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Information

• Member: RutKiskasca
• Studio: Kiskasca Productions
• Title: Truly
• Premiered: 2004-12-30
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Character Profile
  • Sentimental
• Song:
  • Chimera Truly
• Anime:
  • Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
• Participation:
  • Anime Los Angeles - AMV Contest, Anime Los Angeles - AMV Contest (2005-01-28)
  • MegaCon, MegaCon (2005-02-25)
  • Anime Detour AMV Contest, Anime Detour AMV Contest (2005-03-11)
• Comments: WINNER : Megacon 2005 Best Action Video
  WINNER: Anime Detour 2005 Best Action Video
  
  
  "Warriors of the Wind" was the first Anime I ever saw, if you don't count Star Blazers, Voltron, or Robotech. Well, it was the first Anime movie I saw. I saw it in 1988 in Houston, TX on HBO. It was the horrible New World Video dub that had all the artistic moments sliced out of it to fit it into a manageable sized time slot. I didn't know this. I just knew it was beautiful. I taped it, and I watched that tape until it wore out. After that, I began looking for it so I could buy it. By then, Disney had locked it up in their vault, and it was not to be found in the United States. This was before Amazon.com, or even before most people had access to the internet, so I was limited to wandering into every comic book store, movie store, importer, etc and asking them if they could even special order it for me. The answer was always no.
  I never stopped looking for it. Even online, I had no luck. Then in May of 2004, Amazon.com announced that they would be able to ship a region 1 release of the movie by August of 2004. I pre ordered it immediately. By this time, I was making AMVs, and I dreamed of making a video of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. When August finally rolled around, the shipment date was only days away, and I was beginning to get worried. I was hearing rumors that Disney was delaying the release again, for some unexplained reason. I wrote to Amazon, who had not adjusted their shipment estimate, and sure enough, they changed their estimate to "sometime in 2010." I could have strangled someone.
  I lamented on #AMV, and Ian Roberts gave me a URL for a Hong Kong company that could ship me a Region 2 version. I eagerly ordered it, and within a month, it was in my hands. Of course, it was in either Japanese or Cantonese, and all the menus were Cantonese, but who cares. It was the original, un-sliced-up version! I began immediately on the ripping and clipping for my next AMV.
  I had just gotten back from Anime Weekend Atlanta 10, and I was full of inspiration. My hard disk was also full of lots of AMVs, courtesy of Chaosprojects Studios, who I inadvertently offended late in the con by bitching about his Azumanga Daioh "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" video. It won, and I had never seen Azumanga, so I didn't get half the humor in it, and so I bitched like a little shit about how unfathomable it was. Since then, I have watched a LOT of his videos, and I love them all, especially his Azumanga video. I feel like a jerk.
  Anyway, I had lots of inspiration for my project, and I worked on it constantly. Then, in September, I had to begin preparations to move back from Georgia to Washington, DC, and from there to Wiesbaden, Germany. This ate up about a month and a half of my attention, and the video stagnated. When I finally did get started on it again, I was in a rut (pardon the pun.) I couldn't figure out how to time the second half of it so that it told a complete story that had closure by the end of the video. I could visualize what I wanted to see happening at certain parts of the video, but the story line in the movie had large jumps that could not be translated to the video very smoothly. I won't discuss them here, because I don't want you watching the video and going, "yeah, that does kind of suck, doesn't it? I never would have noticed." I'll let you decide what sucks and what doesn't.
  By December 2004, I was getting sick of having so much source footage on my hard drive. I mean, the thing was taking up 40 Gb of space between all the clips, the source footage, and the photo shop files I had created for the effects and to clean up the source. It was a really dirty source copy. Tons of video artifacts and noise, and just when I thought I had it finished, I previewed the final copy, and in the last three seconds of video, there was a silver-dollar sized "cigarette burn" for six whole frames of video that I had to remove. It required some serious cleaning up.
  In the end, I didn't feel like I had told the full story that I wanted to tell in the video, but I don't intend on making another full length Nausicaa video. Instead, I put "...to be continued" in the end, as more of a hint that you should really get this movie, and watch it yourself. I think I avoided most of the blatant spoilers, and in doing so, I have left a rather confusing plot in the video. You'll have to watch the movie yourself to fully appreciate its emotional qualities.
  The song is long, almost 5 minutes, and did not lend itself to cropping very well. I did crop it down a bit, though. The video was edited in Adobe After Effects and VirtualDubMod. The audio was mastered at 44,100 Hz, 160 Kb/s CBR, and compressed using the Lame MP3 codec. The video was compressed using XviD MPEG 4 two-pass codec. The first pass yielded a 141 Mb file, that was compressed on the second pass to 66 Mb.
  I would like to thank IcyCloud of AquaSky Productions for her creative input and willingness to download so many of my betas of this project; Zarxrax for encouragement and kind comments during production, and of course Ian Roberts for helping me find the source footage and putting up with my silly questions and comments at AWA and on #AMV.
  This is the first video I have finished with a feeling that I wasn't finished, and not completely happy. I have heard from other artistic friends that this is a sign that it is good. My other videos gave me a great feeling of pride and accomplishment and I was definitely done with them when they were published, but I look back on them and think they aren't that good. I hope this one will be received well, and that you will enjoy it.