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Information

• Member: CrackTheSky
• Title: Safely, Safely
• Premiered: 2015-10-03
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Other
  • Serious
  • Horror
• Song:
  • Purity Ring Belispeak
• Anime:
  • Mononoke (TV)
• Participation:
  • Anime Weekend Atlanta 21, The Masters (2015-09-26)
• Comments: This was a last-minute project I put together to enter into AWA's 2015 Master's contest. There wasn't a whole lot in the way of specific motivation to get this done...I definitely enjoyed Mononoke, and the art style is so unique and weird that I thought I could make a serviceable horror video out of it, so I chose Purity Ring's song "Belispeak" (due to its dark/creepy factor) and went to work.
  
  I'm not even going to try and pretend there's anything approaching a story or purpose to this, and I'd encourage you not to look too deeply. It's just supposed to be weird and unsettling, not unlike the anime itself. Part of the reason I used this approach was due to the nature of the anime. It's episodic, kind of -- there are five story arcs through the anime, each of which is entirely unconnected with the others, and each having its own distinct visual presentation and color scheme. As such, it's really hard to make an AMV that feels consistent while still making use of footage from more than one story arc, and I definitely wanted to use as much as I could. So I decided to forgo any kind of story and just throw scenes onto the timeline and see what stuck. Luckily, the song allowed for this, as the lyrics are completely nonsensical and stream-of-conscious.
  
  I quickly decided I don't like this manner of editing. This wasn't a particularly fun video to put together, and it was difficult for me. My videos lately have all had some kind of story to them, and dropping an overarching story or theme meant stepping way outside my comfort zone and into unfamiliar territory. I don't like it out here, so don't expect many more videos like this from me.
  
  That said, I'm actually very fond of the end result. It's a weird video, it's vaguely disturbing, and even if I didn't like the process I feel like I achieved what I set out to do. I hope you like it too!
  
  Technical notes:
  All Sony Vegas 8, as usual. Total editing time was probably in the range of 12-15 hours, plus another hour or two-ish to fix things after it was shown at AWA.
  
  Interesting thing, I really didn't think I was going to finish this in time to submit to Master's. Originally there was no way -- I was about 2/3 done and then had to leave for NDK for the weekend. I had accepted by that point that this was not going to be a con video, as the deadline was the Sunday of that weekend. Although I was getting back in town on Sunday, it was after the 4:00 PM CST deadline so, whatever.
  
  BUT, I got back and found out that the deadline had been extended to the end of the next day, which just happened to be Labor Day, so I didn't have to work. Awesome! So I rushed to get it done, but it was still taking too long...with an hour left to export, encode, and upload the video I still had the intro and outro portions of the song to edit. I literally threw things on the timeline for these portions and did the bare minimum (i.e. about 10-15 minutes each of editing to make them look not totally crappy), exported the video (there were no effects so it only took like five minutes), encoded it at comparably lower quality than I usually do to save time, and then uploaded it with ten minutes left. Unfortunately my Internet connection sucks so it took more than ten minutes to upload, by which time the deadline had passed and the upload site rejected it. However, thanks to the Great Merciful Jingoro I was able to re-upload and all was good!
  
  The version available on the .org has had those intro and outro portions tweaked so that there's more actual editing than on the version shown at Master's, along with several other tweaks throughout the video to just basically make it better.
  
  One final thing -- the visual quality. It's not great, but a huge part of that is thanks to the way the show was animated. As you may notice, the video has a kind of "paper mache" quality to it. This is the way it was animated, and this actually posed significant problems in filtering the video. I tend to do very little of this anyway because I'm lazy, but with this anime in particular I didn't want to do any heavy filtering because I risked screwing up the whole thing because of that effect the animators overlaid. So, if the video quality is subpar in your eyes...just keep all that in mind :P