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Information

• Member: Ashyukun
• Studio: Electric Leech Productions
• Title: Otaku Anthem
• Premiered: 2005-10-29
• Categories:
  • Comedy
  • Romance
• Song:
  • American Hi-Fi Geeks get the Girls
• Anime:
  • World of Narue
• Participation:
  • SugoiCon 2005, SugoiCon AMV Contest 2005 (2005-10-28)
  • Anime USA 2005, Anime USA 2005 (2005-11-18)
• Comments:
  "Otaku Anthem" was my entry into the AUSA AMV contest, intended to be paired along with a new trailer- but unfortunately my move into the house saw me without enough time to get the trailer done. It premiered to a somewhat smaller audience at Sugoicon.
  
  Unlike pretty much all of the AMVs I did this year, Otaku Anthem was one that wasn't planned out months ahead of time. Well, at least halfway. When I packed up the limited selection of DVDs I brought out with me to Kentucky when I came out here, World of Narue was among them- I had just finished watching it, had really enjoyed it, and was itching to come up with an idea to make using it- but didn't have a song in mind at the time. So, since it was only 3 DVDs and I had the room in my binder, I brought it along. Narue was a show that I ended up with largely by chance- the 'trial' DVD for it (with a $10 coupon if I bought the whole thing) was an honorable mention prize I won at last year's ACen, and I then picked up the box set (it's a half-length TV show) for like $20 in one of Deep Discount DVD's 20% off sales, bringing the total cost for it to about $10. And it's a really good show to boot.
  
  Six months or so later, I'm sitting at my computer toying with something with iTunes Radio running in the background (this is a great way to find new songs) set to one of the streams when American Hi-Fi's "Geeks get the Girls" comes on- and I immediately stopped what I was doing and listened to the song, switching over to iTunes and writing down the group and song name. I ordered the CD from half.com, and later that week had the album, and was then totally convinced that this was what I wanted to use for making a Narue video. It works quite well IMO, even if you don't know anything about the characters- but I think it works even better for those (very few I'd imagine) who have seen Narue.
  
  The video ended up being fairly simply edited, with the only real effects work coming into play when I did my usual 'bug' in the video (once again the perfect place presented itself for me to not only insert my usual 'bug' but also to use footage from another AMV in the process...)- the rest of the video is pretty much just straight cuts and fades. Though there were a decent number of 'flash fades'. The first run through had even more- the original intro had 'flash fades' on all of the piano hits. The hardest part to come up with was probably the section between where Kazuto gets dragged off by Narue ('What took you so long?') and the 'morning after' section. Ironically this ended up being one of my favorite parts of the finished video.
  
  My only real grip about this video: I hate CPM's encoding. Filtering and prepping the footage for this video was a royal pain in the ass. Which is quite sad considering it's a fairly new show and the original source had to look pretty good. That aside, it was a lot of fun, and hopefully will inspire a few people to check out Narue. I have to give my thanks to AtomX for his help with beta-viewing the video and keeping after me until I got the lip-sync tightened up.
  
  This is the first video that I'm releasing right off the bat in XviD and not MPEG. These days XviD/DivX have become prevalent enough and computers overall powerful enough that it shouldn't be a problem- and I can definitely use the space savings on my hosting. If for some reason your computer will not play the XviD AVI file with your current player, I would suggest downloading and trying VLC- it's pretty much the most painless way to handle it without having to worry about installing codecs and the likes.