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Ooo. It works.
2005-07-20 14:27:41
I just animated the first five frames of Fremen Nausicaa! My wrist hurts from the image editing, but it worked! It looks good!
'Course, I still have 33 frames to go. And then I'll be finished with this one, two-second clip. But I'll take my victories where I can get them. Anyway, at this rate I should be done the video in mayb e a month or so. If I really try, maybe I can even make the Nekocon deadline and send it off to be shown! Oh, what joy that would be... well, I can hope. We'll see.
Work, work, work! -
Rawr, braaaaaaaaaaains!
2005-07-20 12:23:28
Yep, that's right. I'm a zombie.
I was awake all night editing the trailer. I have the first minute and forty seconds "done". That is, I have video set to the audio. I'm not actually done because a) I'm a perfectionist, and b) I have to go back and do image editing to turn certain people's eyes blue. As in, blue within blue. Fremen blue. Yeah, that'll be fun. This is my first attempt at image editing in a music video, and I don't have any kinds of spiffy tools to make it easier. I have WMM2 and I have Gimp. All the same, I have a plan as to how to make it work technically. It'll just take forever, is all.
I'm also not entirely satisfied with how the Duncan and Stilgar quotes look. Ugh. Much much work must be done. I need caffeine and/or sleep.
Oh, yeah. Harry Potter just arrived in the mail. That's right, I read HP. Gotta problem widdat? Dunno when I'll read it with all I'm doing, but I'll squeeze it into my schedule.
Back to work with me! -
My first diss! Oh, the magic!
2005-07-19 22:26:51
"I can tell you've not done a lip sync video before, you should try it and then you'll see how hard it is."
Can I help it if that grates on my nerves a little bit? Well, it does, a bit. Because lip sync videos are all I've done. >_>' Oh well. I'm not good enough of an editor to start being proud. Not yet.
With a bit of trouble, I extracted the trailer's audio and began editing. It looks good. It looks very good, so far. We'll see if I can keep it looking good beyond Irulan's exposition. I find myself frustrated with Nausicaa, though. The manga had so much more story that would fit these clips perfectly. The movie has just the bare bones- barely enough main characters to even cover the speaking roles for the trailer. I'm especially frustrated trying to find a picture of Earth from space, as drawn by Miyazaki. There doesn't seem to be one- at least not in Nausicaa. So what to do? It's sort of an important part of the trailer, so I don't want to drop it, but...
Oh well. I'll work it out tonight.
Incidentally, I invented a drink. Orange soda and peppermint schnapps. I call it a Clockwork Orange. Yum. -
Glory be, a concept!
2005-07-19 12:04:12
First of all, thank you to Wedding_Angel for my First Opinion Ever. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. ^_^ You rock!
Next, on to the aforementioned concept. I had an idea to make a sound clip AMV to a quote from Monty Python. I've seen a lot of them before, and they're always hilarious. I'll put some links to some of my favorites at the bottom of the entry.
Anyway, I browsed around the Internet looking for sound clips from Holy Grail, figuring that I'd use a low-quality sound clip off the Internet now, and rip the audio from the DVD when I get home. I decided on the "Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I'm being repressed!" dialogue because it was just too fun to resist. Then I had to think of an anime, so I turned to Nausicaa. Nausicaa, I figured, had clips of that- peasants being insolent to royalty and royalty oppressing them. The AMV would practically edit itself. So I loaded up the Nausicaa DVD to watch it, so I could decide what specific scenes I would use.
It was while I was watching Nausicaa that I got hit with a concept. It's no secret that Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind shares countless similarities to Frank Herbert's Dune. (I'll list these similarities later, but not now.) I had written a bit of an essay on it myself, once. So, I thought to myself, what if I somehow made a Dune Nausicaa AMV?
The first temptation was to take the short version of the original Dune movie and set the audio to Nausicaa. (My biggest reason for this was Patrick Stewart. In the original movie, Stewart played the part of Gurney, the old master-at-arms. In Nausicaa, decades later, he plays the part of Lord Yupa, the old master-at-arms.) I wisely have decided against this, for one simple reason: even the short version of the original Dune is far longer than the whole of Nausicaa. It would never work. So then I thought, "Dune just did that miniseries, recently, on SciFi. Shouldn't there be a trailer?"
Mwahahahaha.
I haven't even heard the audio for the trailer. In that respect, this concept is ridiculous. I'm planning to make an AMV to audio I've never even heard. But if this works... well. We'll have to see.
Incidentally, I still may make that Monty Python AMV, if I ever get stuck for ideas in the middle of this project. ^_^'' But I think I'm going to use Akira footage instead. The variety helps, and the idea amuses me.
SailorDeath's Camelot video: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=63
Shaister's Black Knight and Bright Side of Life videos:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=4481
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=5389
Kandelon's Killer Rabbit and Holy Handgrenade videos:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=8141
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=5935
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Deep Thoughts, with Jerrit
2005-07-18 11:38:57
Apparently, my video has had 65 direct downloads. Whoa. Cool. But I think what really impresses me is that the page still has only 55 hits. I have more people downloading my AMV than I have people viewing the page you download it from. How much sense does that make? I figure that it must mean that someone has tried to download it multiple times, and had some kind of failure. Oh well. It's still rather cool to me, even though there is still no opinion.
I've hit a wall in editing, too. I've finally managed to hone my DVD ripping skills, so I've got the footage I need. But I'm really pushing the limits of what WMM2 can do, at least on the technical aspects. It's a nice little program, but it simply isn't made for multi-track editing, and there's nothing I can do to change that. Nothing, that is, but look for a new program. I'm still broke as hell, but I know I have to get better software if I'm going to continue with this. I don't want to resort to pirated software because
1) It's wrong and I'd feel guilty, and
2) I doubt I can get it anyway.
But hope is not lost. My dad is a technology supervisor for a district of public schools in Virginia. He has tons of software which he has licensed, and a lot of it is multimedia software. Odds are that if I really insist, he might be able to go through the right channels and get me a copy of Premier at a discount price. At the very least, I could snag a copy of Photoshop for frame-by-frame editing. We'll see. It's worth a try, and I don't want to just give up.
That being said, it's hard to feel confident about editing. I've always watched the legends like Doki Doki, Aluminum, and More Than Toast, and I've never thought of all that as something I could someday do. Making AMVs was for people with more money, more time, more knowledge of computers, and more talent. I'm just starting out, but I have trouble with not comparing myself to others. What am I, in comparison to K-Type, whose first video was 'CHIHUAHUA!'? My first video was nowhere near that good. I'm barely struggling along this path. How can I really hope to ever make something good enough that I, too, can be among those editors?
I want to make something that will make people laugh. I want to take something from my head, set it to music with the scenes I envisioned, and have other people look at it as I have. I want recognition to get to the point where I can take all of these concepts I have and do something with them. But what will it take to get to that point?
I must keep practicing. Until I get the programs I need, I'm going to make little sound-clip videos. That will keep me in shape. And maybe I'll learn some more, too.
JOURNAL: Jerrit Tenurb (Jerrit Tenurb)
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