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Information

• Member: jhfong
• Studio: Ingress Productions
• Title: Girl Fight Tonight!
• Premiered: 2002-02-10
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Comedy
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Julie Brown Girl Fight Tonight!
• Anime:
  • Agent Aika
• Comments: (Reprinted from http://www.evilnet.net/~jhfong/amv/girlfight/index.html):
  
  I first saw Aika when it came out on tape a couple of years ago, but I never had any plans to make an AMV to it until I won the DVD of the first volume, "Naked Mission", at Sakura Con 2001 for "'Cause I'm a Blonde". I couldn't think of anything to do with it at first, but after I rented the second volume, "Final Battle", the line "Girl fight tonight!" popped into my head. I don't even remember where I first heard the song. After a little web searching, I realized that like "'Cause I'm a Blonde", this was also a Julie Brown song, and so it all seemed like the perfect way to do a followup of sorts to my previous video.
  
  The music was digitized from the cassette release of Julie Brown's 1987 album Trapped in the Body of a White Girl, played on a Walkman with Dolby noise reduction. I'm pleasantly surprised at how well the sound quality turned out, considering that it was from a cassette. So now that I found out what the song was about -- a girl with a gang (the backup singers) who picks a fight with another girl to keep her away from her boyfriend -- I knew the only way I could pull this off with Aika was to make this video from Nena's point of view. Having Aika as her rival even fits the "kick her blonde butt" line, although the fact that Nena's been getting it on with her brother is something best not looked at too closely. (What songs about sibling incest are there, anyway?)
  
  Because of all the spoken dialogue in the song, this video was also a chance for me to get more practice doing lipsynching, which I'd first attempted on "'Cause I'm a Blonde". In shots that have a lot of camera or character movement, like Nena's "Girl fight tonight!" line in the fighter cockpit at 0:13 and "I'm gonna rip out your hairs one by one!" at 2:59, the footage was basically unaltered, but I tried to match the closed lip positions as best as I could. Most of the time, I achieved lipsynching by splicing together lots of short segments, but I had to use a superimposed track in two cases: the lead Delmo saying "Girl fight tonight!" at 2:04 while the other Delmos enter the room, and the animation on Nena's tentacles at 1:58. (Special thanks to Val Kyrie for helping me with the "tan lines" line in the lyrics.)
  
  Hargen's morph into Rob Lowe at 1:32 was produced with the old Morph 1.1 for the Mac, written in 1992. Initially, I thought about checking out a copy of St Elmo's Fire and looking for shots of Rob Lowe (especially when he had long hair and that was his look the song was referring to) but I ended up just doing a search for images of Rob Lowe, and I settled on the one I used here. This photo is convenient in that it has a light, mostly featureless background, with Rob Lowe's head tilted slightly down and to his right, which matched the shot of Hargen nicely.
  
  Since this Aika DVD is the only anime I actually own, I figured I could take my time putting this video together. It ended up taking almost a month. By the time I got around to doing it, I had a little difficulty working up much enthusiasm for this project, especially since there's some amount of effort involved in taking a secondary villain and making her the star. I interpreted the fight scene at the end of the song (beginning with "Aaah! Stop it! Let go of me!") to show the singer unexpectedly getting beaten up, with the laughing voice coming in on the right stereo channel ("She deserved it") being that of her rival. But only Aika could fit in with the "You're choking me" line, and I had a hard time working with that because Aika isn't the kind of person who talks a lot while she's fighting. The switch back to Nena speaking as her Ultranate armor goes out of control is a little awkward to me, but I couldn't think of a better solution. Since I've only got a little piece of that scene and I don't show Nena and Hargen's ultimate fate, I don't think that really constitutes a spoiler for Aika.
  
  Most of the footage on this video comes from the "Naked Mission" DVD, but I used "Final Battle" for some shots of Aika beating up on Delmos in the instrumental section and the coda, as well as the "Get her!" "Don't let her get away!" "Yeah!" exchange starting at 2:05.