Video Information

Information

  • Member: ngsilver
  • Studio: Chaotic Bad Raptor
  • Title: 2min15sec (POE S3 Final Non-compete)
  • Premiered: 2013-04-21
  • Categories:
  • Song:
    • ngsilver 2min15sec
  • Anime:
  • Comments: ***WARNING***

    Please do not read any further or watch the Making of/How To video until after you watch the original itself. There are elements of this video, and much of the point of it, that will be spoiled by reading on. I do encourage you to read on and watch the making of video after watching the original video as it will help shed some light on what you have just seen. You have been warned. Reading further WILL ruin the joke/point/pun/fun.

    ***WARNING***





    This video was made as my entry for the finals for Project OrgEditor Season 3. It is a non-competing entry as I was DQ'ed in the 2nd round. If anything characterizes my entries into Org Editor this year is that I wanted to push the boundaries. Not just my own boundaries, but the boundaries of the rules, both POE's and the Org's. There has been much controversy this season with where some sources come from and entry types and what not. So keeping in line with this, I decided as my final entry I would pull the biggest push I could think of, and that's where 2min15sec comes into play.

    To understand the concept of the video we first need to understand the theme I was tasked with. In the words of Code:

    After showing us the power of nature, traveling to the future, experiencing a fairy tale, and showing us your own take on a personal favorite, I think it's time to get to know YOU better. In the game/anime "Shin Megami Tensei: Persona", the protagonists obtain the ability to use "persona", or the ability to summon their inner selves to fight the forces of evil.

    For your final challenge, create an AMV that represents your "persona", or your inner self. Show us who you are as a person, and what we'd expect to find if we ever met you in the real world!

    Now, to me, I'm being asked to do 2 very different things. First, I'm being asked to show my inner self, which would be my true self. Then, I'm being asked to show what someone would expect to see if they were to met me IRL. So, which do we go with? Why not both? Why don't I show who I really am while also showing what people will see? But how do I do that?

    It is true, we all wear masks in our lives. Depending on who we are around we show different sides of us and put on different masks. In a way, everyone is an actor. But rarely do you see who someone really is.

    But for me, it's a little deeper then that. TBH, even I don't really know who I really am. I play so many roles, put on so many personas, wear so many masks, that I'm not really sure I am anything underneath other then a blank slate. So, how to show this? How to portray this?

    It's simple really. Why not show the truth? If I am a blank slate, and if what people see is going to be a mask dependent upon who the other person is, then in a way they will see a mirror of themselves. Or they will see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. So, the experience will be different for each viewer, and different depending on the setting they see the video in. This makes for an interesting challenge then. How to do this, while still staying within the rules of the contest and site?

    Well, taking a note from the famous 4'33" composition, I decided to make my own version calling it 2min15sec. And yes, the idea here then is to make a song of pure silence, where the actual players and instruments in the piece are the noises and sounds from the audience and venue where the video is being viewed. Next, along those lines, doing something similar with the video, by making a video 2min and 15sec long of nothing but blank video.

    Here is where the issue comes into play. In order for a video to be uploaded here on the org the primary source has to come from anime. While I could just easily slap a blank timeline and export, that wouldn't be viable to upload to the org. So what I did was take a bunch of anime I have lying around that I know has segments that fade to black, either between scenes, eye catches, or openings and endings. I then cut clips from the fade out to the fade in and placed them on the timeline. Then, I went in and trimmed each clip to only show the black frames. Now, each source didn't have perfect black levels so I used some level tweaking in order to produce a similar black between each clip. Then, some clips in order to make them longer and not have to repeat often I masked out items that were not black in some scenes. In the end all of this produced a video that is 2 min and 15 sec long of essentially blank or black video. All of this in order to get around the rule that the source has to come from anime.

    Please watch the making of / how to video in order to see how/what I did to each clip.

    In the end, I could have simply ran an avs script the produce a blank clip that lasted that long, but doing that would be against the rules of the site and any contest I send the video to. So, another title for this video could technically be 'How I wasted 10 hours of my life to do something that could have been done in 2 mins just to prove a point.'

    So what was really the point of all of this? Honestly, it was to make a video that completely fit the theme in my eyes, while also pushing the boundaries of what kind of videos I edit (I've never done so much masking and level changes in a video before.) I'm glad I fully completed this entry, as I had not finished my other entries 100% before the deadlines. Of course, the type of video this is kind of lends itself to being completed quicker.

    As with all of the entries I've worked on for POE S3, this one is very much a concept video. But the true concept is knowing what you see and the kind of experience you got out of the video.

    What did you see?
    What did you hear?
    What did you feel?
    What story did your imagination come up with?
    What did you see in me?

Opinions (1)

Downloads

  • Link Format Bitrate Codec Duration Filesize Link Check Information Comments
  • Direct MPEG4 (.mp4)    x264  00:02:45  15.7MB  Last Checked: 2013-04-21 04:33:18 200 OK Making Of or How To
  • Local MP4 0/128 H.264/AAC 2:29 23.3 MiB
    Local File [CB-R]ngsilver_-_2min15sec[h264].mp4
    Duration 149.95 seconds
    Video Track 0 kb/s H.264 [avc1]
    1920 x 1080 @ 23.976 fps
    Audio Track AAC @ 128 kbps
    48 kHz, stereophonic sound