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Information

• Member: Davis 51
• Studio: Under The Box Productions
• Title: Farewell, Satoshi Kon
• Premiered: 2011-07-28
• Categories:
  • Other
  • Serious
  • Romance
  • Sentimental
• Song:
  • Vanessa Carlton A Thousand Miles
• Anime:
  • Memories
  • Millennium Actress
  • Paprika (Movie)
  • Perfect Blue
  • Tokyo Godfathers
• Participation:
  • Otakon 2011, Otakon 2011 AMV Contest (2011-07-22)
• Comments: Awards
  
  Runner-Up: Otakon 2011 Romance/Sentimental Category
  
  About the video itself:
  
  For those who don't know, Anime directing legend Satoshi Kon passed away last year of pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed with only a few months to live, and the illness progressed very rapidly. He chose to tell very few people, so the news came shockingly and suddenly to just about everyone. He was 46 years old.
  
  This is a video that is intensely personal for me. I'm not a huge fan of the song used (very few people are, as I'm discovering), but I am a gigantic fan of the source footage. It is not one I felt I wanted to do, but rather one I felt I had to do. It was almost as if some unknown force drove me to complete it from start to finish. If he hadn't passed away, I probably wouldn't have made this. I'm still not sure how I feel about that.
  
  I am aware the song gets mixed reactions of people, but the way I see it, there are two types of videos. There are those where the footage picks the song, and the ones where the song picks the footage. This is one case of the footage picking the song. A rare instance where a song fits all the emotions I am trying to convey so perfectly it can not be passed up. And somehow, after devoting a month of my life completely to it, I think I've come to appreciate the song as well. I can only hope that people will not prematurely judge, and accept the video for what it is.
  
  
  About the editing process:
  
  Normally I edit along a timespan of months. This one took me 4 1/2 weeks. It was originally going to take 6 weeks, but my video card's internal memory spontaneously combusted, and it took a week and a half of wrangling with incompetent Dell staff to get it fixed. PROTIP: Never buy from Dell again.
  
  My timespan is this long because I typically spend an hour or two every couple of days on editing. With this one, it became a second fulltime job. I wanted at least 3 months to complete it, but because I had decided to continue my education further with Graduate level work, I wasn't able to edit from January to April (Expendable Waltz was actually completed in December, I just took forever to upload.) So I was editing 4/6 hours a day!
  
  Unlike my other videos, this one was light on effects. And by light, they were still everywhere, but this time they are much more..."traditional." Flashes, fadeins, fadeouts, some overlays, a couple of chroma keys, etc. There is ONE shot that is extremely heavily altered that lasts 3 seconds somewhere in the first half. See if you can spot it.
  
  There is also a ton of speed altering going on here. Expendable Waltz was kinda a playground for this, and the experience paid off greatly here. Most of it was to match beats, and get all the shots I wanted. My first draft was actually twice as fast paced, and had twice as many cuts, but friends who beta'd for me found it impossible to follow, so I essentially slowed it down in increments until he and a few others were able to follow it easily. In the end, I slowed it down about 50%.
  
  It also might be worth noting that this is the first video I've edited in 16:9.
  
  This video was entered into the Otakon 2011 AMV Contest. I hope you enjoy it. I honestly have no idea what I'm going to edit next, but I've got about 5 or 6 projects on the back-burner, so I'm sure I'll be able to pick out one of them.
  
  As always, comments and constructive criticism is welcome. Trolling is not.