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Information

• Member: Bakadeshi
• Studio: AuN Studios
• Title: 舞-Reason (Mai-Reason)
• Premiered: 2005-05-13
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Spiritfall My Reason
• Anime:
  • My HiME
• Participation:
  • AnimeNEXT 2005 AMV Contest, AnimeNEXT 2005 AMV Contest (2005-06-17)
• Comments: A Director's Cut version of this video has been released, addressing many problems with the original. Better story flow, better effects, better audio editing, and bigger resolution. I recomend getting it instead, especially if the story was hard to follow in this one with all the flashbacks.
  
  
  A story about a girl who must find her reason for existence...
  A Story about Love,  Betrayal, and Heartbreak...
  Will she be able to protect the ones she loves?
  
  Directed by: Bakadeshi
  
  The Concept:
  
  (Warning: Spoiler Alert for those that have not seen Mai-hime. You should watch the video before reading the description. This will tell me if I was successful in telling my story if you can understand it without the description's help.)
  
  Mai-HiME Is an Action Drama series about girls who attend a unified school from Primary through Senior High called Fuka Gakuen. The school itself is shrowded in mystery, with the strange occurances of mosters apearing, of wich the only counter measures are girls called HiMEs (Highly-advanced Materializing Equipment). The show explores many emotions such as Love, Hate, Anger, and our tendency to deny whats most important to us out of fear of loosing it. And it does this quite well I must say, which is the reason I made this video to it.
  
  The video centers on the main character, Mai Tokiha, who after being a normal highschool girl looking out for her brother for so long is suddenly submerged into the world and fate of the HiMEs and forced to fight.
  
  The concept is fairly simple, Mai searches for her reason for fighting, living, and what she really wants for herself, as her thoughts are jumbled and confused between being needed by Her brother Takumi, the girl she saves, Makoto, and realizing her feelings for the boy Tate, In addition to the fate of the Himes. She Fights to protect her "reasons", though they keep disappearing one by one. In the end she is left "all alone." The story and characters are very close to that of the anime, although the video may make you think certain things happened certain ways that didn't quite happen that way. I want you to think that for the video. In otherwords, I changed the sequence of events slightly for the purpose of this video.
  
  There are spoilers to a degree for those that haven't seen Mai-hime and wish to see it, I show a few VERY important scenes, but I don't use any of the scenes from the ending or last episode. View with discression.
  
  Editing/Technical:
  
  Variable paced editing with effects designed to enhance the mood, no blatant in your face effects that interrupt the mood of the piece. The piece has action, Drama, and Romantic elements with appropriate editing for the appropriate part of the video. Its kind of like Angel's Redemption editing style in that its fast in some parts, but slower in the emotional moody parts more like Swallow. I did no superimposing in this video, like I usually do, however I did allot of subtle and prominent beat synching to the point to where probably 90% of every hit in the song has something synched to it, more subtle in the slower emotional parts, faster and more adrenaline packed in the action parts, all with story telling as the main priority. I hope it shows. I also used motion effects on the parts where Kagatsuchi comes out, to help accentuate the instrumentals in the song for those parts. As always Opinions are always welcome and will be read and responded to, weather you liked the video or not.
  
  I've received comments from some that the mood synch isn't always coherent, some of this is probably purposefull, in that I choose to tell the story in a somewhat hecktic way similar to the approach used in Angel's Redemption. There are however a few scenes I feel I shouldve used another scene for, just a few minor sections that go by quick, but wouldve been a better Lyric/mood synch for the song. I may change these when I do the remaster.
  
  Some Technical issues:
  The video was edited with lower quality source files than I would normally work with, My first time working with fansubs, and I've got to say I now have a higher respect for those that get fansubs to look good. It is alot of work ;p Needless to say, I wouldn;t be releaseing this if I couldn;t get it to look at least above average, but I will be remastering this for sure as soon as the DVDs come out domestically. Assuming that they do.
  The song is another issue, I cannot find a CD anywhere at all, the band seems to be a local unlabeled band in california and perhaps never released any CDs for sale, so I had to edit this to an Mp3. Quality is good, but not as good as I would have liked it to be. If I do happen to find a CD, I will remaster it for that also.
  
  Audio Editing: Yes the Audio was edited to make it shorter and get rid of some uneeded verses. And yes I am aware that some of the edits are noticable, particularly if you have heard the song before. A few people who havn't heard the song say they can't notice the edits, but the one at 3:07 in particular actually does stand out alot to me. It was a tricky edit due to the nature of the song, and after playing with it for a while, felt this was the better of the 2 evils and used it this way. The problem is in the way the voice goes over the instrumentals, isn't uniform with the rest of the song. so It sounds a bit like his voice cuts off, even though the instrument part joins nicely. Thats all I can think of now for techncial comments.
  
  Edited on an Athlon 64 3000+ with 1024MB ram, Using Adobe Premiere and Gimp 2.5.
  Backup machine was a Celeron 1.0ghz with 256 MB ram Laptop. Editing time was approximately 30 hours in the span of 3 weeks.
  
  
  Special thanks to Songbird for introducing me to this series, and much help in beta testing this video.
  
  Also Special thanks for the following people for Beta testing help and suggestions: Kalium, Koopiskeva, SnhKnives, Maverick.
  
  Please Enjoy, and let me know what you think ^^
  
  
  Contests: Judges award at Anime Next 2005.