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Information

• Member: inthesto
• Studio: Video Game Music Freaks
• Title: The Ocean Above Us
• Premiered: 2005-08-09
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Serious
  • Romance
  • Sentimental
  • Instrumental
• Song:
  • Hiroko Kokubu Eternity ~ Memories of Light and Waves ~
• Anime:
  • Air (TV)
• Participation:
  • Anime Weekend Atlanta 11, AWA 2005 AMV *EXPOSITION* (2005-09-23)
• Comments: Comments restored because this is the best video I have made, and ever will make. If you don't like it, fuck you. If you do like it, fuck you anyway:
  
  Yeah, so I finally did it.
  
  I made another video.
  
  Okay, so I've made three videos between this and my last one, but those were all shorts mostly for afternoon-long amusement. This is my first completed project since November. I can't really say how long I've been working on it, since I've had a vague inkling of the concept since I started watching Air. I think my video description for With Clasped Hands alluded to this video, but I'm too lazy to check that right now (yes, I know I had to copy the URL from my own profile to get that URL; I demand you shut up right now). I didn't actually start working on this video until mid-June when I finally finished high school, so I can at least say this video has been in the works for about two months.
  
  In all honesty, I don't know what made me choose the audio for this AMV. I always did like the original song used, as it's the only part of the FFX-2 soundtrack I really liked, and I thought the piano rendition was beautiful (Side note: This is actually the same composition used in my video Lovewaves; just a totally different arrangement. See if you can find the similar theme). What I obviously did not consider was the fact that it was over six minutes long. Sometimes I should consider the pain of my future self when making decisions, but I think the length is a good thing in the end. Air is a story not so easily compressed, and I found myself needing just a little bit more time to fully tell the story. I abridged what I could, and I think I'm pleased with the results.
  
  The premise behind the video is fairly simple. It's a re-telling of the relationship between Yukito and Misuzu, with the gradual "softening" of Yukito's heart to the point where he would give up his life to let her live. I'm a little worried that this AMV will come off as a pedophilic relationship, as Yukito is visibly older than Misuzu and, well...it gets pretty dramatic at the end.
  
  As far as the story goes, I tried to make sure that watching Air wasn't necessary to understand the video. Yukito (the dude) accidentally runs into a girl (Misuzu) with whom he eventually falls in love, blah blah. I tried to use some of the symbols from the anime in my video effectively (the crow, the doll), but I'm not sure how they turned out. I don't think they're terribly important to the video as anything more than "recurring non-human characters". Oh, and by the way, this video contains Air spoilers like you'd never believe.
  
  As for the editing aspect, I think it's necessary for me to say that I drew a lot of inspiration from downwithpants' Tomoe in the Moonlight. In no way did I intend on ripping off the editing style, but I used some of the same ideas. Synching was overall the easiest thing in the world, as the waveform for a piano solo is really nice to follow, but it was scene selection that was a bitch. In an intense drama video, you have to make sure that every facial expression and character interaction is just right, or else something gets lost. I like to think that I put a lot of effort into picking the right cuts, but I do remember that many of those cuts were also made late at night.
  
  At this point, I should say there's an amount of lip flap in this video. While I did mask some of the more awkward places, I left a lot of it under the following reasoning: PEOPLE DO NOT DEVELOP RELATIONSHIPS WITH THEIR MOUTHS SHUT. Seriously, is anyone going to believe this stoic asshole fell in love with a girl by being entirely silent around her the whole time?
  
  Like I did say in my notes for Of Song and Sword (not hyperlinked here because the video isn't all that great), I resolved at the beginning of this year to make better videos. I think this video is my next step up. I understand those should be heavy words to say, but I poured a lot of time and a lot of tears (yes, I actually got teary editing this video, go ahead and call me a pussy) into this video. Numerous times, I was on the verge of trashing the project out of frustration, but I'm glad I saw this thing through to the end.
  
  Speaking of frustration, it seriously took me five exports and six encodes to get this video right. The Air raws run at 120 fps, which confused the shit out of Premiere while exporting, and multiple times I got rogue frames when they weren't there in my project preview. Then, I had to encode this thing many times in order to get it to fit in the 100 MB limit (the video is 6:21), all the while shrinking from 856x480 to 640x360. I think the quality in this encode is just fine, but I have a higher quality one lying around if you're strange enough to want it.
  
  All that said, sit back and enjoy the video.
  
  Also, if you can't figure out how to play the video, you can view the YouTube copy here.