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Information

• Member: 808-buma
• Title: Threshold
• Premiered: 2006-04-15
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
  • Serious
• Song:
  • Nine Inch Nails Hand That Feeds
• Anime:
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion (Death & Rebirth)
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion (Director's Cut)
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion (End of Evangelion)
• Participation:
  • AniZona, AniZona AMV Contest (2006-04-14)
  • Kawaii-Kon, Kawaii-Kon Anime Music Video Contest (2006-04-15)
  • Anime Boston 2006, Anime Boston 2006 AMV Contest (2006-05-26)
  • A-Kon 17, A-Kon 17 Amateur Anime Music Video Contest (2006-06-09)
• Comments: Threshold - working title: project bite
  
  Very challenging video for me, both technically and story-wise. Original idea came from a literal connection between lyric and video (bite the hand that feeds – hence the working title), but over the course of the project, evolved into a tale of father and son, boyhood and manhood, inaction and action.
  
  Source Music
  The Hand That Feeds by Nine Inch Nails
  Amazingly, this song appears unedited, and in it’s full length form. If you’ve seen any of my other videos, this is a first for me, as almost all of them are edited to some degree. I originally heard this song when the ‘With Teeth’ album came out and it was the strongest track by Trent Reznor that I’ve heard in quite a while. It was like he had watched EVA and wrote this song (or at least that’s the way it was pictured in my head, at least). Its emotions captured in the songs lyrics just screamed out to me to make this video, and I hope I’ve done some justice to the song.
  
  Source Video
  Neon Genesis Evangelion
  This is the video that all the Eva footage I’ve been using for the recent MEP works that I’ve done was originally created for. Since I finished my last full-length video, Blue Ambition, I’ve wanted to create this Eva video for Kawaii Kon 2006 and premiere it to my home town convention. I wanted to showcase what I had learned in the last year, as K2-2005 was the very first time I had been exposed to the world of AMV’s and to compete in your own home town at your own home convention is just an awesome feeling. Even though this didn’t win any prizes (which I’m not the least bit sorry about – all the winners were excellent vids to loose to!), I’m glad that I submitted it and hope to again submit for next years kon!
  
  Basic Ideas and Themes
  As stated above, this videos impetus was a literal imagery of ‘biting’ the hand that feeds which, thankfully, never made it into any form of the video – but it did give me a starting point. As I edited, the story slowly evolved into one of a son, Shinji, who starts not more than a puppet in the controlling hand of his father, Gendo, but evolves and grows into his own during the course of the video. Shinji needed to break away from the bonds that held him, the hand that feeds, by first turning away from the control of his father, turning away from being a passive participant in this war against the angels, and turning away his own fears.
  
  Visual Effects
  The once area with the obvious visual effect is in the ‘crossing’ scene where Shinji had decided to leave NERV and all the fighting behind and takes refuge in a shelter. As he sits and thinks, the crosses beat out the rhythm of the music, in-between which are shown all the people who he has left behind to fight the battles he should be facing. Slowly, Shinji sinks into his own self-realization that he has made a mistake, and slowly, slowy he descends into his own thoughts of self loathing until shaken back to reality by the head of Eva 02 crashing into the shelter.
  
  This was very time consuming to coordinate the crossing lines (as they are not all crosses - if you look, some are just horizontal lines, some are vertical lines, and some are both) and to make sure that scenes started and stopped correctly and not overlap with others as the scenes and crosses changed. The layers of images involved in this were sort of boggling for me, but somehow I got them all out, overlaid properly, timed properly, and in the correct sequence.
  
  Technical
  This video was created on 2 machines and a portable HD
  Home computer – Originally started on a Pentium 4, 1.8ghz computer with 1 gig of ram, I updated mid-video to an Athlon dual core X2 4200, 2 gigs ram
  Work computer - Pentium 4, 3.4ghz HT, 1 gig ram
  Portable HD - 200 gig USB hard drive
  
  Video editor: Magix Movie Edit Pro 10 (NLE)
  Encoder: VirtualDubMod, using XVID
  
  Time: about 180 hours or so over 4 month
  
  Things I wish I could have done
  After the final master for the video was made and the contest entries for Kawaii Kon and other conventions were made, I re-encoded it for distribution on this website and watched it again for the umpteenth time. Only now had I realized that there is this super annoying frame-jitter in the Eva footage!!! For one or two frames, the image would offset just slightly off center and then go back to normal. “WTF was that!!!” I said to myself the first time I saw it and I went back to the sources as I thought it was my editor that was introducing this PITA jitter. However, it was not to be – it was straight from the source. Too late to change this as all the entries had already gone out by the time I discovered it, I left it in this version as well more of as a harsh reminder to myself than anything else. If you watch my Interface Video, you’ll see that I fixed that problem and learned from my mistakes.
  
  In closing, I want to send out a big THANK YOU to Scintilla, without whose awesome script to clean up the horrible, horrible Eva footage from the regular (non-platinum) release, I would have ended up with sucky video footage to start with and probably be very unhappy with the way it would have turned out. Also, props must go to JaddziaDax (Katie) and JubJub2 (Christy), without whose comments and gentle kicks in the pants, I might have not gotten this video done in time for Kawaii Kon. My ‘omg-omg-omg wtf am I going to do to finish this @#$%!* video’ mentality was guided by their gracious foots, er, words of encouragements and got me to the finish line.
  
  With this, I all hope you enjoy