My Profile

  • User Name: Declan_Vee
  • Member Since: Monday, February 18, 2002, 10:56 AM
  • Donation Level: Total Leech (Donator)
  • Name: Andrew-John Birkin
  • Studio: Studio_Vee
  • Location: Adelaide SA, Australia
  • Last Login: 2009-08-27 10:08:51
  • Forum Info: Profile        Posts (1046)
  • Journal: Last entry made on 2002-10-17 08:26:35
  • Usefulness: 131.8 with 29 opinions
    [average 119.3 of 231938 opinions; standard deviation 432 ]
  • Profile: Dear reader,

    No doubt you've clicked this to read the profile of the amazing Declan_Vee... or you just wanted to see my videos. Well no profile would be complete without a little more information what is already up there. To begin with my name is Andrew-John Birkin. My birthday is on the 30th of September and currently I'm 20 years old. An Adelaide boy born and bread, (I still eat at least 10 frog cakes a week) If you're ever in Adelaide I suggest you go to the Balfours on Rundle Mall, or The Pie Cart outside the train station and try one. I regularly attend my local anime club, AJAS (Adelaide Japanese Animation Society) and on occasion have made some impression on the playlist and general organization of things. I'm also a member of AUVGA (Adelaide University Video Gamers Association), but that has little to no relevance to AMVs now does it. For the last 2 years I've been working closely within AJAS and AUVGA on a little project we like to call "AV Connection" or AVcon for short (pronounced "avkon") And have expanded it's AMV competition to be the largest and best in the Country (being Australia that's not as much of an achievement as it sounds, but still) and despite my untimely absence at his years Manifest for the AMV panel I was supposed to be giving, oops. I'll be returning to Melbourne next year and hopefully not coming back empty handed. OK that's all good, but what's with the name... Declan_Vee? Well you wouldn't be the first to ask. The Declan part is a reference to The Jackal and is something I've had since going grey in High School. As for the _Vee part... it's basically the cherry on he cake that makes it more of a screen name.

    I first got into AMVs around July/August 2000... that is I had no idea such wonderful things existed, but attempted a 2VHS video. It was an Evangelion video... or rather Evangelion failure for lack of a better word. I'd rather not mention the song, only to say it wasn't angsty, grungy or even aggressive... well the lyrics were aggressive, but it wasn't delivered that way. After that, I just concentrated on other projects using Windows Movie Maker... make that 3D Movie Maker. Then in the early part of 2001 my dear sister convinced me to go along with downloading some of these AMVs. The concept was absurd at the time... they were files upwards of 40Mb... gasp, it would only take a few hours to get each one. 4 hours later I saw my first AMV... it was a Dragonball Z video to 3 Doors Down's Kryptonite. My first impression was... for 41 Mb this video doesn't look too shabby. Not much later, I caught on to the Likes of Aluminum, DokiDoki Kusoyaro and Otaku Vengeance. With my trusty 686MX 266, with a full 64Mb of RAM, 4 Gb HD and an S3 Virge video card. I was really done fine... not. As the months went by I came to a rather bizarre conclusion. I think I might be able to make one of these videos using what I've got right here. Sound familiar? OK, what I am about to type is probably the most embarrassing thing I've ever done in regard to AMVs. Behold my old editing process:

    Dump the AMV source into Virtualdub
    Copy the current frame
    Paste it into Animation Shop (continue until you have enough to go by)
    Using Windows Sound Recorder and Animation Shop playback... attempt to edit (I actually got quite good)
    Once the scene was complete export it as uncompressed AVI and dump into MovieExplorer
    When all of the timing had been done and the MovieExplorer timeline was full, encode it using Indeo
    And that's how you don't make an AMV

    At that moment in time I decided there must be an easier way. A friend of mine was working on his own videos at the time, using a stop-motion (pause/unpause) technique he was making these rather hilarious videos and sent our history class into hysterics with his re-enactment of the Gallipoli battle. What really got to me though was when I saw him editing this on his PC. At that moment I knew the only way for me to get anywhere with this AMV thing is to get... a capture card.
    If I remember correctly it was December 2001 when I finally got it. The Cougar Video Edition... ultimately it's just a hybrid TNT2 with video in/out capabilities and video editing software. And my new and current PC. An AMD K6/2 500, 192 Mb RAM, 9 Gb HD (I have since added another 40Gb) SBLive 5.1 DE and the Cougar Video Edition. Well at least I was using two monitors.
    I spent about a month trying to get the cap card to work relatively well. Doesn't mean I wasn't dropping frames or anything, but I got it there. And at this point I was ready to use this new equipment to work on a video... but first before I did that I would need a studio set-up. The name was Krypton Studios. To act as a reminder of how we started out, and also to go along with the Aluminum, use-an-element-type-thing. Once that was done I signed up for an account here. And quickly got to the guides and soft/hardware information, most made relative sense... except for ErMaC's old guide. I figured I might want to hold off for a while before I tried using that. Within a few weeks of editing I had completed my first _real_ video, entitled "Those to Whom Evil is Done" A Blood The Last Vampire video done to a remix of O Fortuna. I was quite pleased by how well this video was received, and to the amount of support I got for it. It wasn't much longer before Krypton Studios fell apart. Fortunately I was invited to join A2000A Studios with Dark Kamui. Later this nobody AMV creator known as Koopiskeva would also join us. And I would grow deeper into the world of anime, thanks to the access to the A2000A FTP server and the many fansubs that lied within. Of course this worked hand-in-hand with an invitation to join AJAS and the AVcon crew. At this point I started work on another video using the then super-new series Chobits. Oddly enough my cap card is almost redundant, but at least it gave me a push in the right direction. Between work and doing the AMV events for AVcon... I've been pretty lazy in my video progress. Currently I'm working on an Azumanga Daioh video. Or... more accurately I've put it on hold while I recover my skills in the Izumi trailer challenge.

    Where am I likely to go from here? Well I've written up the plans for an Iron Chef Competition at AV Connection 2004, more panels at Manifest and it looks like a trip to AWA. With my videos... I think I'll probably buy a new machine before going ahead with anything serious.

    Well that was quite a read, and thankyou if you've gone this far. Feel free to drop me an email or a private message on the forums, for just about anything really,

    Andrew-John (Declan_Vee) Birkin

global average

  • Count231938
  • Originality8.47
  • Visual Quality8.37
  • Audio9.00
  • Action Sync8.45
  • Lip Sync8.24
  • Special Effects8.49
  • Effort8.60
  • Re-view-ability7.92
  • Overall8.43

average given

  • Count29
  • Originality7.48
  • Visual Quality6.41
  • Audio7.00
  • Action Sync7.10
  • Lip Sync6.60
  • Special Effects7.36
  • Effort7.69
  • Re-view-ability7.28
  • Overall7.24

average received

  • Count16
  • Originality7.56
  • Visual Quality8.19
  • Audio8.75
  • Action Sync8.13
  • Lip Sync7.17
  • Special Effects7.80
  • Effort8.44
  • Re-view-ability6.63
  • Overall7.69

10 FAVORITE ANIME

1.
Ghost in the Shell
2.
Azumanga Daioh (TV)
3.
Chobits
4.
Kaze no Yojimbo
5.
Serial Experiments Lain
6.
Full Metal Panic: Fumoffu
7.
Please Teacher (TV)
8.
Jubei-Chan
9.
Akira (Movie)

My Videos (4)

  • Persocon Girl (2002-07-21)
    [hits: 2497][opinions: 0]
    • Aqua Barbie Girl
    • Chobits
    • Character Profile
    • Comedy
    • Fun
    • No
  • Those to whom evil is done. (2002-03-11)
    [hits: 3456][opinions: 15]
    • Excalibur soundtrack O Fortuna (Excalibur mix)
    • Blood: The Last Vampire
    • Action
    • Horror
    • Other
    • Local
  • Anime Bike Girls (not premiered)
    [hits: 1526][opinions: 0]
    • Machine Gun Fellatio Mother Fucker on a Motorcycle
    • Akira (Movie)
    • Angel Cop
    • Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040
    • You're Under Arrest!, OAV
    • Action
    • Comedy
    • Fun
    • No
  • Ghost Busting (not premiered)
    [hits: 1233][opinions: 1]
    • Ghostbusters OST Ghostbusters Theme
    • Ghost in the Shell
    • Fun
    • Parody
    • No