My most ambitious project yet - Stranger Things AMV

[HotDogVendor]

So I've been trying to get some good flow to my videos by using after effects. This video took me quite a while to make. Feedback would be appreciated

[darkfiretkd]

The eye transitions to the next scene is smooth. The flow of each scenes is good.

[Katranat]

So I've been trying to get some good flow to my videos by using after effects. This video took me quite a while to make. Feedback would be appreciated

I really love this video. Heck, I really love a lot of what you create - I know I've laboured the point in many of my YouTube comments, but I can't reiterate enough how much of a joy it is to watch your videos. Seeing you progress over the past couple of years has been a pleasure, every video you make brings something unique and refreshing, while always maintaining a signature "HDV feel" about them.

I will do my best to give you some feedback. Sadly I am not very technically inclined, and there is a lot going on here where I have no idea how you did it - other AMV org users might have a better idea of how things in this video were achieved, I do hope other people will consider giving you feedback on these elements.

First off - there's a lot of masking going on this video. My main comment on this is the mask around Gon in particular is very noticeable as you can see the outline of sky behind him and his hair - honestly I wouldn't want to mask his hair either for that many frames. Personally this doesn't detract from my enjoyment of the video, I don't really care about things like this, but you might, which is why I've mentioned it. The only other mask that stands out to me is the one around Mob at 00:30 - the glowey outline from Mob's powers I feel is fine to be there, but you can also see some white which is a bit weird. Side note on this part, I love how you masked out two Mobs and layered them on top of each other! That adds a certain type of trippy I've not really encountered before.

Next - the eye transitions! My gawd the eye transitions! I think you've taken one of the most overused and tired editing tropes there is and completely reinvented it here. I have no idea how you've achieved this duplicated eye-tunnel effect (my best guess is masking it out and then copying over several layers and making them move? ), but it looks really cool. Some of the eyes work better with this effect than others, I think that's due to a couple factors, like how much you had to zoom in vs how zoomed in the source was natively, shape of the eye etc. The ones at 00:36 (I also love how this one colour changes), 00:57, 02:28, 02:35 (man this one goes hard) and 03:26, I feel work the best. By the end of the video it does start to feel a little bit like an overused gimmick, however you did do a very good job of varying how this is used, like how it goes backwards sometimes, and the mouth etc. I think the main reason it feels overused is how often the Gon one appears, however saying that, I do like that you keep coming back to Gon as a touch point throughout the video as it makes it feel like this is a journey through his eyes.
So yeah, in summary - cool eye thing!

Finally - the flow of the video. I get the feeling this is a highly experimental video for you. Even disregarding the eyes, there is a lot here from an editing perspective that I cannot begin to understand. Even with all this crazy stuff happening, nothing here feels wrong - everything works very well together and you've kept an excellent sync throughout. Surprisingly, it also never feels like too much. I'm prone to being unable to watch highly technical videos simply because they're often too much for me to keep track of. I think for me this video works well by having the highly edited sequences as hyper focused moments with long enough regular clips in between that give me a break.