Sola Opening Sequence

Song: Colorless Wind
Artist: Aira Yuki

So far from all the new anime shows flowing out from Japan, Sola’s opening sequence is the one that has appealed to me the most. It’s a nice song, but it took a while before I considered it a good song. The opening verse of the song was great, but the chorus was not. After hearing it some more, I started to like it in its entirety. So I’ll be waiting for the full song to become available in the next couple of months. In the meantime, I’ll just have to settle for this.

Go here to listen to the full song.
http://www.ninenines.net/ninesblog/index.php/favorites/2007/colorless-wind/

One day, a thought came to me that it would be entertaining to attempt to make a crossover between Melancholy of.. and Ouran considering the two main characters share the same name. Ironically, both shows aired on TV at the same time, making a very entertaining quarter of a year.

Originally, I only had in mind to just rotate between scenes back and forth between the two without much coherency. But that went out the window as I started. Instead I went with scenes that loosely transitioned from one scene to the next. At first I didn’t think I had enough clips to make this project worthwhile, but some how I ended up with 8 minutes worth of content.

Despite the effort, the first half of the video is somewhat slow, but the entertainment value picks up in the second half. I’m just glad the dialogue and the context of the scenes match up well. If they didn’t, I would’ve given up.

Anyway, a summary of the video would be along these lines:
It starts out with Kyon describing how he meets Haruhi, but there’s no real identification to which one is being referred to. Kyon continues to describe her, with more scene rotations. The rest of the video picks up from there and continues the same.

I had a hard time figuring out how to end the video. I had a lot of content that I wanted to add, but as I neared the 8 minute mark, I knew I had to put an end to this. Anymore would be overkill, plus leaving room for more means room for a sequel..

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.

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.

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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.

Here’s the full dance sequence from the ending credits of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The song in the video is Hare Hare Yukai by Hirano Aya.

It’s also streaming for easy viewing. Enjoy.

So here’s another song I’ve dug out of my archives. Again, this is a song I’ve encountered while listening to internet-broadcasted radio. The song as you can tell is called Strangers from the anime Wolf’s Rain and performed by Raj Ramayya. I never watched Wolf’s Rain, but the moment I heard this song, I had to hear it again. There’s just something about it that makes it somewhat of a timeless song. For me anyway. I guess it has something to do with the brass instrument used for the majority of the song’s instrumental sequence. I’m pretty it’s a trumpet, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, it’s a fabulous song and I’m sure a lot of others can relate. The beginning sequence of the song already seems to pull the listener in. I just like how the song eases itself in and slowly picks up as the snare kicks in. The lyrics are quite catchy, while at the same time, there is a lack of a constant chorus. There is a chorus, but it’s rarely used and is merged with the lyrics in a very subtle way, thus making an enjoyable listen throughout.

It’s just unfortunate that it feels like this song is not readily available. Then again, I’m the kind of person who goes out in search of rarities.

This movie teaser is badass. Many people claimed the first movie was horrible, despite the sales at the box office. I can’t say since I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ll just assume it wasn’t Spider-Man good, but probably wasn’t as bad as what I heard about Elektra. So I guess it was at the level of Daredevil and Hulk. Decent. For now though, this second movie looks promising. And Silver Surfer took Human Torch to school. But that’s expected considering the Silver Surfer possesses the Power Cosmic and is practically invincible in comparison to the likes of the Fantastic Four.

Rumors have it that Galactus is slated to make an appearance as well as Doctor Doom. I’m slightly worried as to what Galactus is going to look like. His purple attire with the bucket helmet is just so impractical these days, especially in a live action film.

As for the movie, the Fantastic Four are probably going to find a way to change Silver Surfer’s mind and have him persuade Galactus to spare Earth. Otherwise, Silver Surfer is going to beat the crap out of them because he’s just that damn powerful.