It's a magical world

source: Yuri!!! on Ice
audio: CHVRCHES, "Clearest Blue"
length: 3:54
download: 229MB on Dropbox
summary: Will you meet me more than halfway up?

Premiered at vidukon_cardiff 2017.

tumblr | AO3

Vidding TV shows is so much work. I was cutting this one until about two hours before the deadline, exacerbated by the fact that the Blu-Ray of the last volume came out literally the day before the deadline. I initially used a low quality rip of the creditless ending and was resigned to a different version online than on the con DVD, but then due to some serendipitous technical difficulties, resolved at length by the very patient and excellent con staff, I actually was able to get a file with a high quality rip of the ending into the con--of course it came out less than 24 hours after said deadline. (If I ever get access to Blu-Ray rips, I may remaster it, just because they changed so much for the disc releases.)

As for the vid itself…I had this song in mind since about January. Yuuri and Victor love each other a lot, okay, and they meet each other in the middle, eventually, every time.

Lyrics

Tatsumi. Dir. Eric Khoo (2011).

This movie, which premiered at MoMA and screened at Cannes in 2011, is being released in Japan in November; I had the privilege of seeing it at a press screening this morning. The manga is the story of gekiga legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi, told both through his autobiography Gekiga Hyôryû | A Drifting Life and through some of his most famous gekiga stories. The movie goes beyond the timeframe of A Drifting Life, which ends in the 1960s, and the animation is quite thoughtfully done; although it's not quite like manga brought to life, it does succeed in replicating Tatsumi's style in another medium, and at being attentive to effects like texture, color, depth and sound in bringing the manga to life on film.

Khoo is Singaporean; Tatsumi is Japanese; the animators were Indonesian; it's an international effort to bring to life something that is quite firmly rooted in the Japanese postwar. Although the criticisms of Tatsumi's work can also be leveled at the film--principally, as far as I'm concerned, both the quantity and type of female characters--it's true that unlike the characters of his more famous friend and rival Tezuka Osamu, Tatsumi's characters have interiority, and even when they're ridiculous or terrible, their stories are often quite moving. The animation is moving too. It's a very good film, warts and all, and as an added bonus, it features quite authentic Kansai-ben, which you certainly don't hear everyday.

In some ways, I was actually reminded of the excellent Studio Ghibli AMV Creating Something Beautiful. If you have the chance, both the AMV and the film are well worth watching.

I'm trying (futilely) to clean out my 'posts' folder. A surprising amount of things in there are not actual posts. But here, have some AMV recs with a side of recs for AMVs of the first FMA anime, in honor of the fact that I am going to see the FMA movie on Wednesday. Both of these posts were written in…May.

Better late than effing never! ( 13 AMV recs for various anime )

FMA AMV recs for stultiloquentia

This is the "spaghetti at the wall" approach to AMV recs: basically I raided my download history on the org for everything FMA and 4 or 5 stars. Yes, there is a lot of Nightwish, because that's the flavor I wanted out of most FMA AMVs at the time. Also, most of these are for the first anime. I may be in the minority of thinking that the first FMA anime was a stellar example of how to adapt an in-progress manga and do it well, but I stand by that opinion, as much as the actual Arakawa ending was much better. And unlike FMA:B, the first anime wasn't lead-footed in the beginning.

Contains my questionable college taste, but I did rewatch all of these and still find them acceptable.

( 10 FMA AMV recs )

Actually, a lot of my highest-rated FMA AMVs aren't available any longer. Part of that is because of the Evanescence Affair, which makes me feel old. Of course, now I want to make FMA AMVs.

Still having a fannish yard sale! Anime, manga, and sff movie fandom stuff of various kinds at the link.

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So I saw this AMV on Saturday afternoon and really liked it: 

And then on Saturday night I had a dream inspired by it, and I actually made up a haiku about the dream: 

I dreamt of earthrise
In a gray desert, awake
In the lunar night.

銀の砂漠で、夜、地球の出を見た。

These are not real Japanese-language haiku, but I like this one all the same.

Over and out.

Taking a break from cleaning all the things (and yes, it is ALL the things; I am moving to the opposite coast in three weeks!) to post this--directly inspired by aria's post on the same subject: vids and AMVs that live in my head! This is not an amnesty, but they are being let out for a walk.


( Eight ideas and change )

This is the third and (for the time being) final post discussing AMVs, and AMVs versus vids. First post here, second post (all recs) here.

( More AMV recs )

DaiCon opening animations by Studio Gainax (before they became Gainax)
Gainax made Neon Genesis Evangelion. But before they turned pro, as college students in the 80s, they made these two hand-drawn AMV/OVAs for DaiCon III and DaiCon IV in 1981 and 1983, respectively. The second OVA is more famous; it's choreographed to ELO's "Twilight" (and here I should mention that "DaiCon" means both "big con(vention)" and "radish"; hence the radish in the OVA). For whatever reason, though, in this file the two are reversed, and since they do tell a story, slide forward to 5:51 and then set your player to repeat all to watch them in order. Fans were creators at the beginning, and now, in the persons of people like Shinkai Makoto and AMV editors, they are creators again.


Academic works discussing AMVs

• Milstein, Diana (2007). Case study: Anime music videos. In Jamie Sexton (Ed.), Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Patten, Fred. Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews. Los Angeles: Stonebridge Press, 2004.
• Ito, Mimi. "Amateur Media Production in a Networked Ecology."
  

Some more links via wistfuljane

- VVC: The Anime Vidshow (Disaster) by flummery
- Vividcon 2005 Anime Vidshow - playlist, decisions and reactions by absolutedestiny
- Anime: A Pre-digital History (and Vividcon 2005 Anime Panel Post-mortem) by absolutedestiny 

So I gave were_duck a list of AMV recs for the Vid Party she and damned_colonial are organizing at WisCon (I'm so excited, seriously). And as part of that I watched a lot of AMVs in a very short time span, which I haven't done in forever, and which caused me to say this in reply to lian's post on original versus fan works. And then both of them asked me, more or less, for my thoughts on AMVs versus vids.

Here's were_duck 's question:

I'm getting the sense from the few amvs that I've seen that there are significant differences between vids and amvs, but I don't really have the language to express what that is other than just saying that they come from different subcultures/traditions. Care to share your thoughts on the subject?

So let me repost my reply:

Hmm. Well, I can say a few things, certainly. I guess the first thing is that AMVs have come a long way from their VCR to VHS origins in the late 80s/early 90s, as I imagine vids have (when did vidding become a thing? same time? earlier? later?); the VHS AMVs that were made with access to professional-grade equipment still stand up, but they fit on the low end of the...hmm...technicality spectrum now.

The thing I notice over and over again is that AMVs abhor lipflap. Seriously, if there's one thing that'll get you flamed as an utter noob in AMV circles it's lipflap. Conversely, lip syncing done well is a real ideal of the genre. Whereas, in most vids I've seen the attitude seems to be that lipflap happens and you've just got to deal with it.

The other thing I notice is that, particularly in the last three-four years, AMVs have become feats of video editing and digital clip creation achievement. That one I linked above, "The Running Man", epitomizes this trend--there isn't a single frame of that video that hasn't been digitally retouched in some way, and a good chunk of it is original animation (actually, remind me to dig up the link to this one Death Note AMV I saw last year that has even more original animation). So the end result is this amalgamation of transformed and original content in a transformative practice that ends up somewhere in between the two, in terms of impact, I think. Whereas most vids I've seen are almost wholly using transformed content, and in terms of aim they are usually engaging directly with the source fandom, whether as critique or meta discussion or story-telling. The AMVs that are most popular these days, by contrast, tend to be multi-anime, and tend to have sheer spectacle as their purpose. Even when an AMV uses a single anime and an obviously relevant song (I'm thinking of this Soul Eater AMV here), it tends not to tell a story so much as harp on a trope. Actually, if you take a look at the 2010 Viewers' Choice Awards on animemusicvideos.org, you can see this made clear in the categories: Storytelling and No Effects get their own particular categories because they're the exception, not the rule.

A lot of this is just, I think, fairly deterministic in that it can be chalked up to the nature of the footage that vidders have available to them, respectively. I don't really think it's possible to make a multi-TV fandom dance vid, for example, but damn straight you can make some awesome multi-anime dance AMVs.

Apparently Francesca Coppa wrote an article about AMVs versus vids at one point, but I haven't read it, or so lian says here.

You'll note that my reply doesn't actually say much about the nature of vids, because I am still very much a noob when it comes to vids. I have probably seen two dozen total in my lifetime (sad, I know!)--whereas I personally have made 15 AMVs, and have inchoate plans for a lot more (and I should note, I am very much an old school AMV person, one who thinks primarily in terms of single-anime AMVs and has neither the plans nor the desire to become one of the technical wizards). So what do you think of my thoughts, vidders? Am I terribly wrong and just don't know it? And if I am, then where?   

ETA: Thanks to wistfuljane, have two hilarious posts by thefourthvine addressing this question from a vidder's perspective: Anime Vids for Media Fans, and The AMV Feedback Project: Reaching New Heights of Obsession!.

I should probably actually write up a bit of description for each of those recs I posted, shouldn't I? *sigh* 

ETA 2: Here are my AMV recs, with explanations!

ETA 3: One final related post!

Guy Fawkes Day: not Halloween.

I think it was Game 3 of the World Series when Andy Pettite got a base hit like it was the most normal thing in the world (as a pitcher, any hits he makes are gravy) and the TV commentators made the comment that "there's no justice in hitting." I immediately shouted back at the TV that there's no justice, period. Upon reflection, I don't think I was quite right. There is justice in the world, but it's what we make ourselves, and make sure is done to and for others, and it's only as strong as people are willing to make sure that it is. One of the courts in Philadelphia reads JUSTICE THE GUARDIAN OF LIBERTY on the face of the building. That's true, but it seems to me that the people are, must be, the ultimate guardians of justice. And I hold to my conviction that without justice there can be no peace.

Anyway, have an awesome Darker Than BLACK video (it's done to the V for Vendetta trailer and is awesome). And remember the 5th of November on every other day of the year. Blowing up representative government ≠ justice.

So apparently it is Book Blogger Appreciation Week, as part of which a lot of book bloggers are giving away a lot of free books. Some caught my eye immediately:

• Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan at Bart's Bookshelf
• Various bookish things (including Scrabble tile earrings!) at Bibliofreak, and supporting the Seattle Public Library
• Lynda Barry's What It Is and a graphic novel grab-bag at Boston Bibliophile
• Geektastic, which I reviewed here, at Books, Movies, and Chinese Food
• And Roberto Bolaño's 2666 at Nonsuch Book, which I reviewed here

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Day five of the meme calls for a YouTube clip. If you haven't seen Martha Stewart put Cookie Monster in handcuffs, well, you haven't lived.

Have a few AMV recommendations too, because I can:

• Malificus' "Newspaper Man" (Cowboy Bebop the movie x TV On The Radio, spoilers). It's an unconventional song choice, and really well done, and I like it for that.
• Mouse Potato, "Nightmare" (Neon Genesis Evangelion x A Perfect Circle, spoilers). The best EVA AMV I've seen, hands down.
• Alkampfer81, "Hold Me Now" (Princess Tutu x Nanne Grönvall, spoilers). This is a famous AMV, and deservedly so.