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Information

• Member: DF Ash
• Title: Sour Times in Silent Hill
• Premiered: 2005-08-09
• Categories:
  • Serious
  • Horror
  • Trailer
• Song:
  • Portishead Sour Times
• Anime:
  • Silent Hill (game)
• Comments:
  Posters for the band Portishead line the streets of Silent Hill and Akira Yamaoka, Silent Hill's composer, has said in interviews that Portishead was a major influence on the game's music. "Sour Times" is a good example of what he means, and this video is an alternate opening set to that song, incorporating CGI footage from the whole game. If you haven't finished Silent Hill, this could spoil it. But it's more likely that it won't make enough sense to spoil anything unless you've already played the game and know the context.
  
  The video's theme revolves around awakenings, drawing deeper and deeper into the nightmare until the viewer emerges on the other side. It could be taken as a summary of the game's story (on a symbolic level, at least), or as a trailer.
  
  It was created using a combination of VirtualDub, AviSynth, a heavily modified version of Windows Movie Maker 2.0 (reencoded through WMM 1.0 to correct a codec conflict), and PSXMc, a Japanese freeware program for ripping CGI directly from a game disc. The few special effects aren't overt, and the focus is more on editing and pacing. The song's lyrics only have a small bearing on the video; the atmosphere is what drives it.
  
  I've left it in WMV format since converting it to MPEG seriously hurts the resolution.
  
  The song is somewhat reduced from the original: an instrumental section in the middle has been removed, and the final instrumental fades out early.
  
  This is my first AMV and, as such, it's a fairly simple and rough work. There are still two or three things I'd like to go back and somehow fix (mostly the dreaded curse of repeating footage), but at this point, and with the limited amount of CGI available in the game, fixing one thing would just mean messing up the timing on several other sections. So I'm more or less happy with it now, and this is the final version.
  
  Consider this a trial piece; bigger and better things are already in the works...
  
  Anyway, enough talking about the video... onto the video! :)