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Information

• Member: Phantasmagoriat
• Title: Easy to Break
• Premiered: 2008-11-07
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
• Songs:
  • In Flames Lord Hypnos
  • Soilwork overload
• Anime:
  • Street Fighter Alpha: Generations (OAV)
• Comments:
  
  Announcement Thread:
  http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=91575 or [click the banner ;P]
  
  About:
  I can't stress enough how good this turned out compared to what I expected. Originally, I just wanted to edit something with some sort of "metalish" type music to use up the Street Fighter DVD sitting on my shelf. It has some decent footage I have to admit, and the movie is barely 45 minutes long, so why not use up all the footage in an action video and call it complete? So that's how I approached it, and I ended up using a song by Soilwork, which is a pretty decent band to gain my respect; however, they are a little more mainstream compared to my tastes in metal... so honestly, I wasn't overly concerned with flaws in the amv that could 'ruin' the song. I find that amusing since I'm listening to the band more often now.
  
  The carefree nature of my approach turned out to be a good thing. I just kinda edited for the sake of doing it, and finished in one day. But that was just the Soilwork section [first 2 minutes]. Then looking at it, I realized my edits followed the storyline pretty good, so it would have been a really crappy ending if I stopped there. That's when I started looking through my music collection for something that would do justice to the work so far. I'd been itching to use In Flames for a while now, and when the breakdown in the song Lord Hypnos came up, I thought it was perfect-- Powerful, progressive, with a melancholy edge, and culminating into an uplifting thrash session that any metalhead can appreciate. All beginning from silence, which was important for my situation.
  
  From there, the songs were blended together in Magix, and I finished off the remaining footage just as the movie laid out; switching to widescreen AR, and adding various effects to capture a cinematic style that tries to emphasize the mood. It took an extra day to do the In Flames segment, then another day to tweak things, render, and clean.
  
  At the end of the day, I didn't really like the movie that much, but I came up with some words to sum up my thoughts of it "...we are fragile// easy to break// but sometimes we forget..." whether that's what the movie was going for or not... This is the reason why we have fights, wars, suffering etc-- essentially the cause is a general disregard for each other as human beings. In many instances this is a personal struggle, but ultimately leads to the broader idea of social interconnectedness. Anyways, feel free to interpret all this as pretentious bullshit too ;) so I'm just going to stop typing now
  
  
  Technical:
  This is pretty much a cut-and-fade amv, aside from the second half, so I'd just like to point out some not-so-obvious things:
  -the section at 1:00-1:30 I was really running out of footage [movie=45min], so I thought I would focus on the mood [that the music so conveniently put at that point in the song] and add a visualization border to help get through that section.
  -The border at 1:45 was supposed to reinforce the idea that Ryu is running towards Akuma
  -At 2:14 the simple glow of the smoke was something I almost didn't do, but I'm happy I did
  -2:30 grey-scaled the scene and isolated the red blood
  -2:37 masked the leg coming into the screen through a different aspect ratio
  -2:38 Lipsynch was all masked to 'pop out' in front of the widescreen footage
  -everything else I did was pretty straight-forward, but if you have questions feel free to ask
  
  
  Specs:
  -Made with Magix MEP 10 and the GIMP
  -Local HQ 720x480 x264.mp4 [42MB]
  -indirect LQ 576x432 XviD.avi [42MB]
  -use VLC or CCCP for playback
  
  as always, ANY feedback would be appreciated!
  
  ~Phan