Video Information

Information

  • Member: seasons
  • Title: Sinked Together
  • Premiered: 2023-04-08
  • Categories:
  • Song:
    • Fountains of Wayne Sink to the Bottom
  • Anime:
  • Comments: This AMV was my submission to the 2023 RICE AMV contest. Thanks to my fellow editors for the comments left on Kollaborate and in chat. I hate receiving thoughtful feedback on a video and then NOT making changes according to viewers' suggestions or impressions, but this was one of those videos that was just kind of... well, it was what it was and, everything taken into consideration, I couldn't really imagine any productive way to improve it on the whole or address certain overarching concerns with it without completely tearing it down and starting from scratch. So here it is in a 99% unaltered form from the version submitted to the contest.

    Changes for this final version: I did swap out one clip for a brand new one, corrected the timing of two or three clips just a bit and tried my best to hide some very brief lip flap that, due to the nature of the clip and some of the visual elements in it, simply could not be fixed by the usual means. These changes will be invisible to pretty much everyone who ever watched it back in February of this year, but I hope they improve the experience at least on a subconscious level.

    I'm a little torn on how satisfied I am with this one. I strived to achieve a certain sense of flow that has eluded me in the past and these clips offered tons of opportunities to finally capture it. The end result is still kind of stiff in a way that I can't quite explain and when I watch it, I'm kind of struck by the fact that my perception of what makes a "good AMV" hasn't really evolved much in the past ten years or more. Maybe you have to have a certain dedication to your craft to avoid falling into this trap? I wouldn't say I'm lazy but I'm absolutely stuck in my ways.

    There's a dark humor to this song that I really love and was hoping to capture and build on in this AMV. To a certain extent, I think I sort of did this but at the same time, I realize that I severely underestimated the potential for some of these scenes to be viscerally upsetting to some viewers, and looking back I'm a little baffled that this never fully registered with me until long after I'd finished editing. Perhaps toying around with the idea of a super-common phobia--one that many people have for extremely understandable reasons--so casually might get in the way of your supposedly "fun" AMV actually connecting with a big audience? Who could have guessed! I didn't want this video to be ALL about drowning, in fact I think those kind of clips constitute a minority of what's actually here, but maybe it's no surprise that those leave the strongest impression on viewers.

    On the whole, this was fun to make because I got to flex my mental index of these kind of scenes and fit them together like a big puzzle. Or at least that was how I felt about it for a while until the editing process reached a point where I was turning to the Internet and other AMVs to round out my suddenly-not quite comprehensive stockpile of water-themed clips. So at that point in the project I stopped feeling like an AMV editor and more like some data-scraping bot mindlessly crawling the Internet in search of some idealized scenes that I'd hopefully recognize the moment I saw them. I know that describes a lot of editors' process and I don't want to suggest that there's nothing creative or "real" in that method. It's just that I enjoyed the process of making this most when I was doing anything other than that part of it, which ended up taking up more of the time here than I otherwise had envisioned. Early in the process I easily found a few Very Good clips from a few different anime that I'd never seen before, which was rewarding and fun in a "crate-digging" kind of way, if you know what I mean. But the last two or three little parts I struggled to fill in here were... okay, that was not fun!

    After submitting this AMV to BentoVid's RICE contest, I sat on it for a while in no particular rush to make the minor fixes that I wanted to make to it. That was until this morning when I stumbled across the now three year-old news that the writer of this song, Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger (who I assume is singing backup vocals here), passed away from COVID-19 complications in the earliest weeks of the pandemic. So for the entire time that I had been working on this video, not to mention the entire time of me rediscovering this band's music, which is not limited to "Stacey's Mom" (also written by Schlesinger), I hadn't realized that the band was now defunct for the worst possible reason.

    Thanks to Nashironeko for his helpful work in upscaling the Blue Drop footage for me.

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Downloads

  • Link Format Bitrate Codec Duration Filesize Link Check Information Comments
  • Direct AVI (.avi)           Last Checked: 2023-04-08 23:31:12 200 OK YouTube
  • Local MP4 7262/128 H.264/aac 3:15 172 MiB
    Local File [seasons] Sinked Together.mp4
    Duration 195.238000 seconds
    Video Track 7262.401 kb/s H.264 [h264]
    1920 x 1080 @ 23.98 fps
    Audio Track aac @ 127.547 kbps
    48 kHz, stereophonic sound