After hearing Gerald's review of Megazone 23 on Anime World Order (an anime podcast), I decided it was finally time to actually watch the damn thing. We watched it, we went on with our lives. The Monday before the AWA 2007 Exposition deadline, it randomly occurred to me that making a trailer to The Matrix with Megazone 23 was the easily idea that could ever be done. I checked around and did not see a single attempt at the idea, so I took it upon myself to do it. The video was edited over the next five days (Monday mostly being ripping and prepping the footage, Friday mostly being finalizing, exporting, encoding, and uploading the video). With one hour to spare after the upload, the video was complete.

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This is a dark comedy, somewhat childish at times, putting a fun twist on Light simply going along killing whomever he chooses. There really is not much of a traditional "narrative" to this video, which is quite different for me. Beyond getting the notebook at the beginning, it's just death... death... and more death. At the end of the day, it's a hard job... but somebody's gotta do it.

The video is (obviously) split up into individual segments. The first and second verse are timed differently (due both to story-necessity and different emphasized musical elements), but both act as the same type of mood-setters; the choruses pick up the pace with that shit-eating-grin; the breakdown and bridge are totally different, showcasing a little bit more of the in-depth actions of Light.

The first thing that came to mind in the video was the "drop" section of the bridge, which is about the only thing that remained the same from the original vision. The breakdown section was originally going to be some floating, feathered, cropped boxes of Light writing names while the names flew by both in front of and behind said boxes of video. Unfortunately, all of the scenes were too short to leave up floating around for any extended period that I could appropriately time to, so the hard cuts in the background (with a grainy film quality) came to be with the names floating around in the front. I think I actually prefer this implementation, anyway, so I'm glad that worked out.

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This video was intended to be primarily a "mood" or "feeling" video, followed directly by the story it tells to set up that mood. The beginning shots simply set up the atmosphere and locations for the story, and moves in to the character introductions (a staple of Meri videos going back years and years and years; see Liberation Of Memories Past for an example). Throughout the intro and the character introductions, you will see lots of comparison shots with characters moving their heads in similar ways, looking up at the moon, etc. These motions will even be re-created in the middle transition of the song where the characters are all shown looking longingly through windows.

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As the winners from AWA 2005, we participated in 2006's "Battle Royale" Iron Editor tournament of champions at Otakon. The theme for this particular tournament was "action movie trailer". Two winners would be chosen to advance forward to the finals at AWA later that year.

We chose the Mortal Kombat trailer for several reasons: (01) it's comparatively well-known among the geek/nerd/anime/etc. crowd, (02) it has an ensamble cast we could exploit for the variety of sources, (03) Kadaj + Shang Tsung = gold, (04) etc.

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It's really amazing what sitting and watching a new show (for a change) will do for your AMV inspiration.

A couple discs into Hajime no Ippo, we were pretty convinced we were going to do a video to it. Meri had a very loose idea for a video to Panic! At The Disco's "Camisado", but that was the problem... it was a very loose idea. My concept for Say Anything's "Belt" was also based on a loose idea, but that one just led into a few other loose ideas that ended up coming together in a more solid beginning-to-end idea, so we ended up going with that one. It was somewhat of a challenge in that the song did not tell such a literal-and-obvious story that we are so used to correlating (see 2005's Fake as an example), but it was a FUN challenge to force ourselves to match the story in a coherent fashion.

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This is our video that was made during Anime Weekend Atlanta XI (2005)'s "Iron Editor" contest. The theme for this year's competition was "exploration," so we picked the "Mission: Impossible" remix. Our competitor was Hsien Lee (Kusoyaro Productions), who has been the Iron Editor champion for many, many years. Somehow, we managed to dethrone him, which was quite a shock, considering how awesome his video was!

This video is pretty simple (didn't really have much choice, having to make the video in two hours, and all) with elements of action and a little light-heartedness. Having the "secret ingredient" helped spice things up a bit, and we thought it was fun to work with. Despite how short and simple the video is, we're both actually very proud of it. There is one massive mistake in the video, though. We accidentally used a shot from "Blue Sub No. 6" twice. Ooops!

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This video was actually my original idea for AWA Pro X (2004), but for some reason or another, we just didn't go through with it. Instead, we decided to work on Meri's idea for Pro that year (Sex, Lies, & Roses). This idea remained in the back of my head for the entire year, though. I definitely wanted to get around to it, but just didn't.

We were undecided on an idea for AWA Pro XI (2005) until very late into the year. We had a few ideas kicking around, but either didn't have the right source footage, didn't have the right audio, or both. Taking a look back on the video ideas, this one stuck out, so we went with it! Since the idea was comparatively old, I don't quite remember how it came to me. It was either in a car or on the way to class (back when I had not yet graduated). The lyrics in Dashboard songs tell such fantastic and relatively literal stories, that coming up with two anime characters to fit the male/female characters in the song was almost no work at all.

Hopefully, the story in this video is extremely straight-forward and obvious. As mentioned, the song does a great job of being extremely clear with its presentation of two characters and their own internal faults and insecurities. In essence, that somewhat makes us extremely lazy... the video nearly edited itself! Arima and Miyazawa were just such perfect fits, especially considering the gender-opposites the song speaks of.

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This video actually has a purpose. I swear.

At AnimeNext 2005, myself and Julian Grybowski ran a panel entitled The DBZ You've Never Seen. Filled with things like Japanese vocal video game openings, clips from movies that haven't been released, the original Chinese live-action movie, etc... it was a fun time.

We also covered the subject of FUNimation's so-called Ultimate Uncut Edition releases that began in 2005. For those who don't know, FUNimation's English dub of DBZ began in 1995. It was distributed for syndicated television broadcast by Saban, and was played on early Saturday mornings... typical kid-cartoon time. Needless to say, DBZ was pretty heavily censored. Approximately 15 episodes worth of material was edited out of the first two seasons (approximately 67 episodes originally, in Japanese).

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If you still don't know about this video/project, check out this page. In short, it's a multi-editor AMV project that spans the entire length of the DBZ TV series, beginning to end. It's to a custom-mix of the song "Sandstorm" (which you no-doubt already know). Besides being the technical coordinator for the project, I also edited two individual tracks (01: Raditz; 16: Fusion), as well as collaborated on another track with Meri and gambitt (12: Cell Game).

Be sure to check it out!

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