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Information

• Member: Kai Stromler
• Studio: Shin Hatsubai/Kuroi Kenshi
• Title: hammerpoch
• Premiered: 2005-06-05
• Categories:
  • Serious
  • Horror
• Song:
  • Geinoh Yamashirogumi Kaneda
• Anime:
  • Hundred Stories
• Comments: SH101 marks a new beginning of sorts, and yet more of the same. Like SH001, it's made from a single episode of a relatively obscure anime and ends on a gunshot. Unlike SH001, it incorporates underground, somewhat difficult music, has effects, some of them quite extreme, and is dark horror rather than tongue-in-cheek parody. What of these changes are trends will depend on other factors, which very few people will want to go to the trouble of discovering by watching the 99 intervening vids and any subsequent.
  
  I honestly forget where the concept for this one came from. I don't know whether I saw the ep and thought of the song, or heard the song and thought of Requiem, with the full concept (such as it is) falling into place once I got the DVD in question, but it's as close as it's probably going to come to spontaneous autosuggestion. The concept? Watch the video, it's a horror piece and revealing that beforehand will spoil shit.
  
  The effects design may have gotten away from me a little, but to me at least, nearly everything I did to the video looks like it belongs there. The bluescreened-behind motif in the first half was fairly new for me, and I think I handled it competently. Only one or two lipsynch places, but it was intentionally done so the caption is made available.
  
  Shin Hats Self-Grade: A-. The total effect is great, but as always there are a few points of constriction -- and debate as to whether the effects design is always working for the sake of the video rather than its own sake.
  stats: # clips: 136. avg length: 1.43 seconds. total time: 6.5 hours.
  
  About the music:
  Geinoh Yamashirogumi is a deliberately non-professional choral and percussion ensemble founded in Japan in the 1960s which was still active at least as of 1990, when they released the Akira: Symphonic Suite album, containing full versions of the pieces that the group composed, arranged, and performed for the soundtrack to Otomo's groundbreaking film. This track may not be as recognizable as the unforgettable "Dolls' Polyphony", but should definitely be familiar to those who have seen the film more than once.
  
  
  other:
  The title has a double meaning that virtually everyone who can identify it as meaning anything at all will understand. I swear one of these days I'll stop putting exclusive semantic content for German-speakers into videos.