main menu

• Members Main Page
• Search for AMVs
• Forum
• How-To Guides
• Site FAQ
• About us
• Login

Information

• Member: Bakadeshi
• Studio: AuN Studios
• Title: Mai-Reason Director's Cut
• Premiered: 2005-05-24
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Spiritfall My Reason
• Anime:
  • My HiME
• Comments: See Original video for original comments. This is a "Director's Cut" version, with some changes I wanted to make afterwards, added effects, and some adjustments to the story to make it flow a little better. Higher resolution distribution file also.
  
  The story:
  Read the first description for a detailed explanation on the concept of the video, but here I'll give a condensed In a Nutshell picture of the plot. Mai finds 3 reasons to fight and live, to protect those Reasons for her existance... and looses each one one at a time. The video is somewhat linear in how it shows her 3 reasons, Takumi is first, then he dies, Mikoto is the second one, she kills mikoto when she finds out she killed Takumi, so reason #2 is gone now. She notices reason #3 at this point, being Tate, at first she doesn't want to get close to him for fear that she will loose him also, but in the end she falls in love with him anyway, then looses him. At the end shes all alone. Depressing angsty story isn't it? ;p I attempt to bring out this aspect of the anime as the main one. The anime actually isn't quite all this dark all the time.
  
  A little Character Background:
  I'll be mentioning some characters in the changelog below, so I'll explain who is who here for those that havn;t seen the series.
  
  Mai - Main character of the series. The girl with orange hair and all the fire powers.
  
  Takumi - Mai's little brother. hes the "Reason" That dies first. Boy with brown short hair and always in the hospital. Has a heart condition.
  
  Mikoto - Pretty much like a little sister to Mai. Mai saves her in the begining of the series, and she latches on to Mai after that. Reason #2. She kills Takumi in this video, and Mai goes postal on her and ends up killing her. (note this is a little diferent than the way it happened in the series. Its the story for this video. )
  
  Tate - The boy that shows up mostly towards the end of the video. The one Mai loves. Reason #3. Guy with short spiky orange hair. He dies, but I don't show how he dies in the video. I just wanted it to be known that He left her. The reason isn't important in this case. (and it wouldve been too much information to explain in this video anyway ;p)
  
  -------------------------------------------------------------
  Changes from original:
  
  0:00-0:14 Added custom noise and texture effects along with partial black and white filter for a better looking effect than the original for this flashback/memory sequence.
  
  0:32~ - tweaked shaky camera effect in this section so it blends in better (not so obvious when it stops)
  
  0:42 - Adjusted fade so its not as sharp change from the last scene.
  
  0:58 - custom noise effect on the edges created using the crystalize effect and blur, and partial black and white /blurred footage to create this soft flashback scene effect.
  
  01:20 - same effect as 0:58
  
  01:32 - same effect here aswell in addition to the darkened edges that was in the original one.
  
  01:50 - slightly blurred the footage here for a softer feel. (blured scene is overlayed over normal scene with about half opacity to create this soft look)
  
  02:12 - 02:17 New scenes, atmosphere fits better than the original scenes used. I left the guy in there in hopes that people who havn't scene the series would assume its Tate. I probably should have did some superimposing here though and maybe change his hair color or something. awell. Assume its Tate ;p
  
  02:18- 2:22 same scenes as original, but overlayed over the fireplace scene with a faded circle mask.
  
  02:30 - Here I created a scene using scenes from 2 diferent episodes, to make it look like a flashback of Mikoto physically attacking Takumi. In the Anime, she doesn't physically kill Takumi directly, so Its dificult to show the way it happened in the anime. I decided to superimpose some scenes together to make it appear that she does infact kill him directly, so Mai will have a reason to go postal on her in the next scene. Unfortunately, there wasn't alot of good scenes of takumi flying or getting knocked back or anything, so I had to settle with the best one I could find, the episode where he just colapses from not taking his medicine in Episode 2. The shadow that moves infront of him as he collapses is Mikoto. Its hard to see her, but it was the only scene that seemed to work well here.
  
  02:56 - Audio join here has been improved... after finding about 120 ways to make it sound worse than it did before, I finally found an edit that sounded a bit better than the old one ;p (Curse this hard to edit song... well I think its more the position I edited it than the songs fault directly)
  
  03:03 - 03:12 - Got carried away again with the blur and black and white ontop of color, and texture, and blurred crystalize edges... Basically I added effects to make it look more like flashbacks than before ;p As you can see, I like to create original effects using a combination of the textbook effects found in Premiere and Photoshop.
  Also added a blur out on the fade out to the explosion.
  
  03:35 - This part can be a bit confusing, because Mikoto was supposed to be killed in the past explosion. The scenes of her that appear again in this segment are supposed to just be images of her flashing in her head as she continues to go postal with angst. ;p I changed the scenes with mikoto to black and white to try and help distinguish this better.
  They are not flashbacks, just images flashing in her head. Like emotions as shes thinking about her.
  
  03:39ish - theres some flashbacks that happen here, with Tate, Takumi, and Mikoto, these have the same effect I used for the other flashbacks to distinguish them from the main video now.
  
  04:19 - flashbacks here changed to use same effect as other flashbacks in the video.
  
  
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Special thanks to the following people for comments and suggestions that lead to the positive changes in this video:
  
  Madbunny
  Godix
  Coffee54
  Silvermoon
  knowname
  
  - And everyone who commented on the vid in the original anouncement thread. Thanks guys ^^
  
  
  Downloads
  Local link has the highquality 640x362 version. Please get this one if you have broadband and can play the bigger resolution fine. Not only does it save my bandwith, but its a better looking encode aswell.
  
  indirect link is a smaller resolution (512x288) for those that have slower connections and/or slower PCs that can't handle the bigger res file.