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Information

• Member: Chaos Angel
• Studio: Eclipsing Saturn Studios
• Title: Fragile and Frail
• Premiered: 2004-09-17
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Serious
  • Horror
• Song:
  • Tori Amos Precious Things
• Anime:
  • Alien 9
• Comments: Originally, I was going to make this video for AWA Pro. That didn't work out. Still, I had a lot of hopes for the idea, so I kept it around. But even with the deadline-pressure removed I couldn't think of anything for said chunk, so I put it on hold.
  
  This would become a kind of cycle for awhile. Add/tweak more stuff, have nothing, put it on hold, repeat. Eventually, I got it filled up and tweaked to my pleasure.
  
  I think this ranks as one of my better videos. Right up there with Graveside Reverie.
  
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  If you prefer to skip the usual info and just watch the damn thing, skip now.
  
  *
  
  The concept behind the video is that of a nightmare. The song Precious Things has always struck me as having a distinctly nightmarish quality to it, and the OVA Alien 9 similarly has a lot of surreal elements to it that (to me) seem at times like a very very bad dream. I wanted to combine these two to try to create that feeling of a really intense, bad nightmare. I think they got along splendidly. :)
  
  The video is narrative-based, but may or may not be perfectly crystal clear to everyone, so if you don't "get it", feel free to say so in a comment and I will try to explain (I'd prefer explaining elements of the video on a case-by-case basis over trying to guess here). But do consider that it is a dream, so if something doesn't make perfect logical sense, try thinking of it that way. :)
  
  
  --]FX Rationale[--
  
  My school of thought is that if a special effect is used, you should be able to justify it's useage. Even "I thought it would look nifty" is better than just throwing stuff in there for no reason at all, I think.
  
  1. Blue tint to two of the scenes: This is done to seperate the waking world from the dream world. Blue was chosen because I wanted reality to look less vivid and real than the dream, and blue traditionally carries a subdued, quiet mood to it. The same scenes are also desaturated to 25%, but I don't think that's very obvious. Originally I was just going to use the desaturation, but it wasn't different enough from the dream scenes, so I blueified it.
  
  2. Black strobes: To match the intensity of those parts of the song. I used black instead of white because it is supposed to be a nightmare, and brightness/light is not conducive to creepiness.
  
  3. Reddish scenes: Red is traditionally associated with alarm, panic, and fear. This part combines a look at the fear the nightmare is causing, and an increase in the attacks of the Nightmare Boys, who are the aggressors in the dream and at the end manifest as large and powerful monsters.
  
  4. Video-long fade to Darkness: This effect is not readily obvious without my pointing it out. I basically stole the idea from Iserlohn's "Haru To Ashura". In that video, he used the Gamma Adjustment filter to make Reality stark and harsh and Madness dark and murky. I used it to similar effect. Since the dream starts fairly mild if bizarre then turns scary later, I wanted to reflect that descent into darkness visually. So I exported the whole thing as one AVI file, Gamma-darkened it, then hit the beginning fader to zero. So the darker version fades in from zero to full over the course of the entire video.
  
  5. Dissolve from Yuri's Zooming-In Head to Spikes: Done to present the scenes following it as inside Dream-Yuri's mind. A psychic attack by the Dream Aggressors.
  
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  Thanks to everyone on my Livejournal Friends List who watched the betas and commented on them and offered suggestions and generally encouraged me. :)