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Information

• Member: AbsoluteDestiny
• Studio: Zettai Unmei Anime
• Title: Arima Shinjikun
• Premiered: 2002-09-28
• Categories:
  • Other
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Spandau Ballet To Cut a Long Story Short
• Anime:
  • His and Her Circumstances (Kare Kano)
  • Love and Pop
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion (End of Evangelion)
• Participation:
  • AWA Professional Contest, AWA Professional Contest (2002-09-27)
• Comments: Welcome to pretentiousness.
  
  This video has a very simple concept: Arima Souchiro from Kare Kano and Shinji Ikari from Eva are the same person.
  
  OK, they're not but, in terms of psychological trauma, they suffer from many of the same maladies. This video is about the warped psychosis of the two characters - the majority of the footage being taken from episodes 25 and 26 of eva (and some End of Eva scenes) and episode 24 of Kare Kano.
  
  Actually, there is a third unspoken character in this music video - that of the director Hideaki Anno whose imagery, style and psychological concepts pervade this video. It's as much about him as it is about the two main characters.
  
  The entire video is done in the style of Anno's post-nadia work: i.e. Neon Genesis Evangelion, End of Evangelion, Kare Kano and Love and Pop (possibly also Celebration Day although I haven't seen it). As a result, the majority of this video required footage and stills to be composited together to the extent that over 90% of the frames in this video do not appear in any of the sources. Almost the entire video is composited together except the scenes that did not require any further stylistic additions. Furthermore, many images had to be drawn by myself as appropriate poses, and so on, were not in existence. See technical notes for more info.
  
  OK, there's lots of strange images in this video... and you might be wondering 'So what does it all mean?' Well, I don't think it's really my place to say. What I can do is point out the salient images in the anime that I have also used in this video - i.e. to combine the psychological imagery of both works. These images include but are not limited to:
  
  - Steel and concrete: A common image in these anime and in Anno's work. Stills of concrete and metal structures are taken from both anime. You cant really miss them ^_^
  
  - Traffic lights and telegraph poles: Another recurring image, the former used more frequently in Kare Kano but both appearing in both shows.
  
  - The tall 8-piece window: This is an Arima image and memory from his childhood.
  
  - The pyramid sandcastle: This is a shinji image from his vision during the complimentation scene in End of Evangelion. Possibly related to a real childhood event but more than likely pure psychological imagery. The pyramid is similar to Nerv headquaters but also seem to represent a vagina... don't ask me, I'm not Freud.
  
  - The cracked/masked face and the face of faces: Psychological reflection of self for each character respecively - I think
  
  - Live action footage in motion (often on tracks): A stylistic device in all his later works. I'm not going to state what I think it represents but it is almost always used in the context of character profiles, dreams and emotional turmoil. The stuff used in the video is actually from Anno's live action movie Love and Pop which was made directly after Kare Kano. Actually some of it was made at the same time and the room that you see in the video is the same on that is featured in the end credits of episode 24 of Kare Kano.
  
  
  Wow, wasn't that pretentious. All this for just a crummy music video.
  
  The song is by a band I dont particularly like, nor is it really that great a song but it realy worked for the style of the video and the lyrics are appropriate as follows:
  
  Soldier is turning
  seen through white light
  war upon war
  heat upon heat
  
  To cut a long story short
  I lost my mind
  
  Sitting on a park bench
  years away from fighting
  
  To cut a long story short
  I lost my mind
  
  Standing in the dark
  oh I was waiting for man to come
  I am beautiful and clean
  and so very very young
  to be standing in the street
  to be taken by someone
  
  Questions questions
  give me no answers
  that's all they ever give me
  questions questions
  oh look at the strange boy
  he finds it hard existing
  
  To cut a long story short
  I lost my mind.
  
  
  Purists will notice that I cut out a line in the first verse and have removed some of the instrumental sections. This video only needs to be 3 minutes, that's the only justification I need ^_^
  
  
  Also a special thank you to:
  
  Tom Ford - for lending me Kare Kano DVD1 when I couldn't afford to buy it.
  Justin Emerson - for scanning a shot of shinji from the Evangelion manga used in the "mirror" scene.
  EK - for getting me started with Photoshop in the first place.
  
  
  Technical Notes:
  
  Sources:
  
  DVD Footage from - Neon Genesis Evangelion DVD8 (US release), End of Evangleion DVD (japanese release), Kare Kano DVD1 (US release), Kare Kano DVD5 (japanese release), Love and Pop (japanese release)
  
  Cusom Images drawn by me using Photoshop 5. There are many character poses and scenes that were drawn by hand in this amv. Misato standing beside shinji in the window scene was drawn by me, as was arima sitting at the desk in the spotlight scene. There were numerous other still compositions and alterations in this video which used a total of 214 hand composed images. They're not always brilliant (I'm no artist) but I hope they are convincing.
  
  Custom animation (morphs) created in WinMorph (see below). 23 used in total.
  
  Music - Spandau Ballet "To Cut a Long Story Short", actually taken from the UK new-romantics compilaiton album 'Music for Heroes' but originally released on the album Journeys to Glory.
  
  In total the music video took about 2 weeks to make, give or take a few days. The project was interrupted by the DDR video but I managed to get it out just in time for the competition it is entered into. At the moment, I don't really think the video is 100% perfect by any means and this is mainly because of it being rushed, but there's nothing I can do about that now that's its premiered. It's 95% perfect, or more I think but there are some stills I'd like to improve upon etc.
  
  
  Equipment:
  
  Adobe Premiere 6 - main editing suite
  Adobe Photoshop 5 - used for still compositions
  WinMorph 2.01 - used for all morphing scenes. Available from http://www.debugmode.com/winmorph/
  Smartripper - for DVD vob file extraction
  ExactAudioCopy for audio extraction
  SoundForge 5.0 - for a slight effect in the audio ^_^
  DVD2AVI 1.6 for frameserving into...
  AVIsynth106
  Virtualdub 1.8.10 for final encoding
  LAME 1.89 for mp3 stream
  Xvid 27/06/2002 build for distribution encode, TMPGenc 2.55 for mpeg2 copy.
  
  
  Quality: The video quality isn't as clean as I'd like but this is mainly because the original sources are far from crisp. Also, my photoshopping skills are very rough at times so things arent as pretty as they could be. Also there is lots of black in this video, and red, and those colours don't compress very well. The distro version will be a divx variant done entirely in quantizer 2 so it's as good looking as it can be, but the actual source isnt good looking enough really.
  
  The audio quality is very good though, as it is encoded at 192kbps mp3.
  
  
  AWARDS:
  
  Best Artistic Endeavour - AWA 8 Professional Contest (2002)
  Best Tech - AWA 8 Professional Contest (2002)