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Information

• Member: SarahtheBoring
• Studio: Ultraviolet Light Productions
• Title: Project REM Sleep: The Great Beyond
• Premiered: 2005-03-26
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
  • Romance
• Song:
  • REM The Great Beyond
• Anime:
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena (TV)
• Comments: This is a little snippet of Project REM Sleep. I'm very proud of it (sad, but true), so I want to list it by itself. I'm kind of an idiot like that.
  
  So this song. And this series. I had actually wanted to do a full-length Utena-centered AMV with this song for quite some time, along with an accompanying AMV about Anthy with "Falls to Climb," but I kept putting it off. Too ambitious. Too easily messed up. Too much repetition in the lyrics; how many times could I really work with "I'm pushing an elephant up the stairs" without getting ridiculous?
  
  
  I hadn't joined a multi-editor project in a long time; I joined AniMix and didn't do very well, and this after flunking out of another MEP. I'm way too lazy and/or downbeat to mix well with the usual MEP thing, although I do like the change of pace involved in doing a very short project. (Oh, let's face it, I have no attention span.)
  
  It was late one night when I read a call for editors for an REM multi-editor project, and naturally, being short on judgment at 2 a.m., I signed myself up. Even though I had just finished another video literally days before and really wasn't ready to work on another one. I usually have to take a few weeks off after a project or I get burned out. But here I was, wiping Azumanga Daioh off my drive and replacing it with Utena, in the first days of 2005.
  
  It's cheating, probably, to take an idea you already had and work it into an MEP track. And doubly so when the fact that it is an MEP track solves the biggest problem you had with the full-length song. The song as used in the REM Sleep mix is only about a minute and a half long. Therefore, no million choruses. No problem. Yes.
  
  ---
  
  This took me about a week to make, two weeks at the outside. Sad but true. I worked on it obsessively for that time, though. Knowing that it was an MEP and it was, more scarily, one of the last tracks in the project, I wanted to make it pretty - not necessarily flashy, since that's not my style, but pretty. Stylish. Graceful. I thought it suited the song. And whether or not it succeeded, that's the aim.
  
  Really there's just one "effect" here, and that's transparency. Lots of it. Actually, I had to learn a few types of transparency I hadn't bothered to work with previously, and some of the shots are more complicated than they look (Anthy closing her eyes is actually a matte and a split-screen, don't even ask, and that shot where Utena is walking toward the archways? Hell). But it was overall a lot of fun to work with.
  
  The theme, as it was for the original concept, is "aspiration." That's what the song suggested to me. In the series, the far-off ultimate goal is represented by the castle in the air, and so that makes several appearances here. The rest is trying to establish flow and lyric sync, along the same general theme.
  
  ---
  
  The mix is the REM Sleep mix by Crazy_Tetsuo, as it appeared in the full project - so you do get a bit of "The One I Love" at the beginning and a bit of "Nightswimming" at the end. I know. You'll survive.
  
  The date listed is the release date for REM Sleep; this track was finished late in January 2005, but I obviously couldn't consider it "released" until the whole project was done.
  
  And finally - this explanation is about ten times longer than the video - I want to thank everyone who watched the betas while this was being made; for such a short piece there were a lot of them, and I appreciate the support.
  
  And of course, thanks to the REM Sleep team. It was fun.