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Information

• Member: SarahtheBoring
• Studio: Ultraviolet Light Productions
• Title: The Clouded Heart
• Premiered: 2004-04-08
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Romance
• Song:
  • PM Dawn Looking Through Patient Eyes
• Anime:
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena (TV)
• Comments: Summary: A remixing of the triangle between Jury, Ruka, and Shiori - two fencers and the girl between them. Another sweet-and-simple one, kind of retro, really.
  
  Warnings: Some mild spoilers for the eps. 7/17/28/29 subplot. Probably nothing that anyone's going to care about. Oh, also, if you do the math this *is* about two girls and a guy, and not the way you're thinking (ya perv). So if the suggestion of a f/f relationship freaks you out, best to steer clear. (No, there's no omghottaxion either.)
  
  
  Concept:
  I had been working on this one off and on, on the back burner, for *months.* Eventually I told myself to just get to the point and finish it off, even if it isn't groundbreaking stuff. I enjoyed watching the test exports, so I just aimed to make something that I liked to watch.
  
  My aim in this one was to go with the flow and try to tell a story - a different story than what actually happens in the series, as it turns out. I like the challenge in that, trying to put together a narrative without leaning on the preexisting plot. Anyway, I've always liked this subplot, and although some key elements are changed in this AMV (Shiori comes off *very* well, very differently than her persona in the series), I quite enjoyed working with it.
  
  And yes, this is an "Utena" AMV without a trace of Utena, or Anthy, or the main plot at all.
  
  As I was saying, my aim was to tell a story, and once the intro is over and the first verse starts, pretty much everything aims to keep the narrative rolling. Hopefully this will come through. If not, I have some explaining to do...
  
  
  Song:
  "Looking Through Patient Eyes" is from PM Dawn's The Bliss Album...?, which has been a staple of my CD collection for many many years now. Relaxing stuff.
  
  It's probably the most well-known song I've used so far, which might be risky, but I liked the mood it set - even if the lyrics are a loose match at best. I waffled back and forth over the song choice for a long time, and it took me ages to decide on a song in the first place, but eventually, as I said, I had to tell myself to suck it up and get it done.
  
  Ultimately it serves to set a mood and pace, and give a little support to the story here and there.
  
  
  Technical:
  Very. Very. Simple. I was tempted at first to get fancier, adding something along with the "clicks" in the "Father Figure" sample, but eventually I just decided to let it go as it was. So this is technically uber-simple. Cuts, fades, transparencies, and a couple of horizontal flips to keep some constructed "scenes" consistent. The rules say I have to check "digital effects" if there's *anything* other than cross-dissolves, and this one does have the flips, some overlays, and one lipsync masking.
  
  On the topic of lipsync: Breaking AMV law, I left a lot of talking in this video. Why? I thought it looked weird in this particular video to have people staring silently at each other. It revolves around interpersonal drama, so it seemed most effective to me to give the impression that a conversation was going on. It's my intention to make the gist of the conversation obvious by the characters' reactions, even if the dialogue isn't there - for example, you know the characters are having a fight, even if you can't hear them. This isn't a very well advised tactic, I'm sure, but it's what I thought was best in this particular case.
  
  
  In closing, this is just a simple little thing that I thought was kind of sweet, and dealt with a corner of the series that not many AMVs cover. (I have seen a few on Jury and Shiori, but not so much the Whispers/Azure subplot with Ruka.)
  
  Later Note: After watching some older videos that I had on file, I realized that I'd accidentally ripped off the ending shot from another Jury/Shiori video, Respect, which I'd seen while RGU was still in fansubs. Maybe it was subliminal, maybe it's just the most fitting shot for the end of a Jury/Shiori video ("great minds think alike"), but I wanted to give credit to the vid that did it before I did. ^_^;
  
  Thanks for watching. Enjoy.