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Information

• Member: Bakadeshi
• Studio: AuN Studios
• Title: Eternal SKY
• Premiered: 2004-09-26
• Categories:
  • Sentimental
  • Instrumental
• Song:
  • Akino Arai Time of gold flowing
• Anime:
  • Escaflowne - The Movie (movie)
• Participation:
  • Anime Weekend Atlanta **PRO** AMV Contest, Anime Weekend Atlanta **PRO** AMV Contest (2004-09-24)
  • Animania 2004 AMV competition, Animania 2004 AMV competition (2004-10-23)
• Comments: Its times like this I wish there was a "Sentimental" Category. This video is not exactly a drama, nor is it exactly a character profile, nor is it exactly a romance, nor is it exactly a serious vid, but rather some elements of all of them combined. Its a Sentimental and maybe "Artistic" vid. This vid was entirely experimental, and I had no idea what to expect of it in the Pro contest. Apparantly people liked it though, as It was nominated to the finals in both sentimental and artistic categories.
  
  The story of how this video came to be almost on accident:
  
  This video was originally never ment to be. To be exact I had a totally diferent idea for Pro originally. I wanted to try and create a sureal scene of a bird flying through the clouds, and had planned various ways of trying to accomplish that using Angel Sanctuary footage to a Angsty concept, However about a month before the deadline, when I tried to obtain Angel Sanctuary from Blockbuster (where I had confirmed before had the DVD) they didn't have it. They had the case out on the shelves, but no DVD. Probably was damaged or something. Well there went my idea for Pro, unless I could track down this DVD in a local store which was unlikely. I was going out of town and wanted to take the Project with me on my laptop to edit on the trip. Therefore mail order was out of the question. Then I saw the Escaflowne Movie was there. I rented it kinda last minute despiration to see if I could come up with something to do instead. When i saw the scene of Vhan flying through the clouds, It hit me that I could accomplish my original sureal idea using this clip. So I went searching for a song that would match it. Somehow I got to searching Escaflowne Instrumentals, and accidentally obtained Time of gold flowing, which was incorrecly labeled as comming from the Escaflowne Sound track. I heard the song once, and immediately knew what I had to do with it. The song had a very surreal and dreamy feel to it. It would work perfectly for a dreamy nastolgic concept. So I ordered the Please save my earth Image soundtrack from cdjapan, and thus begain the editing of my accidental Pro entry ;p I barely got that cd just in time to replace the Mp3 I was working with for the Pro entry before the deadline too.
  
  About the video:
  
  This video was designed to generate a somewhat nostalgic feeling of the Escaflowne movie, and the time Hitomi and Van spent together. The Concept is that Hitomi is sleeping on the roof top of her school dreaming of the time she spent with Van in the world of Gaia and longing to return there. Hence most of the scenes in the AMV is in her "dream" so to speak. The title cards are her thought patterns as she is seeing this dream. Therefore, the AMV takes place AFTER she has spent that time with him and returned to her world.
  
  
  
  Technical Notes:
  
  Alot of the footage manipulation done in this video is to support this dreamy feel. And there is ALOT of subtle footage manipulation. quite a bit of masking and overlaying was done in this video to acheive this effect. I used as many as 12 tracks of footage at once to achive some of the effects. Especially the sureal cloud scene with van flying and the overlayed footage flying out towards the audence. ALOT more editing went into that than it might look like at first glance. The trick I was trying to accomplish is make it look like I realy didn't do much work, and it was like that from the source. Although I think I was pretty successfull at this, you may notice if you realy pay attention to it, that the clouds move a bit jerky... and this was something I realy couldn't get any smoother than it is since I was working with about 2 seconds of cloud footage there that I had to manipluate to repeat and create that 40 second segment, without looking like its repeating.
  
  Also no use of After Effects were used in the making of this video. All image work was done with Gimp 2.0, asside from the text, which I used Photoshop for. Some of the custom effects were also created using Gimp, and sometimes in compination with masking techniques. This video was one giant learning experience for me in the area of masking. I learned quite a bit of interesting ways to use this technique to acheive interesting effects.
  
  There is only 1 scene lipsynched in this video, that is the overlay of the girl at 02:34.
  I did not enable the category since it is a minor synch and only 1 place in the video.
  
  An interesting thing of note, there was so many tracks of footage overlayed with various manipulation being done on diferent opacity levels, that it took a total of 12 hours to export the final project on an AMD 2400+ with 512 megs of ram. And that is with no preprocessing done to the scripts besides the builtin preprocessor for mpeg2dec. no Deen or mftoon was used before export. It would have taken days to export then, and likely crash during it. This project was the most cpu and memory demanding of any of my projects to date.
  
  Software used:
  Adobe Primere Pro, Gimp 2.0, Photoshop 7 (text only), Avisynth 2.5, AMVApp 2.0
  
  
  Enough about the video, give it a download and let me know what you think ^^
  
  
  Contest update: Best Technical - Animania 2004
  Finalist - AWA Pro 2004 in Artistic and Sentimental Categories.
  Nominated for Best Sentimental for 2005 VCAs.