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Information

• Member: DF Ash
• Title: Hallucinations - The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
• Premiered: 2008-09-01
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
  • Serious
  • Romance
• Song:
  • The Raveonettes Hallucinations
• Anime:
  • Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, The (TV)
• Comments: Here it is, the remastered, high-quality version of this AMV! Perhaps the best way to start off explaining the concept is to just give the lyrics, since they're important:
  
  "Observe
  My obsession
  With someone new
  Don't feel
  Like someone new
  The connection is real
  With someone new
  
  In this tomb
  I call love
  I get so lonesome
  With you
  Or without you
  Sweetheart
  The hellhound's here
  
  Hallucinate
  My love
  Nothing's real
  In the morn
  When I rise
  I leave you to die..."
  
  The lyrics are important, but they're not really about Haruhi and Kyon. Rather, it's Haruhi's feelings during episode 6 about the world she's imagined into existence, how useless it's turned out to be for her, and how she's on the edge of renouncing and destroying it. A lot of Haruhi videos are comedy or light-hearted videos, so I wanted to make an AMV that focused a little on the darker, more introspective side of the story.
  
  The story of the video is essentially the story of episode 6, but it's not in chronological order, and uses fades and overlays to skip forward and backwards, first showing the echoes of the world she's leaving behind, and then surrounding the flashback of the climactic kiss with Kyon's impressions of Haruhi and the brigade. The video's pacing is inspired by the Japanese broadcast order, which also hopscotches between past and future towards the climax: if you liked the non-linear broadcast order, the video's pacing will hopefully make sense.
  
  If you haven't seen Haruhi at all, the video's going to make zero sense, but I've had some people who'd never heard of it who still liked the video and got the mood behind it. And if it helps make people curious about watching Haruhi, that's good enough for me.
  
  Technical Stuff
  
  The video source material is the U.S. DVD release, processed and saved through DVDDecrypter and VirtualDubMod as uncompressed .avi's. The video was then edited in Windows Movie Maker 2.0, with a custom WMV9 profile made with Windows Media Encoder: 856*480 square-pixel letterbox format, 23.976 fps, 20 MB/s constant bit rate.
  
  The audio source is an uncompressed .wav from the CD, compressed with WMA10 Professional, 440kbps, 96 kHz, 2-channel 24 bit constant rate.
  
  In short, this is as technically good as Windows Movie Maker 2 is gonna get. The fades aren't quite up to what an expensive editor could do, but they're a huge improvement over the old video: as simple as they might look, it took some roundabout editing and custom transition building to get WMM to pull off those kinds of partial overlay effects.
  
  The audio quality is also much better this time around. The song's still echoey and industrial, but it's much clearer and crisper at 440kbps. The best thing I can recommend for this song is wearing headphones, as the melody emerges from all the different layers of sound, and the effect easily gets lost on open speakers. Still, it's not for everyone, and I wouldn't recommend anyone cranking the volume up too loud the first time you watch it: you're liable to blow out an eardrum when it hits the midsection.
  
  Anyway, that's all I can think to say, so onto the video.