Information
- Member: Bakadeshi
- Studio: AuN Studios
- Title: Angel's Redemption 2: The circle of sin
- Premiered: 2005-02-20
- Categories:
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Songs:
- Evanescence Eternal
- Jared Hudson Xenogears Uncaptured Jewel OC ReMix
- Sephire Kingdom Hearts Above the rising falls OC ReMix
- The Wingless Secret of Mana Aphrodite Oceanus OC ReMix
- Anime:
- Participation:
-
Comments:
Angel’s Redemption 2 : The Circle of Sin
First of all, this is not a direct sequel to Angels Redemption, but rather only shares the first one’s concept and music style. (both are done using primarily dark OC remixes) It’s sorta like the Final fantasy series sequels are. You do not need to have seen AR1 or Haibane Renmei to watch this one, however be warned there are some Haibane Renmei spoilers concerning Reki.
The Concept:
After watching Haibane Renmei, I Fell in love with it and immediately decided to use it for AR2. My original plan for AR2 was to take a slightly more Dramatic slightly less actiony approach, hence less flashy synching and more concentration on Story. As with the first one, The concept is to bring out the darker side of Haibane Renmei, and for this I decided to concentrate mostly on Reki and her fight with her sin-bound state in the Anime, and her relationship with Rakka in that regard. Titles have reappeared as a means of telling us what is going on in Reki’s head. Infact the entire third segment of the video is supposed to be the conflict going on in her head until it concludes at the end.
Segment you say? Yes I took a different approach to the first one, instead of having everything coming at you relentlessly all at once like the first one, I took a segmented approach to this one. The first segment pretty much sets up everything with how their relationship began when she found her. The second segment (Rain, and Eternal music) is there to support Rakka’s role in the video mostly. Then the third segment is the real video, followed by the ending. If you saw this at a convention, the version you saw may not have had the ending segment, if the video length was restricted.
The main reason for Segment approach is in this concept I tried to tell the story in a sort of theatrical view, almost like its a mini movie, with text instead of voice narrating it, rather than it being a Music Video.
Generally Text in AMVs as ameans of telling the story can sometimes be distracting, But one of the reasons for it, beyond that its supposed to be her thought pattern, is that its Haibane renmei were talking about here. The story and precepts in this anime are so deep with so many symbolisms, that it makes it very difficult if not impossible to tell the story effectively with just imagery for those that have not seen the anime. That being said, I did try to make the titles as non distracting and pretty as I could get them. And judging by peoples comments on the video so far, It seems I was pretty successfull this time around in that regard ^^
*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***
消さない罪 – The Premise:
In the anime, The Haibane can be in a state called Sin-bound, which literally means you are bound by sin, and so cannot achieve the blessing and go beyond the walls, which the Haibane call “Taking the flight”. When one is “stuck” in this sinbound state, or what is sometimes refered to as the “Circle of Sin” their feathers are mottled with black spots indicating this, rather than the pure charcoal grey color most Haibane are born with. (In the anime, Reki uses something to cover up her black feathers, hence why some scenes in the video she has white feathers. Also the scene of her friend in glasses form when she was younger collapsed on the ground is from when she went to collect the ingredients to make that medicine) I used the black feathers as a symbolism of representing sinfulness in the video.
The other thing I need to explain is the name tags. The Haibane is named after their cacoon dream, which I take to be how each Haibane died in their previous life. The name tags play a lot of symbolism in the anime, and I used some of that symbolism in my video. Such as the different meanings of the word used for Stone.
The last thing important to understand the video is the importance of “The Bird”. In the anime, birds are said to carry things left behind in the previous life, as they are the only ones who can fly beyond the walls and return at will. When stuck in the circle of sin, one cannot easily forgive oneself for what they did, so it takes someone to forgive you, or help you accept everything and move on. In Rakkas case she had the bird, (Who I beleive to be someone from when Rakka was alive on earth, reincarnated to the form of the bird, and basically made rakka realize she wasn't alone and that someone cared about her. I beleive that she committed suicide in her previous life because she felt unwanted, hence how the bird's influence changed her outlook and gave her forgiveness.) but Reki didn’t have anyone. This was hard to portray in the AMV without words. One of the reasons for the second segment aswell was to try and setup the importance of “The Bird”.
The video Tells the story of the anime for the most part, but in MY interpretation of it. There are some somewhat vague details in the anime that isn’t fully explained, that lets you come up with what they mean on your own. This video is my interpretation of the story of Reki and how Rakka is the only one who can save her. Hence I used a few scenes slightly out of context of what they originally meant in the anime to represent what I wanted to tell in this video.
Techncial details:
Visual:
Haibane renmei has some pretty footage, but a little on the soft side. After many attempts at trying to make it sharper, I ended up settling on the softer look, since It looked better that way to me. Much of the video has a soft blurry and glowy feel to it, this was achieved by many overlays and various techniques at bluring. It also slowed my export to a halt and is one of the reasons for the insane amount of hours spent on this video. The compression was difficult to get looking good on Xvid, with all the soft and dark footage, (dark colors in particular Xvid/divx has a hard time with) and after countless exports at different settings, I settled with this one. The plus side to all the blurriness and dark footage is that the file size is only 68 megs for a 6 min 32 sec video.
The mpeg2 is much more beautiful but way to big to distribute.
Audio:
Although you probably won't be able to tell, the audio is sliced up in a lot of areas, since I wanted to all 3 songs are shorter versions than their original was. The third "Main Sequence" In particular is cut down from 5 minutes to just over 3 minutes, with about 5 join points throughout the song, I even used a symbol crash sound I found online to hide a particularly trooublesome spot, near the end when the young reki holding back Rakka "breaks" after Reki calls out to Raka to save her. Adobe Audition was used to do the sound mixing and slicing. The thunder and Rain sound effects were taken from the Evanessence Eternal Track, inbetween the first and second segment of the song where there is just rain and thunder and no music.
Timming:
There are also many MANY little minute attention to detail timings in this video. Every fade, every scene change, every blur, and many more little details are all timed precisely to some part of the song, as well as many onscreen things in the footage itself, like when Reki kicked away the name tag box. A lot of footage was speed up or slowed down to match the pace of the song. Pretty much like the first one, I timed as much of the song as I could to the footage, but unlike the first one, it is much more subtle. I went all out on this video as far as perfecting the timing and editing. I hope it shows. (This applies mostly just to the third (main) segment of the video)
Superimposing:
From 0:53- 1:10
People who have seen the series would probably notice this, but The rain and lightning scene was entirely created by me to match the sounds and mood of the song. I used various Masks and brightness/contrast to selectively show the Thunder in parts of the screen to make it realistic. I also used it to show rain only in the window, and the reflections of the rain on the table and other objects. The rain itself was made in Photoshop as 12 different images in frames of the drops falling from the top of the screen to the bottom for 3 layers of rain, and animated in premiere with directional blur, rotation, and on 3 different layers to make it more realistic. Its a pretty complicated sequence and I think it came out nice :)
The name tags were translated and imposed onto the original footage to look cleaner, thanks for Maverick’s suggestion. One thing I didn't notice until after I rewatched Haibane Renmei AFTER I had already uploaded the video to local... I accidentally used Rakka's name box as Rekis in the second segment when the Renmei guy gives her it. It still works for the purpose of the video, but those that can read the kanji on it will see Rakka's name instead of Reki's. :oops:
The scene at the very end of the middle segment at 05:10ish is also a superimpose in Reki’s Eye.
I also superimposed the black feathers on Reki at the begining segment when showing her wings as a sortof foreshadowing.
The text:
This text effect was tricky, It involved various layers, with random movement, aswell as masks with random line scrawls whatever you wanna call em, with random blurrs. Kinda hard to describe, but it had a lot of filter processing that also slowed down export on those sections. My aim was to try and match the somewhat hectic and chaotic dark mood of the video with the text animations.
Technical Details:
Software Used: Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop CS, Virtual DubMOD 1.5, AVISynth 2.5, AMVApp 2.0, Xvid 1.0
Video Format: Xvid at Qualtizer 2 CQ single pass, Bframes enabled at Quantizer 2 640x362 res, 16:9 aspect ratio.
Audio Format: 224 Kbps Lame mp3
This video is Aftereffects free. All custom effects were created using a combination of Photoshop Images and Default Effect filters in Premiere Pro. A lot of masking was used in this video.
Special Thanks to:
MadBunny: For continous Beta Testing and many good suggestions regarding the story development.
SnhKnives: Early beta testing and coments.
Maverick: Beta testing and final tweaking suggestions
Kalium: My resident Spell checker ;p And various other tweak suggestions here and there.
AbsoluteDestiny: For the excellent new guides, and some suggestions to try on cleaning up the encoding.
Time Spent on the video: Well Over 200+ hours, didn't keep accurate count. Alot of that time was spent in Encoding and cleaning up/fine tuning the video after initial editing was done. Editing lasted a span of about 4 months in stages, though majority of the editing was in the last month.
With all that being said, If you are even still reading all this, I hope you enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it ^^
This is my most technically advanced and ambitious video to date, and pretty much incorporates everything I learned on all my previous videos. Please do leave an opinion and tell me what you thought of all my work and effort ^^
Since the local link is now up and proven stable, I have removed the Direct link to conserve my hosts limited bandwith. The Local version is the same video.
Contests/Awards: Best Dramatic at Anime Central 2005.
Notice:
Due to the copyright issue involving Evanessence and this Site that occured recently, all links to this video has been removed. Thus I reuploaded it to my own site here, at AuN studios, so you can grab it from there. Thanks and sorry for the inconvinience.
I am making this link available at least during the VCAs so people can check out the video to consider for the Categories this year. Particularly Drama, Character profile, and instrumental.
You can read about the issue at hand here:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=60314
Opinions (35)
- Orig
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- Synch
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- Re-View
- Overall
- 9.78
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- 9.44
- 9.67
- 9.81
- 8.56
- 9.41
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