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Information

• Member: Davis 51
• Studio: Under The Box Productions
• Title: Batou: A Users Manual
• Premiered: 2012-07-28
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
  • Serious
  • Horror
  • Sentimental
• Song:
  • Johann Johannsson The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Turned Black
• Anime:
  • Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
• Participation:
  • Otakon 2012, Otakon 2012 AMV Contest (2012-07-27)
• Comments: Awards:
  
  None...yet!
  
  About the video:
  
  The song is one that perfectly with the Anime, almost to the point of creepy. Both the song and the source are extremely surreal pieces of work. . The concept I had was that of a study in all things Batou & company. I imagined the video like really long fuse to a fireworks show, starting off really slow, somber, yet silently deadly, while getting more and more pent-up and frustrated until everything reaches a boiling point and spills over until it cools off, much like Batou himself. Quiet, but you know he can snap and go nuts at any moment. I really think this video is a reflection of that.
  
  Batou is one of my favorite characters in Anime, and I love the GitS2: Innocence for being a character study on him, but I knew the video also had to have something else, and that something else was atmosphere. The cyberpunk-noir surrealist feel of the film provided a perfect backdrop. In that sense, the first half works as a slow ease into the atmosphere, while the second half is where everything goes to hell in a hand-basket.
  
  Overall, I am very pleased with the outcome. I know its long, but I hope you take the time to sit through it and enjoy.
  
  About the editing process:
  
  So...yeah. This is kinda easily the longest video I've ever had to do. At around 7 minutes in length it was a doozy to edit, but I hate altering songs to make them shorter. Hell, I cut out about 5 or 6 solid seconds from the beginning/end of the song because it was nothing but dead silence padding out the runtime and I still feel odd about that. I did add some echo and reverb to some of that dead space to make it more interesting, however, creating a kind of sonar effect.
  
  This also marks the first time I used some audio from the source, as well as stock royalty-free audio. Nothing too major, just some seagulls, a scream, and a stock gunshot effect, which was far more intense than the one present in the film.
  
  Took about 2 months from start to finish, which is far better than I usually do, partially because I mimicked my methodology from the Farewell, Satoshi Kon video. Essentially, instead of editing a little bit at a time over many months, I edited for hours upon end, for several solid weeks. This was due to grad school, during which I made a promise to myself not to edit until after the semester was over. The rushing was due to trying to meet the Otakon deadline.
  
  Though there are only a few effects, they were very carefully designed to be non-obtrusive as possible. I doubt many of you will even pick up on them unless you are intimately familiar with the film.