's 2001 North American release in English dub (starring the unmistakable Joshua Seth!) feels like a miracle of sorts. Yeah, I'm speaking strictly about "Pilot Candidate" and not The Candidate for Goddess (Megami Kohosei), as I've still never watched any of these DVDs with the original Japanese language audio track selected.
  
  II. I love this series with all my heart. Its confidence in itself, its conviction in its own sense of originality and seriousness is so misguided that you have to root for it. Accepting it as it is a step to accepting yourself in all your own shameful contradictions and flaws.
  
  III. I wanted to make a video like like jforce123's Within This Spectral Plane , DropOuter's permanence or Elcalavero's Everything Will Be Okay. I really don't know if it's evident to anyone else but myself what these videos have in common, nor do I know if I succeeded in making something that captures some of the same feelings as any of those works.
  
  IV. This song is the final piece of music in one of my favorite mixes, which wasn't the first time I heard it but definitely nudged me towards thinking about how I might want to use it in an AMV and how the visuals in a video like that could flow together. This was around the same time I was watching Pilot Candidate, and the idea of trying to pair a track like this with an anime like that seemed...like something that would never happen if I didn't try it myself.
  
  V. This video was submitted to this year's AWA Pro competition, not because I ever thought it had a chance of winning, but because I was confident that there would be nothing else like it among any of the entrants (a hunch I suppose was correct), and that alone would justify its presence. In hindsight, AWA Pro was an extremely inappropriate venue for a work like this; a slow-paced video nearly five minutes long was the last thing viewers wanted to watch in the middle of trying to marathon through over 70 videos participating in the contest. AWA Pro is free-form in nature, sure, but it is still an AMV contest, and this is not a Contest Video. Perhaps it could have been in the (very) early 00's, but that's irrelevant now isn't it. I'm aware of how my creative decisions could be interpreted as sloppy mistakes in the context of such a competitive contest. To anyone annoyed by this video during the Pro streaming sessions, I hope it gave you a good chance to stretch and use the bathroom.
  
  VI. This AMV was originally exported and submitted to AWA Pro in the wrong framerate (29.97 fps). This was not the thoughtless rookie mistake that it may have seemed, but a very complicated conundrum that would take me several paragraphs to try to explain. Also: it totally was a rookie-level mistake and the final version uploaded to the Org was exported in the corrected framerate (23.97).
  
  VII. I really did want to achieve a certain "jerky" feeling to this video, which many viewers might see as a mistake. Maybe exporting at the wrong framerate actually achieved this effect better than doing it by the book? I don't know. This was never supposed to look like a "normal" AMV. Probably the best response I got to it from another editor was "I feel like this would be mindblowing if I consumed copious amounts of hallucinogens." I don't think I'll ever find out, but I hope that's true. If nothing else, I hope it's a relaxing experience, or something like that.
  
  VIII. There may be other technical issues with this video, I cannot tell for sure anymore. The original DVD footage was highly aliased and full of rainbowing and even dot crawl. I cleaned up the footage prior to editing, and I hope I didn't overdo it.
  
  IX. This is the most I've written about anything I've made in a long time, and I do so knowing that almost no one will ever read it. And I'm okay with that.