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Information

• Member: Ashyukun
• Studio: Electric Leech Productions
• Title: Youta's Love Nightmare
• Premiered: 2004-07-28
• Category:
  • Comedy
• Song:
  • Two Ball Loo Online Love Nightmare
• Anime:
  • Video Girl Ai
• Participation:
  • Otakon (Summer '04), Otakon (Summer '04) (2004-07-30)
• Comments: 'Youta's Love Nightmare' was a video that sort of took an off-kilter turn about halfway through. It was a case of my doing something silly as filler in an early beta and finding that the filler worked better than what I had intended on putting there in the first place (something unfortunately understandable with a series like Video Girl Ai, especially when you're not making a serious/romance video with it). YLN was the third video I picked up trying to do before Otakon. The first two just weren't 'gelling' in such a way and as quickly enough as I needed in order to get done on time (for the original deadline, at least- which I did succeed in doing). Maybe I'll include what little did get finished on those first two on one of my CDs/DVDs eventually, but for now they can stay buried and forgotten in the minds of the few who saw anything involving them.
  
  Now, I'll hazard a guess that no more than a handful of people have ever even heard of Two Ball Loo, the group whose song I used as the audio source (slightly edited for length)- though many thousand people have heard at least a small snipped of one of their songs. I can say this with confidence because they are the group who performed the opening theme to the Afro Ken anime- the intro to which was used as the intro into "Who Let the Dogs Out" in my Otakon video last year, "Who Let the 'Fros Out?". Surprisingly, they don't appear to be Japanese, though I don't know if they sang all of the Moko Moko Afro Ken song themselves, or if they had a guest vocalist for the Japanese lines. Anyway, they're definitely amusing. "Online Love Nightmare" was the 'B Side' (figuratively, since current CDs don't have two play sides...) of the Afro Ken CD single, and I've long thought that it would be just the perfect song to make a comedic Video Girl Ai video to.
  
  It may not have turned out 'perfect', but I believe I was right in thinking it would work fairly well. Once I got started on it, things started falling into place fairly quickly. However, as I was want to do, I didn't fill the timeline in using anything resembling a linear progression. I had certain scenes that I knew I wanted to use for certain lines, and sought out and placed those first. So, as I edited the video together, I was left with a number of holes that I needed to fill in later. These didn't really worry me until I got enough done to show it to several fellow editor friends in beta form. I made the export of the video and decided that I didn't like having all that black space in between the segments I had filled in. So, I went back in to Premiere and threw together a bunch of silly title cards making fun of myself for not having any video in the segments where, well, there wasn't any video. The beta- and especially the silly title cards- went over fairly well, and I continued work on the video. Eventually, I filled the whole timeline with video, and released another beta- this one with no titles in it, just the whole song with video to it. The almost unanimous response I got back was, "What happened to the titles?!?! Those were great!!!". So, for the heck of it, I went back and figured out what I thought was the best balance between titles and video, and considerably refined the titles- and got a much better test response. And the titles were a lot of fun... I rather enjoy getting to mock myself and my habit of waiting until the last minute to do things every so often- though in this case, I was a bit more on the ball than I made myself out to be. :P
  
  The song seemed to work quite well for the more humorous side of the relationship between Youta and Ai, which is far more prevalent in the first half of the OAV series. If you've not seen Video Girl Ai, I highly recommend it- and I even more highly recommend the manga it is based on. There's a lot more to the manga than the anime, and it's really good and touching at points. Unfortunately, I didn't want any of that for this video, and just wanted the funny/slapstick stuff that happens early on. :P However, by some very strange twist of fate, there is also a romantic/sentimental VGAi video in the Otakon contest this year- which is just really weird (given it's an older, less popular series these days), but good because it should give people a good idea of the show overall.