Information
- Member: Cybermat
- Title: Don't Think that We're Not Trying
- Premiered: 1994-07-09
- Categories:
-
Song:
- Men At Work It's a Mistake
- Anime:
-
Comments:
My first (completed) AMV. It was made on my roommate Bill\'s pair of Mitsubishi U-57 VCRs before he succeeded in killing them with tape trading a few (short) years later.
The U-57s were a great pair of decks, with Flying Erase Heads (FEH), Video-Only Insert Edit capability, and synced preroll with the other deck (although not very precise on the edits a lot of the time). Alas, their like (feature-laden midrange consumer VCRs) is not to be found in the world today.
Can\'t remember now exactly how many hours it took to assemble, but it was worked on off and on over the course several months during 1993-94 in about four weekends of work.
Structurally, this video is nothing to write home about, as it is damn near completely linear and the song is complete and unaltered. The footage illustrates the lyrics (or the lyrics narrate the footage, take your pick). Cuts are roughly in sync with the lyrics, and may seem slow to people who are expecting intense beat-matching with the attendent visual transitions every couple of frames. What can I say? \"The times were.\"
It may be entertaining for AMV makers who are fans of the original Dominion Tank Police to look for the small number of clips (or sequences of clips) that do *not* conform to the sequence of the original OAV. This wasn\'t deliberate on my part, or sloth either. It just worked out best that way in the end.
The concept behind this AMV was that the refrain of song epitomizes the misadventures of the Tank Police for me. The concept of Tank Police always struck me as a great laugh, but not the sort of thing that you would ever want to see in real life, as they are forever destroying everything in sight -- accidentally and otherwise -- while chasing down Buaku and his gang. The song is originally about nuclear brinksmanship, but the Tank Police\'s brand of devastation is on a much more comprehensible scale.
Even though this AMV was made on a cheap cuts-only system with zero special effects, I tried to incorporate as many dissolves, fades, and irises as possible from the original OAV footage to give it a little flash. There were even a couple of places where I was able to edit out the middle of a clip to make it fit the timing I wanted (ahh, the joys of editing animation footage). Now that I have better equipment, I\'d like to remaster this someday with better footage, and clean up the edits.
This video was screened in Otakon 1994\'s AMV Contest as a non-competing staff entry. One of my fondest memories of that con was some time after the contest when I learned that someone said that they really liked the \"It\'s a Mistake\" video and wanted to vote for it, even though it was non-competing.