I really loved this song when I first heard it. Something about the vocal line reminded me of ebbing and flowing, yin and yang, joy and pain. I originally envisioned a Yin & Yang theme, but struggled to find clips; Yin & Yang is more of a Chinese concept than a Japanese one, and so it doesn't pop up in anime as much as I thought it would. That said, Chinese anime is on the rise so maybe that can be an AMV someday.
Eventually I settled on a Time theme, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I wanted to capture the transience of life, and how everything eventually arises and passes away. The first version I released on youtube had a few technical issues that I noticed after watching it a bunch. They bugged me *just barely* enough to fix it, so I've cleaned those up and made a new version. I don't think anyone else will notice anything different.
Aggretsuko has always resonated with me a lot, but it hit extra hard once I started burning out on my job in 2020 and 2021. By the time I made this, I was counting the days before I could quit. There is something totally soul sucking about being trapped in a job you have no enthusiasm for but that you need for money.
I submitted this to AWA Pro, and it was mostly a flop (although it had a few fans). The video is a weird mixture of drama and comedy and suffered from the anonymous format. One comment I got for it was that the person genuinely didn't know if the video was trolling or not. And yeah, the video is sort of deliberately ambiguous on whether it's supposed to be funny. Without any context, it's hard to really know what the creator was thinking. People who had seen and enjoyed Aggretsuko seemed more likely to get the joke, but even then it wasn't a sure bet. And the song selection was polarizing; screamo isn't something everyone can just pick up and enjoy.
Another criticism I caught for this was that the cuts are too static. This was my first time trying a single source AMV. In multisource, you can use longer cuts because your overall clip quality is higher. But in a show as static as Aggretsuko, some of my cuts just lingered too long and dampen the energy of the song. An important lesson.
THAT SAID, I still am fond of it. It's basically a very longform joke that relies on a slow buildup to the screaming part of the song, and once the punchline hits I think it's just hysterical. But of course ymmv.
I made this in 2021 while fighting against COVID depression. I wanted something that would lift me out of it, so I went back to an old favorite, Level Up by Vienna Teng. I found editing to this song extremely challenging, and a part of me wishes it had come out just a little bit better. The flow doesn't quite hit right as is. When I submitted it to Pro, I knew it probably wasn't going to win anything, but I was hoping it would make at least one person cry tears of joy. Mission accomplished.
One particular thing I struggled with was matching the lyrics while also matching the flow of the song. The lyrics are important here, so I didn't want to just ignore them. But finding a balance is tricky, especially when you can't expect the viewer to understand the lyrics of the song as they're watching the video. Both this and the Aggretsuko amv suffer from this flaw, and since then, I've moved away from lyrics-heavy songs. It's just much easier to work with stuff that either has simple lyrics or is instrumental.
For all its issues, I still think the climax hits hard if you know the song well enough to follow the lyric sync.
This one was all about finding clever ways to sync to the music. It also had some experimentation with Google Deep Dream style transfers. The main reason I waited so long is around the time I made this video, I learned about photosensitivity, and subsequently became obsessed with all of the triggers in this video. Psychedelic stuff seems very linked with triggering migraines in people that have photosensitivity, and so the guilt from making something that could very easily give someone a headache made me start getting nauseous when I watched it myself, out of a psychosomatic response.
Flashforward a a year later and I'm more happy with it. Overall I think it turned out pretty cool, albeit a bit unpolished. Some of the sync is pretty neat. My biggest issue with it is the jerky camera in the beginning.
