lizardjay

Festivids has now revealed creators, with 160 (!!!) works in the collection. I've barely scratched the surface of what's there, but everything I've seen is great.

First off: I got three gifts! THREE!!! All by ultraviolet_catastrophe, which is incredible of them. Three!!!!!!! I'm the luckiest person alive.

VID: I'm That Queer - Janelle Monae music videos

NOTE: glitchy/stuttery effects, fast cuts in here

Incredible, immersive, stunning! I'm so happy to have seen this. I'm going to be studying this for a while to pick apart how it works.

VID: Les Fleurs - Ponyo

Another absolute joy with a heavy focus on the ocean creatures and environment. It also introduced me to the song, which I love.

[VID] Tea for the Tillerman - Ponyo

More Ponyo! This one is so sparse and quiet and lovely.

As for me, I made two videos.

[Vid] Go Lisa Go - Ponyo

Yes, it's the year of Ponyo. I personally am happy about this! (There's also one more Ponyo vid that wasn't by me or gifted to me, and it too is wonderful).

It's been several years since I've seen the movie, so I rewatched in preparation, and realized..... Lisa drives WILD. It's all I could focus on. And so this vid was born! I then spent several days trying to find a good driving-focused song. Speed Racer won.

Please ignore 1) when she's stomping on the brakes (or the clutch? I forget) but the lyrics imply the gas, and 2) any moments when I flipped the shot and she's on the wrong side of the car. These are the perils of balancing accuracy and flow.

I actually intended to make a second vid for my recipient because this one was so short, but I was struggling for more ideas. Luckily, the other participants picked up the slack and gave them some more gifts <3

[Vid] Dreaming - Short Films Directed By 流云蕊 | Liu Yun Rui

For this, I set out to make a vid for Soulmate Adventure (风灵玉秀), a wuxia donghua that I've really been enjoying. I picked a song and everything. But nothing I put on the timeline looked right, and I wasn't clearly picturing the structure of it.

In looking at

sandalwoodbox's letter, they'd also requested these short films, and I was curious. I'd already poked around

baihe_media a little bit (I feel like I saw it via

vriddy....) and there's an entire post by

douqi linking to each video, with subs for most of them.

That post enabled the whole vid, because I wasn't about to hunt down all these shampoo commercials. (Most of the short films are shampoo commercials. There's also one for facial wipes... and one for powder.... and some unaffiliated ones). If you're at all interested, I recommend checking some of them out! My personal favorites are probably The Caged Canary, A Tale of Yearning, and Women's Script, but genuinely I enjoyed them all. (There's also another one I haven't watched yet!)

Anyway. I watched them all on 1/27 (one week before the collection opened!), started work on the vid on 1/28, and finished on 1/31. I was inspired! I actually ended up using the same song that I'd picked out for Soulmate Adventure.

This is my first time working with live action! I'm not sure what I think about the difference yet, I need a bigger sample size. So far here are my thoughts:

At several points I was really wishing for more long shots to work with. I almost never have this desire for AMVs. Does this come from the fact that (non-action) shots in animation are often longer, to ease the burden of animation, so I have more options for long shots? Is it just the style of these short films? Do I want longer shots because live action is more complex, so I want to lighten the information density? I'm not sure. Of those three options I'm leaning toward the last one. Clarity and efficiency of information is something I work really hard on in AMVs; I normally do story-based AMVs with focused plots so it's really important to be purposeful in that way. (Speaking of that, doing a more 'vibes-based' video was interesting, and a lot of fun. I'm glad that people seemed to find it coherent!)
On the other hand, at many points the complexity of the shots and the motion was a real joy to work with. Such subtle shifts! So many things happening at once! It also used a bunch of pans, zooms, and camera movements in general that were more organically paced/less mechanical than most of the ones in anime. (Well. The anime that I work with. Naruto has many beautiful episodes but I won't say that pans/zooms, beyond certain fight scenes, are really a focus for it.) Sometimes this was frustrating; for example the pan would change speed just a few frames before I wanted to start the next clip, causing a jarring effect of "something happened and I didn't have enough time to understand what it was" when watching it back. But overall I think the effect was nice.

The actual hardest thing for this video though: cropping out all the watermarks and subtitles T_T I kept thinking I had them all, and then I'd render it and find another one. I think I went through three passes of this, sent it to a friend, and he found two more. If any somehow snuck through to the finished product I won't be responsible for my actions :D

In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

My IRL goals are not very interesting or specific (sleep more; buy a desktop computer; exercise), so these will be about my AMVs.

First, let's look at last year's (AMV) goals...

Make backups for all my videos! Didn't happen... I think I did like 2. It's just so boring and tedious :/
Finish at least one video that I've abandoned. Done! That was Valley of the Dolls, started in April 2022.
Do Festivids again? In progress :)

Two out of three isn't so bad!

This year is very similar:

Make backups for all my videos T_T This is genuinely the most difficult goal but I have to try. My poor Tobirama AMV got copyright struck in 2022 and it hasn't been on the internet since! Not that I think anyone will really watch it from the backup site.... but the option would be there at least.
Look again at some ancient projects and finish at least ONE. Even if that includes cutting it short. Done is better than perfect.
Make at least three videos. Optimally more; I only did three in 2023 and I'm pretty disappointed about that. But I don't want to set this number too high and stress myself out; when I'm not making stuff, it's because I'm not feeling it! I know many many people do creative stuff on a habit basis but that doesn't work for me at all. The videos will come when they come. Still, there are things I can do to make them easier for me, or to come up with new ideas that might inspire me.
At least two of the specific videos below.

Specific videos:

A Festivids treat! I have the rest of the month; it would be difficult, but it's possible.
Rock Lee AMV; this one is basically done up to the bridge and I have a plan from then on, so it shouldn't be that hard.
Ghost!Sasuke AMV. I've been dreaming of this since last April... I swear I spent multiple evenings just searching for songs. But I finally found a song in December! I am so excited about this one. My ghost AMVs are some of my favorites, even though they take SO much work.
Clean up and post the Dabi AMV, optimally before season 7 comes out so I don't have to think about new footage. (On the other hand, maybe new stuff will inspire me?)

I'm trying out being a little more specific this year, we'll see how it goes! I've slowed down significantly in the last year or two but I think this is still a very doable amount.

( AMV rambling in here )

... their first copyright block* on Youtube :(

*A block, not a strike, so the video is hidden but there's no action against my account.

I'll appeal, obviously, but I'm not sure about the success rate of me vs TV Tokyo Anime Rights Management. This is a block based on visuals rather than the song, so I think the problem was I included a continuous clip that was too long. (I mean, I did some timing edits and cuts and stuff on it, but fundamentally it's like 20 seconds from a fight scene, which eventually got onto someone's radar... six months after the post date.) Fair use is a pretty nebulous concept, and by rights I feel like I should win, but in reality who knows. I'm also kind of paranoid that appealing will make them take a look at my whole account :/

Anyway, this is probably the push I need to investigate alternate hosting options. I'm definitely not going to stop using Youtube; without it almost nobody would watch anything I make! But it's smart to have backups. I've been pretty lucky until now not having to worry about this.

Luckily the blocked video isn't one of my favorites :D I like it, but this isn't a huge blow.

Just spent my evening researching what I need to do to apply for the professional certification I've been putting off getting for five years... which involves emailing one of my professors from years ago to ask for a reference out of the blue 🙃 This small task has made me procrastinate on this to the point where he's probably going to go "....who are you??" but hopefully he'll help me out.

In other news, I'm almost done with my latest AMV! It's taken me a little over a month and an unknowable number of hours* so I'll be happy to finish it and move onto something else.

*I really need to start tracking this! I'm thinking it'll be like 15-18 hours at completion, but I don't really remember how much time I spent at the beginning... could be more. From what I can resurrect from file creation times and messages to other people:

2/20: 3 hours at least based on the clip timestamps
2/22: ??
2/24: ??
I took a break at the end of February/beginning of March to work on another AMV but I think I worked on this one too...
3/12: 2 hours
3/13: 2 hours
3/19: 3 hours
3/20: 1 hour

If I assume 2 hours for the mystery days, that's 15 already, with maybe 3 left to go... YIKES. Couldn't I have picked any other hobby which is less time-consuming 😅 That's six hours per minute of finished product!

I find the Snowflake Challenge to be slightly intimidating BUT the latest one is basically something i wanted to do anyway, so...

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

2021 was a great year for me, AMV-wise! I mean in a sense it's my first full year, since I started in spring 2020, and honestly the stress and isolation of the pandemic (along with my job) is probably the main reason why I've spent so much time on all this. We'll have to see what consistent output level I'll have once life is a little better.

But! I made 10 AMVs in 2021. This is a slowing of pace from 2020 (how did I make 10 AMVs from May to December 2020???) but still very respectable. My goal is to make 24 in 24 months (so, by May 2022) and I think that's doable. Overall I think this year really cemented for me that this is something I like and that I'm good at. It's really strange; I've never been so automatically confident in something I've made before. I can see the flaws in every video I make, of course, but I also genuinely believe they're really good.

This year I tried a lot of new things. I made an entire split-screen AMV where each half focused on a different character. I edited in show dialogue over music, to the beat. I made child-Obito into a ghost and inserted him into other scenes. I experimented with a lot of effects and most of them worked out (Chroma Keyer, my friend and nemesis...).

My favorite of them all is always biased to whichever one I just finished, so lately it's Honey. I spent so much time on this (╥_╥) ... I hand traced dozens (...hundreds?) of individual frames. I think it turned out great! Not just for the ghost effects, although those are good, but also I think my timing on fight scenes just keeps getting better.

Entries tagged with amv: chatting

festivids!!!

snowflake 2024 #2

2022 AMV year in review

guess who got...

happy late solstice

Snowflake #8

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