Video Information

Information

  • Member: Freeptop
  • Studio: C & C Productions
  • Title: Portrait of a Serial Killer
  • Premiered: 2005-10-29
  • Categories:
  • Song:
    • Velvet Acid Christ Pretty Toy (Freeptop Edit)
  • Anime:
  • Participation:
  • Comments: A character profile of Muraki from Descendants of Darkness.

    The roots of this video's genesis come from multiple sources. First, Descendants of Darkness is one of my wife's favorite anime series. As a result, I've seen it a couple times, myself, and have been around while she and her parter in AMV-making made several videos using the series. As a result, I at least had a decent familiarity with the series, and its imagery. Second, were my wife's comments about what she has seen in the fandom for this series - namely, the element that worships Muraki, and excuses everything he does (hello? The man is a brutal SERIAL KILLER and RAPIST! Not much to excuse there!) Things like this produce a perverse tendency in myself to poke holes in such ideas by demonstrating the absurdity of it all - usually this is evoked via parody, but in this case, it worked out a bit differently. That's because of the the third factor - while the first two factors laid the seeds for this to happen, the idea of doing an AMV about Muraki didn't occur to me until I heard the song that I used for the video. The song is really creepy, and is meant to be about a serial killer. In the end, it was the opening sample from the song that really triggered me to think of doing an AMV about Muraki - "You have no idea how much watching other people's pain gets me off. Hearing their screams, and knowing that _I_ have the power of a God."

    This video was completed in five days, in order to finish it in time to submit to Yaoi-Con 2005. In all honesty, I think it suffered from being a bit rushed at the end, but on the flipside, I'm not sure I could have kept at it much longer, without a deadline. There's only so many times you can really deal with watching lots of blood and gore, while listening to a creepy song about a serial killer...

    This is the third video I've worked on, and my first AMV that I've done more or less solo (much thanks to my wonderful wife, Kasra_WTF for capturing video for me while I was at work).

    Equipment/Software used:
    G4 Powerbook Macintosh running MacOS X 10.3, using a Dazzle DV bridge for capturing. All editing was performed in Adobe Premiere 6.5.

    Notes on the music:
    In case it wasn't obvious by the name, you can't find this particular version of "Pretty Toy" on any CD. This came about because I found that the regular version had a sample in it I really didn't feel fit with the video, and while the PG-13 Edit didn't have that sample, it also removed a sample I did want in the video. Additionally, the beginning was long, overly repetitive stretched out intro for what I needed. The solution was to edit the "Pretty Toy (Edit)" and "Pretty Toy (PG-13 Edit)" versions together to create what I have dubbed the Freeptop Edit. The two versions I used to create the Freeptop Edit can be found on the Pretty Toy single (from whence I got them).

    WARNING: This video contains a lot of blood and gore. If you are squeamish about animated blood and gore, do yourself a favor and do NOT watch this video. Some of the parts are rather gruesome (this _is_ a video about a serial killer, after all).

    Note on the video quality - this video seems to have suffered from the conversion to MPEG1. Unfortunately, better renders vastly exceeded AMV.org's size limit. Someday, I'll learn how to make a better looking MPEG1 that fits inside of 100MB...

Opinions (3)

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  • 10.00
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  • 9.67
  • 9.33
  • 10.00
  • 8.67
  • 9.33

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