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Information

• Member: Athelstone
• Title: Amalgamation of Spirit
• Premiered: 2005-07-11
• Categories:
  • Comedy
  • Drama
  • Sentimental
• Song:
  • Des'ree You Gotta Be
• Anime:
  • Naruto
• Comments: ========================
  Naruto - Amalgamation of Spirit
  ========================
  
  This is my first music video which I've been working on for the last
  four and a half months; Naruto - Amalgamation of Spirit.
  
  ============
  Introduction
  ============
  
  The whole process of making this video has been a huge learning
  experience. I started knowing nothing about Premiere, and little about
  Photoshop, to being presently well acquanited with both. Additionally,
  I've learnt a lot about encoding. I'd like to offer my sincere thanks
  to the helper community of animemusicvideos.org for their wonderfully
  clearly written guides, as well as the members of the official Adobe
  support forums, who assisted me in solving some of the earlier
  difficulties I had with my music video. In this piece of text, I'd
  like to relate to my audience some information about my
  video, describing what I've done with this project, how, and why.
  
  ==============================
  Why should I watch your video?
  ==============================
  
  Although this is my first music video, I have been watching anime
  music videos on the internet for quite some time (four or five years).
  My most memorable music videos would be some of Castor Troy's works,
  as well as Meri's Trunks videos, at http://www.templeotrunks.com.
  Without sounding too show-offy, I think I have a relatively good
  understanding of how to make a music video, but I'll let you be the
  judge of that. I should mention that I have committed a large amount
  of planning time to this music video (one and a half weeks before I
  started), as well as revamping content many times over to reach this
  final stage.
  
  I believe this to be an original music video. It has some good
  effects, very precise timing, lip synching, some comedy, some action,
  emotion, but most importantly, a theme, as I shall now explain.
  
  ===============================================
  What's with the title, "Amalgamation of Spirit"...and why Naruto?
  ===============================================
  
  I chose Naruto as the anime for my music video for a number of reasons.
  Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, it is one of my favourite anime
  shows. Although the show is named after the single main character in
  the story, this particular anime features a wide variety of many
  interesting characters. Notably, the show focusses on their
  development, as well as the main character's development, throughout
  the series. Hence, although Naruto is an action anime, I feel the
  creators of the show have succeeded in personifying certain themes by
  focussing on specific figureheads, which for me, make the anime all
  the more enjoyable and intriguing.
  
  Once you understand that, perhaps the name of my music video will make
  a little more sense to you. My "Collins Gem" pocket dictionary defines
  "Amalgamate" as, "To combine, or unite". And that is principally
  what my music video is all about. Although Naruto features a
  diversity of characters, they all have something in common: they each
  have their own dream or ambition which they continually attempt to
  reach through adventure, battle, strife, journey and hard work.
  This is what the word "spirit" relates to in my title. The characters
  in Naruto are united by spirit whilst they journey onwards, fighting
  both evil (and themselves) to achieve their ambitions. Naruto to
  become Hokage, Neji to defeat fate, Jiraya to watch over Naruto, Gai
  to watch over Rock Lee, Rock Lee to become a superb Taijustsu
  specialist, Shikamaru to protect his friends, Gaara to discover love,
  etc. All of their dreams are united by this common resolution, or
  spirit, and this is what I have attempted to convey in my music video.
  The Hokages (and Jiraya) in my music video represent "the masters"
  that everyone is striving towards.
  
  =======================
  Why the song, "You Gotta Be?"
  =======================
  
  I obtained this song back in Febuary 2005 - As soon as I started
  listening to it, lots of images of the Naruto anime came flooding to
  mind. These were specific thought images relating to each particular
  line in the song (which I'm sure many other music video developers
  have felt before they decided to make their music video). I thought
  to myself, "Oh, I've just GOT to make a music video of this!"
  Eventually, I had drawn up a large plan, which took about a week and
  a half, noting each sentence of the song to a particular scene in my
  music video. I had methodically and meticulousy gone through the
  Naruto anime, noting down the time of each sequence I'd like to have
  with each sentence spoken in the song. I then did a search on
  animemusicvideos.org, to check if anyone else had used this particular
  song in a music video. After finding only three results (two for
  sailor moon and one for Final Fantasy), I realized this is not an
  overused song on animemusicvideos.org, and that I could have an
  original video on my hands.
  
  ======================
  How did you make your video?
  ======================
  
  I used Adobe Premiere Pro for timing and effects, VirtualDub Mod for
  extracting lossless Huffyuv clips and encoding and Adobe Photoshop
  for cutting out frames and applying a Gaussian blur to the edges. I
  used the NaruTxtGen font maker
  (http://www.keiichianimeforever.com/narutofontcreator.html)
  for my introduction logo, as well as obtaining a scan of
  the official Naruto logo from a manga cover.
  
  To make the "Amalgamation of Spirit" writing in my video glow, I
  created two photoshop files and used the blending options to apply
  two glow effects to both images, one lesser and one greater. I then
  overlayed both images on top of one another in Premiere, and adjusted
  the opacity of the higher glowed image accordingly.
  
  For overlayed images, I used track mattes in Premiere and applied a
  gaussian blur to the edges to make them blend in with their background.
  
  For Lip Synching, I captured still frames of characters opening and
  closing their mouths. I discovered that almost all of the time,
  characters had three frames for opening and closing mouths: one frame
  for a closed mouth, one frame for a mouth being opening at its highest
  point, and one frame for a mouth being opened half-way. For simplicity,
  I labelled these in Premiere as "CL" (Closed) "ER" (Wider) and "EST"
  (Widest). I then simply put these three frames together when
  appropriate, moving the time sequence bar up and down in Premiere to
  keep testing it, making sure I got it just right. The hardest bits to
  lip sync were parts where I had to sync the character's body, as well
  as the lips themselves.
  
  For example, at 00:50 in my music video, I had to make sure that my
  "ER" and "EST" clips always came after the last "CL" clips, so it
  looked as if Choji's hair was blowing relatively smoothly in the wind.
  Another tricky part for me was at 01:20, Jiraya's "Yea-eh-Eee" Lip
  sync. I had to sync his lips opening at the first point, and then
  reverse the clip accordingly, so his body would moving back into
  position for the second lip sync. I zoomed in and out of his mouth
  to emphasize this effect. I used the "CL" clip, for the last lip sync,
  so it looks like his teeth are clenched when he utters
  "eee".
  
  In the credits, for the looping sky effect, I took the scene from
  episode 063 of Naruto, 12:47. This is after Neji has been
  defeated by Naruto in the Chuunin exam. I repeated
  and increased the speed of the moving sky, additionally
  adjusting the opacity of the sky effect to make it move
  smoothly and seamlessly.
  
  =================================================
  
  Thanks for watching my video, hope you enjoyed it. I'm very interested to read feedback comments, as this is my first music video. Thanks!
  
  - Athelstone