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Information

• Member: MeriC
• Studio: Temple O' Trunks
• Title: When It's Only Me and the Music
• Premiered: 2001-11-13
• Categories:
  • Character Profile
  • Serious
  • Dance
• Song:
  • Jem When It's Only Me
• Anime:
  • Kimagure Orange Road (TV)
• Comments: Title: “When It’s Only Me and the Music”
  Anime: Shin Kimagure Orange Road
  Song: “When It’s Only Me,” by Jem and the Holorgrams
  Length: 1:44 minutes
  Size: 26 MB, in MPEG format
  Time spent: 12 hours, or so.
  
  This video has quite an odd story behind it, so be prepared for some reading. :P The conception of the idea for this video occurred in my car, as most of my video ideas do. Here’s where some of the weirdness comes into play. If anyone grew up in the 80’s as I did, then you might remember an American cartoon called “Jem”. “Jem” is all about a woman who transforms into a pop star with the help of a special holographic earrings. Yeah, that sounds cheesy, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the only truly great American cartoon series ever made (and I’m generally not a fan of American cartoons, mind you). Anywho, in this show, there were usually an average of three original songs per episode. Since there are 65 episodes in this series, you can imagine how many songs there are. In recent years, I’ve gone into this “re-living my youth” phase, which included hunting down all “Jem” episodes, and downloading as many MP3s from the series as humanly possible. So, after I got the songs, I burned ‘em on to a CD for my own listening pleasure. That takes us to the present!
  
  While listening to this CD of burned “Jem” MP3s, I realized that the song “When It’s Only Me” was very pretty, and just a nice tune. The more I listened to it, the more I thought, “Whoa, I oughta make a music video to this song!” The song, being all about music, and dance, could fit nicely with any kind of anime that had such themes. It didn’t take long for me to remember the Kimagure Orange Road Movie, which has scenes of Hikaru auditioning for a musical, along with recurring scenes of Madoka playing on her piano. Aha, a concept has been born! Use a song from a 80s cartoon show with footage from a 90s-made movie about an anime from the 80s! Amalgam powers activate!
  
  Then, I thought about how to turn this little idea of Hikaru dancing and Madoka playing the piano into a story. I wanted to show both characters being artistic, and showing their love for the arts. But, when I went to capture my footage, I ran into a small problem…not enough footage of Madoka playing the piano!! Arg! So, I had to change my concept for the video slightly from my original idea, but I still liked it, regardless. I decided to place most of the emphasis of the video on Hikaru, and show Madoka as a “supporting” character, literally. As Hikaru is going through her audition, I have short scenes of Madoka playing her piano. I wanted this mood to be like, “Madoka’s not there physically, but as she plays her piano, she’s thinking of Hikaru, and is there in spirit.” I also wanted to kinda go back to the idea of both of the women being artistic, and I think that sort of works, too.
  
  That’s pretty much it! In summary, this video is about the artistic talents of Hikaru and Madoka. The focus is on Hikaru, striving to make it in her audition for a musical, while Madoka supports Hikaru in her own special way.
  
  Here’s some technical info about this video! I used the KOR Movie DVD as my source footage. And as for the audio, heh…now this is odd how I did it. This is my first experience with using a non-CD or MP3 as my audio source. Since this show is from the 80s, all the music I actually own from it is all on cassette. So, I went out bought a wire that allowed me to hook my cassette player to my computer, and recorded the audio from the tape that way. With that said, the audio quality isn’t as good as any song ripped from a CD. But, considering the tape I used for this video is from 1986, I don’t think it’s bad at all. :P Umm…let’s see. I encoded this at a very high bitrate, so the video quality is excellent. I also added some tiny special effects, to spice things up a little.
  
  Well, I hope you like this video! Yeah, I know it’s short, but that’s how long the song is. Good thing, too, cuz I was running out of source footage. :P I hope you’ll enjoy it, and write a review of it some time! Thanks for reading.