AMV Salad 3: next stop - NekoCon 12...

[Gaelstrom]

Patience. He'll let us know when it's appropriate. Obviously it's due for Otakon today, so if he's anything like me with my school projects a few years ago, you'd better believe today will involve Mountain Dew and screaming.

[Squancho]

any new news about the BETA?

Talk about uncanny timing...

I'm actually about to put together the closing credits and nail this coffin shut, saving the final nail for after I hear from you all. I may never learn that these things always take longer than expected.

Anyway, the opening sequence is a simple one: a short preview of a future episode of something as closing credits roll for the show that just ended, followed by a Law & Order-type intro. I even have the "donk donk" noise. There will be two or three commercial spots after every minute or so of regular clips. The "donk donk" rings in each new group of clips. The final clip I have chosen (to end the main video) is a rather epic DBZ spot. I think the editor who created it knows which one I mean. I also threw in some fake [adult swim] bumpers here and there.

Right away, I'll tell you that I took liberties with a few clips. I added actual product graphics to the end of each Head On piece. The Demolition Man clip has a few added lines of text and a graphic at the end which turn it into an ad for Adobe Premiere Pro. The reasons for choosing to do so were the occasional inclusions of the a-m-v.org logo and Sandra Bullock's last line in the scene. The clip I have with the Family Guy audio (when Peter is doing his news segment and ends up doing "Bird is the Word") is now a match.com commercial. Trust me, I made sure to preserve the integrity of all your videos. I think you'll enjoy these.

The end credits...yeah. I wanted to do something with the song that plays at the end of Metalocalypse (season 1; episode 6) where everyone is screaming and the old guy in the wheelchair keeps saying "kill me kill me kill me..." I couldn't find the damned thing anywhere I could at least rip the audio from. I'll think of something good.

As far as the schedule goes, fret not. Apparently, the fan-produced videos are on a different deadline than the AMV contest. This is probably because they don't have a dedicated FTP for the parody submissions. Good for us because I have a few days now to dwell on the smallest details. The trick is I have to MAIL the disc to Otakon to make the premiere. This, I will do NO LATER THAN THURSDAY this week!

In spite of the computer issues which bogged me down and delayed the construction of this Salad, I think we managed to top ourselves this year. It looks good so far, but you'll see in a couple of days...

[Gaelstrom]

Does this mean like you mentioned earlier that once you send in a 'rough draft' per se then between now and Otakon we can check it and you can give us suggestions on potential changes and such and you can add any changes and just swap out the one you're sending for the new one at Otakon?

[Squancho]

Does this mean like you mentioned earlier that once you send in a 'rough draft' per se then between now and Otakon we can check it and you can give us suggestions on potential changes and such and you can add any changes and just swap out the one you're sending for the new one at Otakon?

At least I hope they'll allow it this year, considering the narrow schedule they're on. Last year wasn't a big deal because the deadline was about two months from 'kon. Things are gonna be tight but you have the idea of what I'm gonna try and do.

That is if you watch the beta and are certain you want something changed. I think it looks good as is but this project represents you as editors and artists. Let's make the most of what time we have until Thursday.

You know what kills me, though? About six weeks from now (the Monday after Otakon), this whole process begins anew again for AMV Salad 4. Will it be "Your Just Desserts" (love and romance gone horribly wrong) or "TV Dinners" (television theme songs and various sound clips)?

[Squancho]

The evil of your efforts are about to be unleashed upon you tonight!

The beta is rendering right now as DivX 1 Logical CPU AVI so, at over 18 minutes, the file might be rather large. If it's too large to upload anywhere, I'll compress it and send out the download link. There ought not be a problem, though.

The worst, most tedious part about this whole thing was writing out the end credits. Hate it hate it hate it! But it looks pretty good. I can't wait to hear from you all after you've seen this.

The only thing I missed were Dezbo's (the AMVS2) and my production tags. Other than that, I think we're ready to launch...

[krvabo]

Awesome

You know, I'm leaning towards the themes. Love gone wrong is a very nice theme, but I don't think you can really get a lot of original stuff with that.
The themes can get a good lough, either by combination or sheer retro-ness of the themes.
As long as we can do movie themes too, I'm going for that one.

[Gaelstrom]

If we were to be honest, I'd say both have been covered to a decent degree. Themes offers more variety because many themes can fit with one anime or another, while love gone horribly wrong would be more difficult to come up with something original someone else hasn't at least touched upon before. While the latter would cause us to have to light fire under our asses and be creative, god forbid, the former would allow more leeway.

...Sooo... that may be worth considering since they seem to have that market cornered.

Edit: Okay, yeah, so no utube links, never realized that, just search for 'The Anime Network - Bite Size Version' on utube, or of course, there's a huge version that's 6 vids long as well so themes are pretty effectively covered...

[Squancho]

Here it is, kids...



AMV Salad 3: Three Bean Casserole

There is a glitch near the end of the Kung Fu Panda clip where the image inside the cookie cutter bubble didn't line up like it should have during the render, in spite of playing as it should in Vegas. Trying to fix that. On the plus side, I think the sound came out pretty even this time.

I am re-rendering as mpeg2 right now to see if there's a difference in visual quality. I chose 640x420 resolution so everything will appear on screen as opposed to having the left edge slightly sheared off as with 720x480. Layer-2 PCM audio, 220kbps, stereo. Of course, the render is progressive scan.

The bit of choppiness you might see in the video is probably because of the codec I used. This won't be the case when I finally ready this for DVD. Speaking of which, maybe it's my burning program but the DVD always comes out with no sound, no matter what files I put on it. I know the sound works on them all but I'm thinking I need a better DVD burner. Any suggestions?

Anyway, here it is. Enjoy and send your opinions...

[Squancho]

Edit: Okay, yeah, so no utube links, never realized that, just search for 'The Anime Network - Bite Size Version' on utube, or of course, there's a huge version that's 6 vids long as well so themes are pretty effectively covered...

Yeah, that's Dave. I know him personally and it doesn't worry me that his videos exist. He's not ambitious enough to upload them to the 'org or tour them to other conventions. He just does those things for fun. He's skilled to be sure, but lacks initiative to make those projects more well-known. Besides, he doesn't have a small army of creative minds to collaborate with like we do. If you break it down, there are significant differences between his project and this one.

Like his project being "one and out" while the Salad is ongoing...

[Gaelstrom]

Should we send critiques directly to you or bring them up here?

I'll go ahead and post my foremost concern, which is to bring back your rainbow-barred reel shift like the first two to cut the clips instead of a fade, as impact for many of them seems to be lost with a simple fade unfortunately. It doesn't have to necessarily be for the bumps, but even if it's meant to be an allusion to watching a single channel, I think more is gained by keeping the hard cuts with the reel sound. I personally designed mine 'knowing' you'd do that, so I relied on those cuts to empower a couple punchlines. Plus I'd say that transition is like your signature. Similar to AMVHell but different enough to have its own effect on how the audience hears/perceives the clips. I really really believe those should be put in at the very least.

For specifics for my clips, should I just e-mail you?