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Information

• Member: Khandreia
• Studio: Vulture Studios
• Title: Sins of the Armor (The Truth Beneath the Sakura)
• Premiered: 2013-07-21
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Serious
• Song:
  • Within Temptation The Truth Beneath the Rose
• Anime:
  • Ronin Warriors
  • Ronin Warriors (OVA)
• Participation:
  • Youmacon 2013, Youmacon 2013 Music Video Exposition (2013-11-02)
  • A-Kon 25, A-Kon 25 VSE (2014-06-06)
• Comments: **First Place Anime Video at Kitsune Kon 2014
  **"Quake with Fear" audience award at Youmacon 2013
  (These were with a slightly tweaked, cleaned-up version of the video.)
  
  (This video was also shown at Anime Central 2014, but didn't win anything, and no one has added that to the list of conventions yet.)
  
  (I wonder if anyone ever believed I would actually make an AMV for something other than Gundam? >_>)
  
  Sometimes I end up with videos that I didn't expect to make, but it all somehow manages to come together. This is one of them.
  
  Within Temptation is another one of my big favorite bands, and when I was listening to this particular song one night, I suddenly realised just how much the lyrics really fit the Message OAV, because I've been on a YST/RW binge for a while, and it was quite fresh in my mind. While the song itself is about something else entirely, how much of it fit the overall themes and emotions on display in this five-episode OAV were beyond striking...haunted by the sins of the past (whether it's the Troopers/Ronins themselves, who wish to put their battles behind them, or the vengeful spirit Suzunagi, who pursues them because of the play that predicted their battles and was responsible for her/her family's persecution and death), seeking forgiveness, and looking for the truths in life. As the idea first came to me, it simply would not leave me alone. I would listen to it over and over, sometimes for a couple hours on end, just letting the imagery come together in my head.
  
  Of course, doing this was not going to be without its challenges. For one, this is a seven-minute song--not something you find very often in AMVs in general, mostly because of length restrictions in contests; in fact, this is the longest song I've ever done a video to. While I could have trimmed the song down by a couple minutes, I honestly felt like doing so would remove some significant moments and context for the entire video, so I decided it was better to simply leave it be. Second, while this OAV has some wonderfully striking visuals, it's also chock-full of lengthy clip segments from the TV series (a lot of which were downright unusable--those clips that were I used filters to give it a washed-out, aged look of happening in the past) or the Kikoutei Densetsu OAV, the events of which are referred to often in the main Message story. I was also determined to only work from what was in these five episodes and not draw from anything else in the series or other OAVs.
  
  While certain portions were very clear in my mind at the planning stage, there were others that weren't, and I kind of had to wing it. But when you look at the video itself, it's not entirely obvious which parts were initially unplanned just because the themes of the OAV go so well with the music. Many ideas came to me while editing, and some even became an ongoing theme (such as Kikoutei/Inferno and/or the fight against Black Kikoutei being "the cruelty of the beast"). And even among what I did plan, there were some "happy accidents" in the themes (like all the references to one's soul ending up being scenes of Seiji/Sage, who is rather the more "spiritual" member of the team). Surprisingly, editing only took me a bit over a week (not counting planning or pre-production work), even though there were some days where I didn't get a lot done for one reason or another.
  
  So why does this have two titles? It's mostly because I couldn't decide which one I liked better. "Sins of the Armor" was my working title for this, playing off the "forgive me my sins" line that is so prevalent in the song, but as I was working, I liked "The Truth Beneath the Sakura" as well, since it plays off the title of the song, and also how sakura petals not only feature heavily within the series, as well as imagery I used throughout the video, but also are something associated with samurai in general. In the end, I simply couldn't decide on one over the other, so I used both.
  
  It really amazes me just how well this all works together in the final version. Maybe the song wasn't written with this series/OAV in mind, but when you look at this, you'd never guess that was the case. There's just something about this combination that works, and I can't describe it any more than that.