While designing a new banner for my webpage, I started messing around with the image and came out with this cool silhouette image. Just another one of those spur of the moment things.

Kuu and Setsuna are shopping for food when Kuu sees a sale on letter sets. She remembers Kozue’s statement about giving letters back on the bus in the first episode. Over at the campus, Jin praises Kyoshiro for having two Absolute Angels. Jin rambles on about Kuu not having any battle abilities, but tells Kyoshiro that the campus has the necessary resources to do what Mika attempted to do. All this time, Kyoshiro looks frustrated at the situation. Jin looks at the book he picked out and briefly describes the story as a prince who realized his wishes and therefore had no more need for a “sword”.

This is an obvious reference to the situation imposed on Kyoshiro right now. He was adamant about destroying all the Absolute Angels, but now with the ability to do so, he is showing cold feet in having to destroy his own Absolute Angels. In particular, Kuu (which doesn’t make much sense since he never really showed his affection towards her so far).

Back in her room, Kuu doesn’t know what to write to Kyoshiro. She settles instead for designing the letter and using plenty of white. She’s relatively happy with what she’s doing until she has an image of Kyoshiro stabbing her with his sword. Setsuna comes in and gives Kuu a hug. She tells Kuu that Kyoshiro told her to give her a hug. Kuu breaks out in tears. While Kuu is in the shower, Setsuna is cleaning Kuu’s room and sees the card that Kuu made. Setsuna summons out her mech arm and is about to destroy the letter (along with the table), but decides not to do so.

This was a particularly useless scene overall. The only purpose it served was to establish Setsuna’s somewhat jealous thoughts as she had a momentary sign of it when she wanted to destroy the letter.

Kuu calls Kozue for some help, but hangs up when Kozue answers the phone. Elsewhere, Kyoshiro is trying to rationalize with himself what he has to do. But the thought of Kuu makes him snap a string on his violin. Over at Sojiro’s place, he finds out that Kuu’s makes the Absolute Angel count to five, but doesn’t know how to proceed. At Mika’s place, Mika is trying to increase Kaon’s power and thinks back to the past where she’s injured and the nurse there taking care of her had a very strong resemblance to Kaon.

Here we see that Kyoshiro’s plans are not going well. He’s starting to lose his determination and is frustrated by his emotions towards Kuu. Mika on the other hand is making sure that her Angel is the strongest of them all. Her flashback explains why she has two different eye colors and also why she’s so obsessed over Kaon.

That night, Kuu asks Setsuna how to summon the Absolute Angel powers. Setsuna explains that each Angel relies on a desire to do something and uses a reference item to increase that concentration. Setsuna explains she uses her bells while Kaon uses her earrings and Tarurotte uses her feet. Kuu tries to find what her desire is and tries to summon her powers, but fails. Elsewhere, we see the girl whose only appearance was in the first episode up in a tower. A large feather falls to her and she realizes “it” has begun. Kyoshiro returns home and crashes on his bed. Kuu enters his room and takes off all her clothes in front of him. The episode ends with him calling her an idiot and we hear the sound of fabric as if to describe Kyoshiro grabbing a jacket or blanket to cover up Kuu.

The show has raised its shock factor with this ending scene. I think it was to make up for the lack of a Kuu and Setsuna bath scene in this episode. Anyway, it’s pretty apparent that Kyoshiro covers her up with something at the end of the episode. I guess she wanted to find a way to activate her powers and this would be a pretty effective way as she’s going the “Fate/Stay Night” route (if you know what I mean).

I was feeling a resurgence in making some art in Photoshop again so here’s what came about this time. This time I experimented with using Lens Flares combined with the Smudge tool and some colored layers to pull off the effect. Looks nice for something so impromptu.

Seems like everyone’s looking for the Hishoku no Sora piano version, but Google keeps sending people to this post. Well, here’s the Piano Version if you’re interested.

I found this song while hunting around for the piano version of the original song that was played in the Shakugan no Shana anime. Unfortunately, the piano version does not exist, but it doesn’t stop me from looking around anyway on occasion. So instead of finding what I was looking for, I found this remix. I noticed who the remix group was and immediately downloaded it because I know they’re awesome, having heard their God Knows remix which is also available for listening on my site.

Originally I came across this remix while browsing some anime forums which linked me to YouTube to some recording of some guy playing a dance game to the song. I quickly realized it was not the original song, but some kind of remix. I didn’t pursue looking for the song afterward, but came back around a few months later while bored and looked for the song. And here it is.

Download Video

YouTube version (very low quality)

Introduction:

Since I had some free time again, I decided to make another AMV; this time with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. After making the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya music video, I noticed on YouTube that everyone had these really nice quality videos while mine was crap. That’s why I chose to use Advent Children because I have the actual DVD of the film which means I had the highest of qualities to work with. Not only did I have a very good quality source, I was also did research to make quality music videos. Many thanks to animemusicvideos.org for the great tutorials. Now armed with all necessary equipment, I set out to make a great video for everyone to enjoy.

The Song: Battle in the Forgotten City

I decided to be somewhat traditional and went with a track that came with the movie’s soundtrack. I had many choices to choose from in this soundtrack, but some songs felt overused such as “Tatakau Monotachi”, which I personally don’t even like, “One Winged Angel” and “Divinity” and “Divinity II”. I do like the piano version of “Tatakau Monotachi”, I do like “One Winged Angel” and “Divinity II”, but it felt too easy. Plus I would have used “Divinity II” but the Aeris theme insert near the end of the song ruined its chances because it softened the ending of the song instead of making it stronger. So I went with “Battle in the Forgotten City” because it is not used very often. It worked out well as the song has a lot of strong beats that goes well with many of the action scenes in the movie.

The Software: AMVapp, Premiere, and Super©

Well, AMVapp isn’t exactly one piece of software, but rather a collection of multimedia programs and plugins designed to help me make as best a music video as I can. Some of the apps in that bundle include AVIsynth, VirtualDub, DVD Decryptor, a bunch of compressors like XVID and ffdshow, and so forth.

The other program would be Premiere. It’s so much better than Movie Maker from Windows because it allows the export of lossless AVI. And let me tell you, at the end of the export, I ended up with a 2.5GB file for a few minutes of video. It was great because it was lossless and therefore not one bit of quality was lost.

As for Super©, I used this program to resize the video after it was recompressed to more suitable video dimensions and file size. I simply love this program for all that it does. And it’s legitimately free!

Preparation: Getting Everything Ready

Preparation is probably the most un-fun part of making the video. I’m the kind of person that likes to just jump in and start playing before reading the instruction manual. I prefer to figure things out as I go along. However, this time I wanted to do things right so I stayed with the tutorial provided by animemusicvideos.org. I transferred the content from the DVD to my computer, I installed all the necessary programs and plugins and followed all the steps in the tutorial as best as I could.

Instead of my previous process of making a music video in which I had prepared slices of materials to use, this time I just stuck in the entire length of the movie into Premiere and removed all the boring scenes. That was all there was for preparation. Next step, the fun stuff.

Editing: The Fun Stuff

Before I even got started on this music video, I already had a good idea of what I wanted in conjunction with the song used. The beginning of the song built up the momentum while the second half of the song picks up the pace, hypes up the action, and brings the house down. So at the start of the video, I knew I wanted some clips to introduce the characters in steadily to the beat while slipping in some action. Actually, this video is composed of about 90-95% action while the rest of the clips are there because I can’t live without them or they help propel more action.

I spent about 12 hours working on the video and completed it before heading to bed. Most of the way through though, I was frustrated at the length of the song. The only downside of this song was that it was about 3:20 in length. Three minutes is incredibly short when trying to squeeze an action movie’s worth of clips in. I did manage to produce some great content within that time frame, but I didn’t like how I had to leave out so much content. When I woke up the next day, my mission was to extend the song by a lot. I ended up extending the song to 5:16, so that’s more than a 50% increase in length. With the extra room to work with, I added more variety and content, but keeping the original skeleton for key scenes that HAD to be where they had to be.

Distribution: Getting this on the Web

In this day and age, it’s all about accessible media. The best way to do it would be to put it online and start plugging it in various areas of interest. YouTube is the first and main option as it has millions of viewers daily. Too bad it takes them so damn long before my video is actually up for viewing, but nonetheless, it works to getting my creative work out to the public. And then there’s this page. Since I own this place, I have no fear of my content being deleted and I am in control of everything, such as the quality of the video. If you managed to read this far down in my documentation of the making of this video, then you can tell that in comparison to YouTube, the video featured on this page is so much better in every which way. Besides these two outlets, there are the discussion groups and forums to spread the video and hopefully it continues to keep getting passed on from one friend to another. So if you’re reading this, pass this to a friend to see too.

Final Thoughts: What I’ve Learned

Things are much different than the last time. There’s a little more guidance, a little more time, and a whole lot more resources being applied than before. Right now as I’m composing this, I’m still trying to figure out why my video looks like shit when it’s transferred over to YouTube. I have a feeling it’s because the quality being uploaded is too poor. I need to maximize my end’s quality, while staying under their size limits, and pray that it all comes out well. I guess we’ll see how it turns out.

There will be more videos to come, just need the right mixture of inspiration, motivation, duration and animation.

Continuing off from the previous episode, Kuu is still in shock to find out that she is an Absolute Angel. Meanwhile, Setsuna continues to bait Tarurotte to Mika’s temple. Mika cuts open Kuu’s uniform to reveal the Absolute Angel symbol on Kuu’s chest. Kuu has a hard time coping with the sudden knowledge and is awoken by Kozue and Kuu finds herself at school. There are no signs of what Kuu has experienced since Tarurotte attacked the school.

Well before I go into what happens next, I’d like to put in that I’d be very disappointed if things rewound itself like that, because it would mean that I’ve just lost five episodes of my life. However, since the series is at the halfway mark, any strange happenings like this is obviously fake.

Apparently, Kuu, timewise, is back to the point in the first episode where she is in class after failing to hand the invitation letter to the boy on the bus. Kuu breaks down in tears. At lunch, Kuu explains that she’s had a strange dream and starts talking about being happy about having a normal life and being a normal person. Kozue counters Kuu’s belief of being average by pointing out that she is an Absolute Angel. Kyoshiro appears and stabs Kuu with his sword.

I was just to see when reality was going to set in on Kuu. It was longer than expected, but inevitable. Also, this scene would half-explain why in the opening credits Kyoshiro has a sword in Kuu’s chest. I say it’s a half explanation because Kyoshiro intends to destroy all of the Angels so it might be foreshadowing what’s going to happen.

In reality, Kuu is in a trance state trying to make sense of everything while Mika plans to fuse Kaon with Kuu to create an extremely powerful Absolute Angel. Mika retires to her room and shows signs of illness. She starts asking questions, directed to some unknown person. Apparently, however, Mika is venting her frustrations at why Kaon is infatuated with Himiko instead of being infatuated with her instead. Mika vows to make Kaon love her. Later on, as they prepare to fuse the two together, Setsuna comes crashing down, but Setsuna is still no match for Kaon by herself. With the involvement of Tarurotte, the 3 way battle begins.

I have no idea who Mika is talking to while she is in her room. I have a feeling it’s directed to someone who told Mika that Himiko is important and Kaon only operates well with Himiko and no one else. It’s all speculation, but it does look that way.

As the fighting intensifies, Kyoshiro appears and grabs the distraught Kuu. Mika strikes up an argument with Kyoshiro with a gun pointed at him. She fires a shot, but Kyoshiro blocks the bullet with the hilt of his sword. As the building starts to collapse, Kyoshiro and Setsuna make for an escape as Kaon prevents the building from falling on Himiko. Mika at first thought Kaon was protecting her, but realized quickly it was Himiko Kaon was protecting. Kuu asks Kyoshiro and Setsuna if the two knew from the start if she was an Absolute Angel. They wanted to take her to Joto Academy for more studies. Kuu is obviously unhappy with what’s going and breaks down to tears as she is saddened by the fact that she’s not human.

I like how the biggest fight so far in this series was practically not even part of the animation. Sure a few kicks and punches, but overall the scene was saturated with just a bunch of dialogue such as the confrontation between Kyoshiro and Mika. Bleh. The end of the episode finished on a low end, but at least the series is finally starting to pick up the pace.

Not wanting to be outdone by Setsuna, Kuu attempts to bake a cake on her own. While Setsuna asks Kyoshiro if it is necessary to move Kuu to the Joto Academy. They are interrupted by Kuu who makes a commotion downstairs. Setsuna and Kuu end up in the bathroom again as Kuu is dirty from the attempted cooking. Inside, Kuu talks about wanting to impress Kyoshiro with her cooking. However, in the process of their talk, Setsuna is called away by Kyoshiro, or so she says anyway. After the bath, Setsuna talks Kyoshiro into going with her to go shopping for food.

I think I’m starting to be right about the whole bathing thing. The show just likes to make situations that result in Setsuna and Kuu in the bathroom together. Not that I mind, though.

Over at Mika’s temple, Kaon is powered up and ready to re-abduct Kuu after receving energy from getting a kiss from Mika, with a jealous Himiko looks helplessly on. All the other servants are ecstatic at the sight. On Kaon’s way out, she gives Himiko the cold shoulder and leaves without saying a word to her. At the market, Kuu and company finish their food shopping, but Kuu’s attention is pulled towards a jewelry stand. She wants to pick something up for Kyoshiro and spots a white horse. Kyoshiro notices the white horse at the same time and picks it up before Kuu does and attaches it onto Kuu’s uniform. This leaves a horribly jealous and heartbroken look on Setsuna’s face.

This time they’re really making it obvious the feelings Setsuna has on Kyoshiro. Before it would just show a blank stare from Setsuna whenever the potential for being jealous is available. This time it’s a zoomed in, black and white shot with only color in Setsuna’s eyes. If it’s not jealousy or heartbreak, I’d like to hear it.

Afterward, in front of a lake, Kaon appears in front of the three characters and makes quick work of Setsuna. While Kyoshiro has no choice but to help regenerate Setsuna’s mana, Kaon takes the opportunity to abduct Kuu and fly away. Kyoshiro devises a plan to rescue Kuu by having Setsuna lure Tarurotte (catgirl) over to Mika’s place to insight battle between Kaon and Tarurotte while Setsuna rescues Kuu.

In this scene where Setsuna is calling out for Kyoshiro, I don’t see why there’s a hesitation on Kyoshiro. It’s not as if he can stand off against Kaon by himself. Either way, it was going to end up with Kuu getting abducted anyway. Made no sense.

At Mika’s place, Mika introduces herself as Kyoshiro’s sister while also speaking negatively of her brother Kazuya. Kuu questions why Mika is using the Absolute Angel to cause destruction to the world. Mika realizes that Kuu has not realized it herself yet and that Kyoshiro has yet to tell her. Mika instructs Himiko to show Kuu what she’s talking about. Himiko reluctantly grabs Himiko and kisses her. Kuu lights up from a symbol on her chest and finally realizes that she herself is an Absolute Angel.

It was pretty much hinted that Kuu was an Absolute Angel, if not with hidden special powers. What took me by surprise was when Himiko kissed Kuu. They could’ve just told her, but I guess they were trying to be dramatic. That’s how anime are anyway. Actions speak louder than words.

The episode starts out with a scene from the past. Lucia is chasing and shooting down Viruses over rooftops and in the process drops something down to the street below. Still in the past, Sumire is shopping around with Nene. It’s getting late so Sumire heads towards her dormitory. On her way back, she sees something sparkling on the ground. It is the broach that Lucia dropped. Sumire picks it up, but cuts her finger on the pin. She puts her finger in her mouth to stop the blood, but at the moment of contact, she is infused with a strange bodily experience with a momentary vision of Lucia. Suddenly, a Virus blob drops in front of her and is about to attack her when Lucia fires a few rounds from behind and kills the Virus. There are numerous Viruses in the area, so Lucia grabs Sumire and the two run off.

I always thought that there were special circumstances that led to how Sumire ended up the way she did, but from watching this, it looked somewhat convenient and easy as if anyone who poked themselves with the pin on that broach would end up the same way. Of course, I’m sure there’s a deeper meaning to all of it that will unfold later down the road, but from a face value standpoint, it appears too simple of a method to cause so much change. On another note, up to this point, I always thought Viruses were somewhat humanoid. There were a whole lot of blobs in this episode. Either that’s how it really is, or the animation studio was getting lazy. Just toss some eyes on them and move on, eh?

While they are running, Lucia explains to Sumire what the monsters are and that they go after those who can see them. In an alleyway, the broach drops out of Sumire’s uniform pocket and Lucia, for a moment, is relieved that the broach was found. A Virus finds them and is on the attack. Lucia leads the Virus to a graveyard for a better situated fighting area. In the ensuing battle, Lucia accidentally shoots Sumire as the Virus uses her as a shield. Moments later, Sumire gets up. The Virus grabs Sumire, but ends up getting killed by a smiling Sumire.

I pretty much expected somewhere along the way Sumire was going to get shot by one of those antivirus bullets. And on a side note, I find it very clever and cheesy how they call it “antivirus” bullets. It is technically sound, but cheesy. Anyway, we get to see dark Sumire awakening for the first time. Too bad it wasn’t all fancy and stuff. She just gets up and acts like any evil villain standing there with enough confidence to show how invincible and powerful they are.

While dreaming, Sumire is running away from Viruses and is running towards Lucia. Suddenly, Sumire turns evil and turns on Lucia. Then she wakes up in a bed at the Venus Vanguard. Lola explains to Sumire that the place looks like an antique shop, but it is really a virus exterminator shop. Later that night, they explain the situation to Sumire. Lucia asks Sumire to lend her her abilities to fight the Viruses. Sumire is afraid of what’s inside her and doesn’t want to help. Lucia convinces Sumire that they need her. Lola makes a brief comment about the two of them being alike each other, like a person named Lilith.

The dream is a first look as to why the dark Sumire keeps turning on Lucia. The two may be linked somehow since Lucia’s eye starts hurting when dark Sumire awakened. Lucia probably got used to the pain later down the road or this may be an isolated incident. I’m surprised Lucia was able to talk SUmire into joining with the extermination group so easily. And then there’s the reference to Lilith. Who’s that? I don’t know. I’m guessing she’s Lucia mom, but it doesn’t sound right. So it has to be a fallen friend of Lucia’s. Just a guess.

Back in the present day, Sumire is trying to improve her aim with the gun, but to no avail. Upstairs, Lucia grabs the broach and opens it to reveal a picture of her and her mother. Then there is a cut scene of her mother receiving the broach from someone whose face is covered by his hair. Sumire runs off to see Yoshiki at the playground. Observing her from above is a woman with an electric finger… No, really, there were electric-like sparks coming from it.

Here we are introduced to Lucia’s mom and some mysterious guy whose face is covered. I recognize him as one evil looking guy from the opening sequence. Then there’s that girl in the tree watching over Sumire. Seems like there are a number of different characters in this show on different sides of the playing field. But it does look like the bad guys outnumber the good guys by a great deal. I wonder when the episodes are going to start churning out the cliffhangers at the end of each episode.

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Utada Hikaru - Flavor of Life

I found this on YouTube. Pretty nice song from one of my favorite artists. Maybe I’ll provide lyrics and a download of the song later down the line.
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Well, it has been later down the line. Here are the lyrics to this song provided from another site. I didn’t feel like asking for permission to post it so I’m just linking directly back to them — CLICK HERE FOR LYRICS

And here’s the song.