From Utada Hikaru’s album, Heart Station, it’s track 2, which is aptly named “Heart Station”.

So a couple of months back, I had a visitor to my site who was nice enough to provide me with the Hishoku no Sora piano version that he produced from a transcribed MIDI source. And it sounds pretty accurate to the one played on the anime. Enjoy.

(Sorry, comments have been disabled on this post as comments have become pushy, violent, and aggressive, which I have duly deleted. Thanks for ruining it for everyone else.)

Here’s a quick music video I made based off of Bleach episode 58 as all the clips are taken from there and are all in sequential order. Anyway, I just wanted to go for a shortened down version of the initial battle between Ichigo and Byakuya.

Due to sudden popularity with this song, here’s a streaming version of the song for you all.

Here’s the song used in the opening sequence of Sola
Opening Sequence Video

And here’s where you can download the full song.
Colorless Wind by Aira Yuki (Full Song)

For those who don’t know, this song is the opening song for the anime Sola, which seems to be gaining a lot of popularity and momentum from anime viewers. Me included. I don’t have lyrics or a translation yet, but I’ll find some eventually. In the meantime, enjoy the song.

I finally found some lyrics for this song. Here are two sources:

Well, I’m just going to assume the Kanji is the same throughout. Only the translations vary.

First, here’s the Kanji:

hane ga shiroku hikari mabushiku tonde yuku
kokoro dake nosete hoshii no ni

tsumetai te wo nobasu todokanai… shitteru
dakedo ima furetai kimi ni

natsukashii kaze ni wa ano koro no fune
maboroshi ga omoide wo miseta

‘wasurenai’ dareka no koe ga setsunaku hibiku
hajimaru yokan ni furuete
‘wasuretai’ negau jibun ga wakaranai
matte iru yurarenagara yume hitotsu wo

toozakaru hito nara nani mo tsuge wa shinai
kanashimi wa watashi dake no mono

sakasama no kimochi ga sawaideru… shitteta
mune kogasu hitosuji no honoo

kioku ni nagasarete musubarenu mama
nando demo meguru sadame nara

‘aimashou’ itoshiki hibi no tsuzuki ga mitai
memai ni tomadou mamonaku
‘aeru deshou?’ hikareau no wa tsumi desu ka
tomadoi ga sasou toki no hazama e yuku

‘wasurenai’ dareka no koe ga setsunaku hibiku
hajimaru yokan ni furuete
‘wasuretai’ negau jibun ga wakaranai
matte iru kodoku no naka
‘aimashou’ itoshiki hibi no tsuzuki ga kowai
memai ni tomadou futari ga
‘aeru deshou?’ hikareau no wa tsumi desu ka
tomadoi mo keshite shimau yume hitotsu de

Here’s the translation from Anime Lyrics:

The feathers gleam in white and are flying dazzlingly
Though only my heart wants to ride them

I held out my cold hand I know I can’t reach you…
But I want to touch you now

The boat that day is inside the nostalgic wind
Its illusion showed me memories

“I won’t forget” said somebody’s voice, painfully resonating
And trembling inside the signs of a beginning
“I want to forget” I wish, but I don’t know myself anymore
I’m waiting while being shaken for my one dream

Distant people aren’t able to tell anything
I made sadness my own

I knew it, this upturned feeling is getting louder…
My heart burns an earnest flame

Flown in memory, but still unbound with each other
If this is our revolving, repeating destiny

“Let’s meet” I want our precious days to continue
But soon I am perplexed in this dizziness
“We can, can’t we?” Is mutual attraction such a sin?
This pause adds to the length of time of my answer*

“I won’t forget” said somebody’s voice, painfully resonating
And trembling inside the signs of a beginning
“I want to forget” I wish, but I don’t know myself anymore
I’m waiting inside this loneliness
“Let’s meet” I’m afraid of our precious days to continue
Both of us are perplexed in this dizziness
“We can, can’t we?” Is mutual attraction such a sin?
This pause is also inside my one dream that has vanished

And here’s one from some other site:

Dazzlingly, the gleaming white feathers fly away,
Though I had wanted to set just my heart on them.

Knowing they won’t reach you, I stretched out my cold hands –
Because I want to touch you now.

A boat from back then, in that nostalgic wind –
An illusion showed me my memories.

“I won’t forget.” A voice filled with pain rang out,
Wavering in the premonition that had just begun to unfold.
“I want to forget.” Though I had wished for that, I no longer know myself.
I’ll be waiting for that one dream, while trembling.

If it’s to people who’re going far away, I’m not telling anything –
For this sadness belongs only to me.

Knowing my reversed feelings are fermenting,
My heart is scorched by a determined flame.

If it is our recurring destiny to be
Swept around in our memories, unable to be together, so be it.

“Let’s meet.” I want to see our precious days continue,
But just as I begin to hesitate in my dizziness, you asked,
“We can, can’t we?” Is it a sin that we should be attracted to each other?
In confusion, I couldn’t give you a reply.
　
　
“I won’t forget.” A voice filled with pain rang out,
Wavering in the premonition that had just begun to unfold.
“I want to forget.” I had wished for that, but I no longer know myself.
I’ll be waiting, in this loneliness.
“Let’s meet.” Afraid of what would follow those precious days,
We hesitated in our dizziness.
“We can, can’t we?” Is it a sin that we should be attracted to each other?
Along with that one dream of mine, confusion has vanished.

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.

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.
—-
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.

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 is one of my favorite songs. Translated, it means Cherish These Moments. It’s such a shame that I don’t know who the vocalist is for this song. No matter where I search, the credits point to Perfect Blue, which is just the name of the movie that this song is from. I found this song while listening to internet radio on winamp over 4 years ago, but it has such a timeless feel to it.

I like this song because it’s relaxing plus I’ve seen the movie Perfect Blue. But this post isn’t about the movie. It’s about the song. And it’s a nice song in my opinion. Plus it took quite a bit of effort to find it considering there’s no singer credited to this song.