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Information

• Member: jhfong
• Studio: Ingress Productions
• Title: Mirrorshades
• Premiered: 2001-01-14
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Information Society Mirrorshades
• Anime:
  • Ghost in the Shell
• Comments: (Commentary reprinted from ):
  
  Sometime around the fall of 1999, I said in a post to alt.fan.bgcrisis that I had an idea to do a music video to "Mirrorshades" with Ghost in the Shell footage. I don't know if anybody remembers or cares, but having put the idea in the open, I wanted to be sure I did it as soon as possible to forestall anyone else from getting to it. Also, since this is probably the longest song I'll ever work with at nearly five and a half minutes, it provided a good test of my equipment and methods for coping with extreme conditions. (It eventually meant using the two-stage editing process I'd thought about after making the "Robot Girl" video.)
  
  At one point, I made a version of the song edited down to about four minutes by cutting out most of the instrumental sections, which would be more acceptable to a con audience if I entered this video into a competition. But because the discussion on the newsgroup that started all this was about the appropriateness of using "Mirrorshades" with Sylia from BGC, I decided to go ahead with the full-length version as a favor to people who would be familiar with the song.
  
  The really important insight I had about doing this video was using the song to characterize the relationship between Batou and Motoko. Now, I should say that I saw the anime version of GitS before I read the manga and it colors my perception somewhat. (I have the same attitude toward David Lynch's Dune.) While I recognize that Oshii made the movie pretty humorless compared to Shirow's plot, especially when all references to the Fuchikomas were removed, I prefer how the movie gives Batou more dignity, as opposed to making him a buffoon whom the Major keeps whacking on the head.
  
  I had a fairly good idea about many of the correspondences between the image and music I'd be using. Matching the synthesized cello motif to gunfire was a given, but I wonder if I overdid it? I knew there were only two shots in the movie of Motoko wearing mirrorshades, but I was going to fill in the other references as much as possible with the VR goggles she wears with her thermoptic camouflage skinsuit. I should also say something about the use of the Ghosting filter: I don't entirely approve of using lots of digital effects in videos, but in this case I thought it fit well with the sampled spoken clip in the song. Besides, I wanted to use that part of the song to illustrate the movie's point about uniqueness and duplication (which also ties in with "mirrorshades" as a symbol.) Again, there were parts of this video that I wasn't sure would fit at first (the dog food commercial at 2:20 in particular,) but once I'd placed them I worried for a while about how best to match them to the beat.
  
  More advance planning went into the making of this video than in my first, but there's not much to be done with long instrumental sections that can't be better left to chance and improvisation. I have several ideas for videos to purely instrumental music that I want to do in the future, and I suppose this will be the attitude with which I'll approach those projects.
  
  This time around, I captured footage from the GitS DVD, so I was able to avoid the video quality problems I'd experienced on "Robot Girl". As before, I ended up doing the instrumental sections last, and I used fight scenes to fill them in because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I tried to make the edits correspond to the music better, and I'm pleased with the result on the whole. Anyway, I hope I was able to sustain your interest while watching such a long video.