Video Information

Information

  • Member: Melichan923
  • Title: You Are Loved
  • Premiered: 2009-05-24
  • Categories:
  • Song:
    • Josh Groban You Are Loved (Don't Give Up)
  • Anime:
  • Participation:
  • Comments:

    Convention Participation:

    Won:
    Anime Mid Atlantic 2009 AMV Contest - Best Drama
    Anime Evolution 2009 AMV Contest - Best Sentimental
    AnimeNEXT 2009 AMV Contest - Best Sentimental
    Fanime Music 2009 AMV Contest - 2nd Place Judge's Choice Drama
    Fanime Music 2009 AMV Contest - 3rd Place Audience Choice Drama
    Anime Mid Atlantic 2010 BATTLE OF THE GREATS AMV Contest - Best Drama

    Other Finalist:
    A-kon 2009 AMV Contest Expert's Exhibition - Drama Finalist

    Non-Finalist/Non-Competing:
    Anime Boston 2009
    Anime Central 2009
    Anime Expo 2009
    Otakon 2009

    Quick Info
    (For those that don't like to read lengthy descriptions)

    Date Completed: March 7, 2009
    Time Spent Editing Final Draft: Span of two months, About 50-60 hours
    Time Spent Pre-processing: ~ About 30 hours
    Programs Used for Editing: Sony Vegas 6.0, Photoshop 6.0
    Other Programs: DVD Decrypter, Exact Audio Copy, DGIndex, AviSynth, VirtualDubMod, Zarx264GUI, BeSweet GUI
    Editing Style for video: Slow paced, simple effects. I used flashes, black fades, and cross-fades mostly, some straight cuts on beats occasionally. Lip flap was edited out where possible, except where it looked necessary. Some color adjustments and light adjustments were added.

    The Concept and Back Story

    (Below may contain some spoilers for my video and for the series.)

    You Are Loved will always be a special video to me because for the first time for me, the primary inspiration to make this video came from a person's real-life experience rather than the usual "This anime kind of fits this song" or "This song suits this anime!" There are a lot of feelings behind it.

    I got the idea for this video in March of 2008. One night while researching online after hearing a story on the news in the background, I came across a website named RyanPatrickHalligan.org. The website, created by a man named John Halligan, was written in memory of his son Ryan who was literally bullied to death. It helps spread awareness of teen bullying and it gives hope to teenagers who felt as Ryan did. The website explains in detail what thirteen-year-old Ryan went though before his heartbreaking suicide. (A short video of the story if you don't feel like reading can be found here: A Cyber Bullying Suicide Story.) His peers in school relentlessly bullied him: spreading rumors, calling him names, telling him no one liked him and many other cruel, unimaginable things... However, it didn't stop there: He was even being "cyber bullied" online through instant messages. Ryan told personal things to someone at school he thought he could trust, only to find out that person had turned against him and his instant messages were copied and pasted to other people online and he got laughed at when the following days came. After many months of being verbally abused, Ryan, now feeling unloved and like he'd never amount to anything, committed suicide never knowing that what his family and friends thought of him was much, much different. By the end of Ryan's heartbreaking story, I had tears streaming down my face and spent the majority of the weekend reading the rest of the website and researching cyber-bulling and teenage suicide. I found out suicide is the third highest ranking cause of death among teenagers and that not enough is being done to help prevent it. With all the information fresh in my mind, I vowed to make anything, any little thing that could possibly help prevent a tragedy similar to Ryan's death from happening.

    Like a Godsend, that same week I first saw the music video for "You Are Loved (Don't Give Up)" by Josh Groban. The song inspired me more than I had ever been in my whole life and by the time the video was finished I already knew that I would be making an anime music video to the song. It really was only a matter of minutes before I decided on which anime to use: Air, Clannad, Kanon, and ONE. It was so easy to pick the shows because each one has characters that are still in school and dealing with painful struggles and depression, some characters even attempting to take their own lives because they were hurting so much. Choosing which characters and situations would best follow the theme of the video while still maintaining the stories and plot in each anime was a little tougher, but when I studied the lyrics and my concept and put two and two together, it became very clear on which characters to pick and what exactly to edit. The song had the same message that I wanted to portray: simply that everyone is loved by someone else and that they should never give up on their life or their dreams because brighter days will come. The video's primary focus is not on bullying, but on feelings of suicide and hopelessness. Sometimes people can't hang on for only themselves when hurting so bad: they need help from others and they need to know they are needed as well. And that idea inspired me to put a quote that I knew of at the end. The quote is the exact summary in words that ties the video, characters, concept and the above message together. (There is also one by Harriet Beecher Stowe at the end of the credits.)


    Preparation, Pre-processing and Draft

    In Spring of 2008 I had a complete draft of my video completed. I needed to map out what characters were best for certain parts and since it was my first various anime video, it was a bit tougher than expected. I knew the final would be easier with scenes already layed out in a separate project. One of my biggest concerns in the draft was the visual quality since I hadn't worked on ANY Avisynth scripts for the draft project and the quality of the DVD for ONE really suffered compared to the others. You name it, it was there in ONE: Rainbows, aliasing, washed out colors, the dreaded dot-crawl and more. ONE is 4:3 and the rest of my footage was a 16:9 AR and that meant I had to diminish the quality even more to crop it, scale it up and make it match the others. With kind PMs from Kariudo and Scintilla's Avisynth guide I was able to make it presentable along side the other beautifully animated series. (Thanks you two!)

    In a span of five months I re-watched all the movies and shows needed to complete the project and worked on my AMV scripts for each series.

    I asked my mother for the Josh Groban CD and received it for my birthday in '08. ^_^ The pre-processing of the DVDs, converting, quality cleanup, and all of that fun stuff for the final project took quite a long time.

    Editing Stresses

    Once I actually done with all the ripping, converting, etc. sometime in October I believe... well, it's kind of a funny story looking back, lol. ^^;;

    Kind of similar to my Ouran project, everything seemed to be going wrong every time I'd try to get this project done. My computer's RAID drive shorted out and I was without a computer for a while. My computer also got terrible computer virus that made it unstable for a whole month. By the time I cleared it out, I had actually picked up two more and with the state it was in, it did not make editing a happy time! My computer wasn't the only thing catching viruses though, I was sick practically every other few weeks and I stayed in bed a lot. If that wasn't enough, the power where I live was constantly out due to storms (You know the huge storm during the winter that caused power outages for weeks? I was in the second worst area and had no electricity on even Christmas). Soon after that, my cat of almost twelve years passed away from Lymphoma and that caused a lot of grief for my family. :'(

    Needless to say, all that and more put a damper on my original plan to finish the AMV in a span of a few months (Overall, it took a full year from it to go from an idea to complete on the timeline) but I am quite happy with the results and glad I could finish it after all that! :)

    Thank Yous!

    Thank you to:

    Josh Groban - For singing one of the most beautiful and inspirational songs in history.

    Visual Art's/Key/Tactics - For creating incredibly beautiful shows that show you how beautiful life can be.

    John Halligan - Spreading awareness about suicide from your own personal experience. You are a very strong. Thanks for sharing your story and for being inspirational.

    Eric V. - Support when all the stress hit me at once!

    Kariudo - Helping me with Avisynth filtering for ONE. That dot crawl was horrendous.

    Scintilla - A very helpful quality cleanup guide.

    xstylus - Friendly tips and help about submitting to conventions.

    Qyot27 - Further helping me compress my videos at high quality for the Org and teaching me a few new compressing tricks in VDub.

    And of course anyone who takes the time to watch my video! ^_^ Thanks!

    Links

    RyanPatrickHalligan.org
    Suicide Hotlines

    Immediate Help:
    1-800-SUICIDE begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              1-800-SUICIDE      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

    Never be afraid to get help if you need it. Everybody needs somebody to talk to at some point in their life.

    ---

    Thanks for watching.

Opinions (6)

  • Orig
  • Visual
  • Sound
  • Synch
  • Lip
  • Effects
  • Effort
  • Re-View
  • Overall
  • 9.50
  • 10.00
  • 10.00
  • 9.25
  • 10.00
  • 9.50
  • 10.00

Downloads

  • Link Format Bitrate Codec Duration Filesize Link Check Information Comments
  • Indirect AVI (.avi)  308kbps  XviD/MP3  05:33:00  100MB  Last Checked: 2009-06-25 23:17:13 200 OK This indirect link leads you to a lower quality XviD version of the video. If your computer can't handle the higher quality MP4 on Local, download this one.
  • Local MP4 0/128 H.264/AAC 5:34 92.8 MiB
    Local File [MeliChan923] You Are Loved.mp4
    Duration 334.07 seconds
    Video Track 0 kb/s H.264 [avc1]
    848 x 480 @ 23.976 fps
    Audio Track AAC @ 128 kbps
    44.1 kHz, stereophonic sound