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Information

• Member: AnnaMayBelle
• Studio: AnimeBelle.com
• Title: Shades of Red - Prelude
• Premiered: 2006-06-02
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Other
  • Instrumental
• Song:
  • Alan Parsons Project Dream Within A Dream
• Anime:
  • Original Drawings
• Participation:
  • METROCON 2006, AMV Contest (2006-06-04)
  • METROCON, METROCON 2006 AMV Contest (2006-06-04)
• Comments: I had been wanting to work on this project for some time. I knew I wanted to create a film from my own original artwork, but other projects always seemed to get in the way. I always wound up working on AMVs to enter into contests. But then, I heard about a little thing Metrocon 4 was doing… It was called the Anime Fan Film Festival. Finally. I had an excuse to open up After Effects and get to work on Shades of Red.
  
  Mind you, I didn’t know how to use After Effects. At all.
  
  Luckily, Premiere Pro had educated me in key frames, enough to learn how to use After Effects. Unfortunately, I only had a month to get my film done… I had longer than that, but a friend who’s a musician said she’d compose an original piece so I’d be eligible for the Best Original Score category. But after two weeks she had 1/4th of a midi that she wouldn’t even send to me to preview. So finally I realized there was no way that was going to work. Ma Belle introduced me to Dream Within A Dream by Alan Parsons Project, and so I got to work.
  
  I would wake up, start work on my video, maybe eat a meal during the day, and some time around 4 or 5am the next morning, I would go sleep, often in my office near the computer. A few hours later I would get up and continue work on the video. At times this even meant waking up, sitting up, and loading Premiere without even having stood up yet. This was my schedule for a month.
  
  This lack of sleep, and especially lack of nutrition, eventually lead to me passing out one day. Thus, this is the first and only video project to date to give me bruises. That should count for something, right?
  
  In the end, a month of obsession and bruises paid off. “Shades of Red – Prelude” won Best Dramatic Presentation at the Metrocon Anime Fan Film Festival. I wound up being not only the only hand-drawn project, but the only solo project; everything else had a cast and crew. All of the characters are from my webcomic, and soon to be webnovel, Shades of Red. I hand-drew all of the artwork, and CG’d all but one or two pieces all by myself in Photoshop. All of the scenes were created in After Effects, and assembled in Premiere Pro.
  
  I also want to thank Zarxrax and metro for their assistance in The Org’s chatroom. If not for these two I doubt the project would’ve gotten much of anywhere!