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Information

• Member: Second Element
• Studio: Second Element Video
• Title: The Haunting
• Premiered: 2005-10-27
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Other
  • Character Profile
  • Serious
  • Romance
• Song:
  • Kamelot The Haunting ( Somewhere in Time )
• Anime:
  • Inu Yasha (TV)
• Participation:
  • PortConMaine 2006, Anime Music Video Contest (2006-07-01)
• Comments: !!!Winner, Best Romance Category at PortConMaine 2006 AMV Contest!!! Big thanks to everyone for all of their support!
  
  The story behind Kamelot's "Epica" album reached it's epic conclusion in their recently released album "The Black Halo". Having already done a video using songs and elements of the first album to "Inu Yasha", it only seemed fitting to do a companion piece using the companion album. However, what was to become "The Haunting" began to take on a shape and form all it's own. Althought the vocal characters of Ariel and Helena were to once again to be adapted to Inu Yasha and Kikyou, Kagome, who in "Memory's Coldest Winter" had no real character alignment, has been assigned to "Halo"'s new female vocal role, Marguerite, who is, fittingly, Ariel's new love interest since the death of Helena, who's suicide was the climax of"Epica" album. While this video was originally meant to be the comanpion piece to "Memory's Coldest Winter", as work on the video progressed, so did it's story, and it began to take on many different forms and become an AMV that stood on it's own.
  
  The actual haunting takes on a few different angles in this video. Inu Yasha is both haunted by Kiyou's love, Kikyou's memory, Kikyou's vengeance, his love for Kikyou,and by Kikyou herself in a physical form and in a supernatural form. This haunting has opened up new wounds for him, and caused him to re-examine both his old and current relationships and react in certain ways.
  
  This was a very different role for us to assign to Kagome in this video. She is involved in a way we have never used in any of our AMVs before. For the most part, she has either been the focus of our AMVs or has been prominently featured on an equal level with Inu Yasha. But in this AMV Inu Yasha and Kikyou take the stage- with Kagome serving as the catalyst that sets off the haunting. In order to achieve what we were looking to say with this video, we focused on a lot of the earlier
  elements in the tv series. The most important one being that Kagome resembled Kikyou so much that Inu Yasha, in fact, mistook her for Kikyou the moment Kagome's cry for help woke him on the tree. As the series progresses, Inu Yasha still sees striking similarities between the two women, but begins to realize Kagome as an individual, far-removed from Kikyou by about 500 years.
  
  LIT was a bit worried that this AMV was a little abusive to Kagome, but in the end, we felt that everything was justified. ( Lord knows we're big-time Inu/Kag shippers ). Inu Yasha treats Kagome callously at times, pushing her away, because he believes he is saving her by doing this. He thinks he is saving Kagome from the fate that took Kikyou's life and the bitterness and pain that it caused. We wanted to depict Inu Yasha as an individual that has given up hope on himself- believing that he is an individual lost in time, doomed to be haunted by a few moments between him and Kikyou, and that there is never any escape or any resolution. Loving Kagome enough to fear for her future and happiness, he pushes her away and rejects her, thinking that it is for the best and that he is saving her as he continues an endless cycle of being haunted by his relationship for Kikyou and everything that trangressed. In a way, I guess Inu Yasha is a ghost himself in this AMV. Neither he nor Kikyou are free from this sequence of events. Kagome is the only one with the ability to come and go freely, and avoid the haunting's continuous, unbroken circle that keeps repeating itself.
  
  One of the hardest parts about making this video is that it's a duet video. Sure, we've tackled the duet thing back in "How Many Stars", but that was a "take turns" duet. The two singers had verses that were very obviously theirs, so it was easy to assign footage. In "The Haunting", a lot of the lines are sung together, so we tried creating different ways to show both the characters either singing or interacting at the same time. Hopefully we managed to make it work for the most part.
  
  In the end we have made an AMV that can be perceived differently by every individual that views it. There really is no right or wrong viewpoint- we have no real concrete description for what goes on in this video. We cannot tell you to take in and understand the thematics of this video. Is Inu Yasha merely haunted by the love he has for Kikyou, or the love of Kikyou? Is he haunted by Kikyou herself? Is Inu Yasha a ghost himself? Is the actual haunting of an actual place and time, or is it the haunting of individuals? We don't know ourselves, and I think that's what makes the video very different from the rest of it, and in the end, a lot of fun to see finished. It can be a different experience to different people- and making something that everyone might have a different perception of is a likeable AMV method for us.
  
  So, regardless of how you end up perceiving what occurs in this video, we hope it will still be enjoyable. We know we had a damned good time making it. So in the end, it was an enjoyable experience for us, and hope that in the future, we can come up with other challenging ideas and execute them.
  
  On a technical level, we incorporated things we hadn't done before previously ( or even imagined we would bother using ). This video contains several hand-animations and frame by frame hand-editing, some more complicated and frustrating the one that was used in "Love Changes Everything". The most challenging one we had only fleetingly thought of adding as a scene to the video, but then decided the AMV needed it, to solidify the physical Kikyou haunting as an angle in the video's story. I already had to hand-edit frame by frame an animated "cut-out" of Kikyou before her grave, but I wanted to avoid the pan on the grave, too, because successfully getting Kikyou to pan in unison with the background was a major head-ache. So instead, I free-framed the background...only problem is, it freeze-frames the falling rain. So then, hand-created rain had to be created to put as the top most layer in that scene. It was achieved not by a 3rd party-plugin, but by smashing 5 different effects together in Premiere.
  
  Thankfully, none of the other hand-edited animations were not as time-consuming nor as complicated, but they are still dotted all over the place throughout the AMV, and required only 2-3 layers of footage.
  
  While we have turned on the "effects" rating for any resulting opinions, we've decided to leave "lip sync" turned off. This video is not entirely based on lip syncing, and only certain scenes have it. So we didn't want people to base judgement on the idea that *everything* is supposed to be lip-synced to the lyrics, because it's not. Some day we'll make a 100% lip sync video, and then we'll have an excuse for allowing lip syncing scoring ^_~x
  
  
  This is also to date, our most freaking expensive vid. Absolutely none of the footage is from fansubs, digisubs, raws, or bootlegs. All the footage was pulled directly from the official English and Japanese DVDs. Footage that occurs later in the series had to be imported from Japan. Those official Japanese DVDs are ridiculously over-priced: approximately $52 per DVD of only 2-3 episodes, no special features, no DVD case inserts, etc. etc. If you were lucky enough to get a hold of one of the "First Presses", you got an art card featuring the DVD cover art in the DVD case. Whoop-de-do.
  
  The song has also been cut- about 30 seconds or so, I can't remember just how much. After the "someone like you" lyric, the song goes into a long guitar piece, which we felt we just had no use for ( we've already got so much going on in this video ) so plainly, it was cut out. Hopefully, for those unfamiliar with the song, it's not noticeable at all ^_^x
  
  
  ***You will need a proper XVID codec to view this AMV***
  
  
  
  Additional Commentary & Musings:
  
  :31 - :34 Originally we had Kagome's entire line, "Dare ga, dare ga tasukete yo" dubbed in here, but cut it down to just the last parts of the line. We figured the "somebody/anybody" meant little to the importance of the scene- it was the initial raise of her voice in the cry for help that reached Inu Yasha's ears and awoke him.
  
  :37 - :41 "Merely the sound of your voice......"Hands-down, this is my all-time favorite lip sync ( taking the current place-holder from "We Belong's" "..you don't speak my dialect" ) that we have ever utilized in an AMV. Lip-syncing is always fun- but the more animation and movement in the character during the lip sync, the better.
  
  :48 - :50 One of the simpler frame-by-frame hand edits. I had to seperate Inu Yasha from the water's surface in order to apply a simple flash effect that would affect the reflection, and not Inu Yasha himself.
  
  :51 - :52 Tell-tale heart. We wanted to emulate Kikyou's heartbeat here. Using footage from anime openings runs the risk of being very dull and boring, because it's been seen a million times. We tried to dress it up a little by emulating the pulse of their souls.
  
  3:18 - 3:20 Tried to emulate "twinkling". But those tiny little notes were too hard to hit right on the head on the timeline. It was really hard judging exactly where they were and how long they lasted.
  
  3:31 The ghostly interjection of Kikyou singing was another hand-edited scene. Her mouth had to be seperated from her face, because of her wind-blown hair, in order to create a lip sync that didn't interfere with the animation of her hair. All in all, 40+ seperate frames of her face were done with her mouth removed, and 3 seperate frames of her mouth were made. Too bad she flares on screen for barely a second- that was a lot of work :P
  
  4:01 - 4:02 Yes, that is actually yours truely stepping in for Kikyou. We originally just had Kikyou lip-synced to Kahn's vocals of Ariel singing "liar", but it looked odd to not only have Kikyou lip-synced to that line, but this scene in the anime is just so powerful and there is just so much drive and force behind Kikyou that is not available in the audio. I actually thought of using the "Chess" "LIAR!!" scrails from "Endgame" and dubbing them in for Kikyou, too add a little bit of "oopmh" to this scene. But it became complicated and so, it came down to just me. I'm sure the neighbors thought I must have sounded strange shouting "LIAR!" into a microphone over and over again at different pitches. In the end, I settled for a "sing-song" approach of "Liar". Kind of like the "song-speech" style. Either way, the "liar" you are hearing dubbed into the video for Kikyou are too different versions of my "liar", as I couldn't make the word sound right whole. So I took one of the "li" sounds I liked best, and one of the "ar" sounds I liked best, and mishmashed them into the whole world.
  
  Looks like my dream of voicing an "Inu Yasha" character came true :P Either way, this is Robert's favorite part out of the whole damn video. Must be because of the humour of the whole travesty behind how my voice ended up in it.
  
  
  4:05 I wanted Inu Yasha with an evil grin here, and the best example of that is actually from the Feral episodes. I thought it seemed out of place to have Feral Yasha with his natural tattoos streaked on his face in this video, so once again, hand-edited frames to remove the tell-tale tattoo symbols.
  
  
  
  Lyrics:
  
  
  "Merely the sound of your voice
  Made me believe that you were her
  Just like the river disturbs
  ...my inner peace
  One I believed I could find
  Just a trace of her beloved soul
  Once I believed she was all
  Then she smothered my beliefs
  
  One cold winter's night
  I may follow her voice to the river
  Leave me for now and forever
  Leave while you can
  
  Somewhere in time
  I will find you and haunt you again
  Like the wind sweeps the earth
  Somewhere in time
  When no virtues are left to defend
  You fall in deep
  I was a liar in every debate
  I rule the forces that fueled your hate
  When the cold in my heart leaves
  It comes to an end
  And quietly I'll go to sleep
  
  How could that first time recur
  When memories linger on
  What made me think you were her
  Helena is dead to all
  Dead to all
  Nothing can bring her to life
  Don't pretend that I'll be loving you
  Once I believed she was gone
  I corrupted from within
  
  Leave, leave me for now and forever
  Leave while you can
  
  Somewhere in time
  I will find you and haunt you again
  Like the wind sweeps the earth
  Somewhere in time
  When no virtues are left to defend
  You fall in deep
  I was a liar in every debate
  I rule the forces that fueled your hate
  When the cold in my heart leaves
  It comes to an end
  And quietly I'll go to sleep
  
  Follow me into the light
  Like ice on a lake of tears
  I'll take you through
  Or leave me tonight
  I've gone too far to begin all anew
  Life fades in anew
  With someone like you
  
  Somewhere in time
  I will find you and love you again
  Like the wind sweeps the earth
  Somewhere in time
  When no virtues are left to defend
  You fall in deep
  I was a liar in every debate
  I ruled the forces that fueled your hate
  When the cold in my heart leaves
  It comes to an end
  Quietly I'll go to sleep..."