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Information

• Members: VegettoEX, MeriC
• Title: Fake
• Premiered: 2005-09-23
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
  • Serious
• Song:
  • Dashboard Confessional The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most
• Anime:
  • His and Her Circumstances (Kare Kano)
• Participation:
  • Anime Weekend Atlanta 11, AWA 2005 AMV *PRO* CONTEST (2005-09-23)
  • Anime Weekend Atlanta 11, Anime Weekend Atlanta 11 (2005-09-23)
  • Onna! Music Video Contest, Onna! Music Video Contest (2005-10-08)
• Comments: * NOMINATED: Best Sentimental (AWA XI Pro)
  * NOMINATED: Best Character Profile (AWA XI Pro)
  * NOMINATED: Best Drama (AWA XI Pro)
  * NOMINATED: Best Overall (AWA XI Pro)
  
  CONCEPT:
  This video was actually my original idea for AWA Pro X (2004), but for some reason or another, we just didn't go through with it. Instead, we decided to work on Meri's idea for Pro that year (Sex, Lies, & Roses). This idea remained in the back of my head for the entire year, though. I definitely wanted to get around to it, but just didn't.
  
  We were undecided on an idea for AWA Pro XI (2005) until very late into the year. We had a few ideas kicking around, but either didn't have the right source footage, didn't have the right audio, or both. Taking a look back on the video ideas, this one stuck out, so we went with it! Since the idea was comparatively old, I don't quite remember how it came to me. It was either in a car or on the way to class (back when I had not yet graduated). The lyrics in Dashboard songs tell such fantastic and relatively literal stories, that coming up with two anime characters to fit the male/female characters in the song was almost no work at all.
  
  
  THE STORY:
  Hopefully, the story in this video is extremely straight-forward and obvious. As mentioned, the song does a great job of being extremely clear with its presentation of two characters and their own internal faults and insecurities. In essence, that somewhat makes us extremely lazy... the video nearly edited itself! Arima and Miyazawa were just such perfect fits, especially considering the gender-opposites the song speaks of.
  
  The first verse speaks of a male character putting up a great front, but completely insecure on the inside. While he's been able to deal with it up until now, it's catching up with him. At this point, he's not fooling himself (or anyone else, for that matter) anymore, and he needs to deal with his baggage.
  
  The second verse speaks of a female character in nearly the same situation. She's out there in the open public looking fantastic, but on the inside, she's dealing with the exact same problems. She, too, can no longer fool herself or anyone else, and must also deal with her baggage.
  
  Finally, with the third verse, the two characters and their problems truly reach the level where it's interfering with the front they're trying to keep up. It falls. And it doesn't just fall, it completely and utterly collapses.
  
  
  MAKING THE VIDEO:
  As we like to do with most of our videos, the video starts off with a "strong" opening and ending. The opening is actually a collage of manga scans that shift back and forth between the "fake" and "real" versions of the characters, while the ending is a collage of the fallen characters and their reasons-for-being-fake.
  
  The (amazingly terrible) footage was cleaned up with a combination of filters thanks to both AbsoluteDestiny and Scintilla. I think it could still use a little more work, but it took enough processing as it was!
  
  Interesting tidbits about the video! As noted, the opening montage is all constructed from actual manga scans, as are the two vertical bars of both Arima and Miyazawa, and the anime-turns-to-manga shot of the two characters turning to face each other. The shot of Miyazawa at ~1:24 is indeed taken from one of those multi-take shots where she turns around a few times, spliced to create just a single turn. If you look carefully, you can see where the edit is (though we tried to fudge it as best as possible). At ~1:45 when Miyazawa's face turns black, what we did was take a still-frame of her from the original footage in this scene, and do the face-fade manually with the cut-out. It does it in the original footage, but I believe it is extremely short and dissolves into another scene. We needed it longer for our purposes, so while you can see that the black doesn't perfectly match the "video-black," it works much better for what we needed it for. The scene at ~2:00 was originally a dark orange sky in the footage, but we changed it to a much darker and moodier blue for the extra "creepy" feeling. Throughout the video, there's *tons* of lip-flap cover-ups. There's probably a lot of other minor tweaks & cheats in the video, but I can't remember anything else!
  
  The video was constructed with Adobe Premiere 6.0, Adobe After Effects 5.5, and Adobe Photoshop 7.0.
  
  
  CONCLUSION:
  Not much else to say about the video! It's relatively short, sweet, and easy to digest the narrative flow (we hope!) and overall presentation. Please enjoy!
  
  (And as an added bonus, the DVD that we passed out at AWA XI contains an extra video of Dashboard Confessional playing this song live from the MTV2 Unplugged performance.)
  
  
  LYRICS:
  Buried deep as you can dig inside yourself,
  and covered with a perfect shell.
  Such a charming, beautiful exterior.
  Laced with brilliant smiles and shining eyes.
  Perfect posture, but you're barely scraping by.
  But you're barely scraping by...
  
  This is one time... this is one time,
  that you can't fake it hard enough to please everyone,
  or anyone at all... or anyone at all.
  And the grave that you refuse to leave,
  the refuge that you've built to flee,
  the places that you've come to fear the most.
  It's the place that you have come to fear the most.
  
  Buried deep as you can dig inside yourself,
  and hidden in the public eye.
  Such a stellar monument to loneliness.
  Laced with brilliant smiles and shining eyes.
  Perfect make-up, but you're barely scraping by.
  But you're barely scraping by...
  
  Well this is one time... well this is one time,
  that you can't fake it hard enough to please everyone,
  or anyone at all... or anyone at all.
  And the grave that you refuse to leave,
  the refuge that you've built to flee.
  The places that you've come to fear the most.
  It's the place that you have come to fear the most.
  
  And you can't fake it hard enough to please everyone,
  or anyone at all... or anyone at all.
  And the grave that you refuse to leave,
  the refuge that you've built to flee.
  The places that you've come to fear the most.
  It's the place that you have come to fear the most.
  It's the place that you have come to fear the most.