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Information

• Member: CrackTheSky
• Title: Aberration
• Premiered: 2018-09-25
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Other
  • Serious
• Song:
  • James Blake The Wilhelm Scream
• Anime:
  • Mushishi: The Next Chapter (TV)
• Comments: !!!WARNING!!! This video gets extremely flashy near the end. Maybe don't watch it in a dark room? Or do, whatever floats your boat.
  
  I don't know how long exactly I've had the idea for this video, but I think I got it around when I first saw the official music video for this song, which was probably shortly after James Blake released his first album...so I'm guessing it would have been around 2011 or 2012. I really, really liked the aesthetic of the video, and wanted to try something similar, but didn't feel I could pull it off and also didn't have the right anime for it. So I let it simmer for a while.
  
  Fast forward a couple years. I had clipped scenes from Mushishi Zoku Shou, intending to make an entirely different video than this one. I played around with that idea for a day or two and pretty quickly got bored of it, but never deleted the clips off of my HDD as I was banking on either coming around to the idea at a later date or making something else with them. They stayed on my HDD for the next three or four years, and I didn't give much thought to them, but I didn't forget about them either.
  
  Moving forward again into August 2018, I was determined to make at least two videos for NDK (which I did, here and here), as well as a video for that year's AWA Pro contest, a contest I love entering whenever I have the opportunity. The problem was that I had spent all of my time on those two NDK videos, and only had a week left to crank something out for AWA. I had no time to create clips, so my only real recourse was to make a Mushishi video -- luckily, a while back I had connected the dots and realized that my original idea for this song would work really well with Mushishi...the question was, how intense was the effects work going to be? I spent all my free time that week editing this, and luckily finished it in time.
  
  The impetus behind this video was as much to emulate the song's video as it was to try something completely new, not only for myself but for AMVs in general. That's kind of a tall order this day and age, but I haven't seen another AMV that has quite this look or feel. Effects in AMVs tend to be really...uh, same-y nowadays. On top of that, the bar for effects use is probably higher than it's ever been, so making a video with heavy FX usage requires a certain amount of technical skill that I simply don't have.
  
  I've been convinced for a while that there's still a way to creatively combine basic stock effects together to make something visually striking and unique, and this video is my attempt to do just that. I made this video using only Sony Vegas (no After Effects; I haven't even had that program installed on my computer in years). It took a lot of layers (more than I've used in probably like 10 years), a lot of masking and Gaussian blurs and color work and opacity stuff, but nothing that you couldn't find in any basic NLE.
  
  The result is a video that closely and deliberately mimics the official video, but if you've never seen that, that probably isn't helpful. It's meant to be very disorienting. You're not supposed to be able to "tell" what's going on, so to speak -- it's very impressionistic and ambiguous. Hopefully you get a sense that there are things happening and "characters", but figuring out a narrative is supposed to be impossible. Yes, it's a lot of faces and hands and stuff like that, but the idea behind this is much more about atmosphere than chronology. It's very open to interpretation, and feel free to project your own emotions onto it.
  
  This probably won't be everyone's cup of tea, either because of the song itself or because of the way it's edited. For those of you who do like this though...thanks for sticking around!
  
  Technical notes
  Edited entirely in Sony Vegas 8, as per usual. Total time on this was probably...20-25 hours or so. This one was exhausting, but so much fun to see come together.