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Information

• Member: Kai Stromler
• Studio: Shin Hatsubai/Kuroi Kenshi
• Title: a declaration
• Premiered: 2006-05-26
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Serious
  • Sentimental
• Song:
  • Bruce Springsteen Independence Day
• Anime:
  • Initial D 1st Stage
• Participation:
  • Anime Boston 2006, Anime Boston 2006 AMV Contest (2006-05-26)
• Comments: WARNING - This is the polar opposite of any Initial D video you may have encountered. It is slow, dark, and virtually free of cars doing racing moves.
  
  
  
  
  That being said, if that line makes you want to navigate off this page rather than watch the video, you probably ought to watch it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This is SH105. This is also the second run of these comments; you can look on the comment history to see the huge morass of verbiage that used to be here if you like. There are two sides to this video, technical and conceptual, and hopefully, this revision will cover anything necessary about them with fewer words.
  
  The technical dimension of this video is basically that it used to look worse. One of the things that really gets me about Initial D is that, given its huge success in manga and huge popularity as anime, it did not need to be animated with as low production values as it was on the first two seasons. First Stage was done with cels rather than digitally, but there's a lot of off-model in the characters and a lot of the CG sequences are poorly integrated. Second Stage is done digitally, but on the extreme cheap, which you can see whenever the camera pans -- at 30 fps rather than 12, making a really jarring disjunct. It's like they didn't care about the character animation at all. Tokyopop's DVDs of First Stage are okay, but still need extensive cleanup to purge all the interlacing and make the picture not look like total crap. Only after this was done could I play around with levels and stuff for lighting consistency and effects reasons.
  
  Conceptually, this video is pretty much a straight read of Bruce's track. This cut is off The River, which came out the year I was born and as such is still early enough for Bruce to be concerned with the personal than with the global. With all he's done since, especially since 1990, it's easy to forget that this guy rose to fame by putting the blue-collar, small-town, American-teenager experience up on stage and delivering it with absolute conviction. I was also planning a companion video with his "Racing In The Street" (which is even slower and more emotive), but got about a minute in before I realized that I wasn't really differentiating it from this one at all.
  
  So in the end this video is not what people expect from either Initial D or from Bruce Springsteen, but hopefully it will work well enough to bring out themes that are from Springsteen, and to a certain degree are present in Initial D as well. Some people will identify with it more than others, which is reflected in the scores, at least how they fell out when this was written. It's kind of a personal video, but my own relationship with my father is a lot closer to the way it's presented in the anime as opposed to here.
  
  Shin Hats Self-Grade: B+/A-. People will react to this in different ways, but hopefully positively, and hopefully overcoming the technical hurdles for competition was worth it.
  stats: # clips: 190. average length: 1.47 seconds. total time: 30 hours.
  
  
  Thanks are due to the people who beta-viewed this one.