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Information

• Member: inthesto
• Studio: Video Game Music Freaks
• Title: Amnesis
• Premiered: 2005-11-28
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Disturbed Remember
• Anime:
  • Bleach
• Comments: Comments restored with appropriate edits, because this video is also awesome:
  
  Somebody on the forums once said that a video is like a joke: If it needs to be explained, it probably sucks. According to that person, I think I've just made the worst AMV ever. Oh well, tough shit. That's how I work. Prepare for extremely long drabble ahead, useful only if you want insight into the inner workings of my mind and maybe to understand what I'm trying to do with the AMV some porn inbetween.
  
  The origins of this video trace all the way back to when I mae an op exchange with Kaiba57's Back Then. I felt is was a fairly good video in its own right, but what really captured me was the song. Disturbed had never struck me as a particularly interesting band; I had always lumped them under "generic nu-metal." After hearing this song, I checked out their albums in-depth, only to find that this was the only song I liked between all three albums anyway. Regardless, this one song was a real anamoly to me: Interesting guitar work, vocals that didn't rip my ears to pieces, and most importantly, lyrics that actually felt like they had depth. The lyrics were somewhat vague, and thankfully so, but I could sense there was a shrouded story within it: The narrator forgot something important about his past in exchange for something else. The song is about the narrator's struggle to keep the forgotten memory surpressed, before it can break out and "conquer me." Of course, the consequences of "remembering" and whatnot are not fully expressed, but it's a song. Things like that stay hidden, just because that's how we like it.
  
  I did some further "research" into the matter, and began downloading just about every video using the song. What I discovered was that there was really only one other video that was really good, LightningCountX's Remember. While both Remember and Back Then are great videos in my view, I also kind of felt like they didn't chew on the lyrics enough. (Note that I am not trying to insult the videos; these are just my personal feelings on the videos in relation to the song). I thought that with lyrics so tangible, there needed to be constant interaction with them. Thus, my deseri to edit a video with this song was born.
  
  At this point, I'm going to diverge on a completely wild tangent that will connect back to my previous rambling by the end of this paragraph. At my high school, the English department offers a semester-long course in philosophy. Being that it is high school and all, the class isn't terribly sophisticated or deep, but still does a job of teaching the basics of philosophy at a high school level. While studying Socrates, the teacher introduced a term, "amnesis." He used it to describe a process to which Socrates subscribed: To forget all the "false junk" one learned in life in order to "remember" the innate truth with which the individual is born. Google and Wikipedia exposed the fact that this was never a real socratic term, and is at best a hand-crafted amalgam of Greek roots. Despite this, I found the word far too fitting for the song and the video, as by the time I thought up this title, I was about half-way through the video.
  
  Oh right, about the video. I almost forgot about that. While I was reading the Bleach manga, I felt that I wanted to do a character profile for Renji, because that's naturally what all shounen anime fans want to do with their favorite shounen anime characters. For some reason, I felt like the song Remember by Disturbed could fit him. The reasoning is probably transparent to anybody who has seen Bleach, but non-viewers will probably find themselves totally lost. That is just as well, since I played with and reinterpreted the narrative in my head anyways.
  
  I tried to convey several narrative changes that I felt were key to the video, most important of all is Renji's death. Yes, he's my favorite character, but I also love drama, and death is dramatic. What can I say?
  
  There are also a number of minor editing nuances I threw into the video, but I don't feel like going over them now. They should be easy to catch anyway, and if they're not, then I suppose that gives this video some replay value.
  
  In closing, I have to give out thanks to IcyCloud, Kitsuner, and godix for beta-testing the video, Decoy for teaching me how to imitate some of his cheesy effects, and Pwolf for creating an overlay which I never intended to use, but had to due to the fact that I deleted my own copy far too early.
  
  UPDATE: Turns out that "amnesis" is not entirely made up. However, it is actually titled "anamnesis" and is more of a Platonic, not Socratic, concept. However, since Phade is apparently a complete pack rat, I can't change the title; not that I would with the option.
  
  If you can't play MP4s, you can view the YouTube version here.