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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.