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Information

• Member: Ashyukun
• Studio: Electric Leech Productions
• Title: Dark Metropolis
• Premiered: 2003-01-10
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Parody
  • Serious
  • Trailer
• Song:
  • ...other... 'Dark City' Theatrical Trailer
• Anime:
  • Metropolis (Rintaro)
• Participation:
  • Ohayocon 3, Ohayocon 3 (2003-01-10)
  • Katsucon, Katsucon (2003-02-14)
• Comments: My first solo video. 'Dark Metropolis' was originally conceived a while ago, shortly after Metropolis was released and some friends and I had seen it. On the 'Dark City' DVD there is actually a section about comparisons to the original silent-movie era Metropolis, so the idea for this video was born. I decided to undertake this video as the first after a long hiatus in creating anything because I figured I needed to sharpen my skills back up to where they used to be and to learn some of the newer programs and tricks I'd picked up.
  
  This video ended up using far more of both skill and time than I initially figured it would as I started paying more and more attention to details on it. I had gotten nearly halfway through the selection and placement of the clips when AD's 'Bait and Switch' method came along, and I went back and started over using it to get better quality. I realized after getting all the clips laid up and well into effects editing that I probably should have been editing it in 24fps instead of 30, but it was too late at that point (much to my dismay... I would much prefer to have had 20% less frames to edit in the frame-by-frame sections).
  
  I had initially intended to replace all of the original text in the trailer with new text (though the wording would have stayed the same for most of the sections, it just worked so well), but without a good way to generate my own cloud fields to replace the cloud segments or a good anime to pull them from, after editing out and replacing the only one that -had- to be edited (the 'From the Director of' section) I decided that the benefit from editing out and erasing the rest would not outweigh the time it would take and the hit to quality (you can unfortunately fairly easily tell I edited out the text on the director one if you're looking) and left them as is.
  
  I was really pleased with how the scenes matched up. For almost all the cuts, perfect parallels between Dark City and Metropolis existed. For the ones that didn't, I think I found very good replacements. I had a lot of fun replacing the New Line Cinemas logo at the beginning with the new one from the beginning of Metropolis. Editing the fog was far less fun, but I like how it came out, and I think it was well worth the time. I have to thank my friend John Jones for the Metropolis scans, I think they worked out well. The 3D lettering for the logo was done using a program called Xara3D. It took a lot of playing around with it, but in the end it was worth all that and lots more. I also have to give props to another program I made extensive use of, InFeRn0's 'Font Matcher' (http://teleline.terra.es/personal/infern0/). It was very helpful in matching up the fonts I had to work with with the ones that were used in the original trailer.
  
  Programs used:
  Premiere
  After Effects
  Photoshop
  Xara3D
  InFeRn0's Font Matcher
  AMVApp (older version, given when this was started)
  
  
  Started: August 2002
  Completed: December 2002
  
  Awards: Best Action Video, Katsucon 9
  
  Addendum- January 2004
  
  Owing to my needing to do so for a DVD I made, the direct and indirect links (i.e., the links that go to the downloads from my own site) now feature a more cleaned up (i.e., noise-reduced) version of this video. The original, un-cleaned version will remain up on the donut until the tools are put into place to easily replace it with the new one.