(no subject)

[which_chick]

On the cocoa front, I soothed the savage whatever by having chocolate sauce with crepes for breakfast today. You might think that the appropriate ordering there would be crepes with chocolate sauce, but, like the kid in the Kraft "Cheese and Macaroni" commercials, I have my priorities in quite the proper order. That indulgence also neatly used up the last egg in the house so that it didn't linger overly long in solitary. Anyway, where I'm going with this is that there will not be expensive imported cocoa powder in my near future.

Fortifed by that complete breakfast, I turned my attention to the AMV project, which is driving me up the damn wall. I'm still less than twenty seconds into the damn thing, but the idea that I had for the second line of the song fell apart when I cut and spliced it together. It made no visual sense. This is because I suck.

Now, I have in the past claimed to ramble incoherently and yet, below the cut, you found things of value. However, I really mean it this time.



I figure building a good AMV is like writing a coherent paper. It should have a fairly solid aim (or three), with points and illustrative examples. There should be a thesis, a line of argument. For full value, the line of argument should proceed lyrically, visually, and in tempo with the music. (You've no idea how much it pisses me off that I just lost the parallel structure there. Been givin' myself shock treatments. Up the voltage! I could have rewritten it as "lyrically, visually, and temporally" but I'm not entirely sure that "tempo" can be made an adverbial thingie in that way. Probably it's not allowed because "temporal" has a slightly different, nonmusical meaning in English. Anyway. I'm just going to pretend that it's proper parallel structure there and I want everyone else to pretend that too. Onward.)

Keeping all the balls in the air for a music video is somewhat more complex than writing dipshit freshman comp essays (I took honors freshman comp and got an A. I am allowed to diss the subject.) for fun and profit, or at least for fun and beer money. Fortunately, the organizational skills you were supposed to have learned in freshman comp or even in high school English can help you divide and conquer the complexity of an AMV by breaking the task down into small bites. I'm talking about outlines. Outlines, outlines, outlines. Yeah, I know. It's dorky. It's like writing a term paper. How much fannish entertainment can anyone have with that?

More than you think.

As the studio audience is mostly aware, the music video rattling around in my head is made of footage from Revolutionary Girl Utena, sensibly abbreviated SKU, with a soundtrack provided by Grand Funk's song Some Kind of Wonderful. I understand that Utena isn't particularly a hip, happening, fresh, trendy anime. I further understand that Grand Funk isn't what modern young people listen to. I totally, completely grasp that the potential audience appeal of this AMV will be minimal. I'm sorry about that and I wish it were otherwise. It is, however, the AMV that I want to make, so that's that. I am honoring my unique artistic vision and all ya'll that don't appreciate it can piss off.

This will not be a happy, romantic music video about a guy and his best girl. I mean, the video IS about a guy and his best girl, but his best girl is his sister and their relationship is somewhat dysfunctional. SKU, as an anime, doesn't offer us very many functional, healthy relationships but I'm still picking one of the sickest it has to offer.

In case you haven't seen it, Utena is not particularly a happy, romantic anime. According to fooliv, who did a quite capable reading of it the other year, it's a stylin' but kind of surreal (melting-fish) world where homosexuality is posited as a possible, if flawed, solution to the pressing problem of brother-sister incest. Well said, there. It's got subtext, lots and lots of subtext. It's all very Freudian subtext, too. I'm not making this up. The subtext is a lot of fun.

So what's an outline for a music video about this socially vital issue look like?

While I can't deny the unbearable (lightness of being) attraction of an outline with roman numerals, it's easiest for me to divide the thing up by lyrics and then further by the timing of words and/or interesting musical bits. A segment of my outline (and this would be the segment of outline I'm stuck on -- I used this LJ post to work through the problems with it) looks like this:

I don't need a big fine car.
Time from 11.281931 to 15.278860, a hair short of four seconds. (Please to be bearing in mind that the entire rest of the post addresses just under four seconds of music.)

We need shots of the car we've not seen yet. Reusing footage because you're too lazy to go capture more is lame. (Reusing footage for humorous intent is OK) I like him sprawling on the hood of the car, also the prick-cars in the duelling arena. Also him standing beside it, lots of choices. I am NOT going to do two lines of lip flap in a row. I don't LIKE doing lip flap.

Sku19 has potential.
Skua22.avi is the car pricks at the duelling arena.
skuc27 is nice.
skuc25 is great. (2 seconds)
sku8 is useful (yeah, that's the crotch grab) 1 second
sku9 is the rotating talking head. I know this sucks, but maybe as an intro? He looks so pretty...

(These are just clips. They're none of them huge and they're just numbered 1,2,3 and a,b,c so that the numbers didn't get too high. I just dumped 'em in a directory and I flip through the previews to pick out what I need. This is not particularly a good content management system (Damn, I'm a geek. I can happily use phrases like content management system in casual discourse.) and if I were doing this in a bigger way, like for a fandub sort of thing, I'd have to have something more useful. Goro-Mark, I see what you mean about tools to make things being a viable market.)

*thump* is subtext where possible. Subtext in Utena is so funny.

I -- 11.307 - 11.461 .1622 skuc27 is him standing beside the car. It's pretty static. It will work for .1622 sec.
Don't -- 11.461 - 11.743 .2818 sku5 is him sitting beside the car. Good for .2818 - this clip is 1 frame too long
Need -- 11.74-12.443 .7003 total line2w3 (in finished folder) is "need" *snark* There are a LOT of these sorts of shots in Utena.

Timing to here is now good.

*thump* -- 12.45 - 12.81 .358699 total (First of the car erection shots?) I was going to do the fountain cherub with gushing water and all because that's such a nice visual metaphor, but it took too long and confused the subject overly. We're sticking with cars for this line. I can use the fountain cherub elsewhere.

Later... This also doesn't really work as subtext. We could do that in the intro because we repeated it every drum beat so that people had time to get it. As a one-shot, it doesn't fly and "need" and "big" and "fine" are sweet and I like 'em. I don't want to cut to match drum beats on this line and I did the last line to lyrics as well. We're going to ignore the drum beat for the moment. It's eight frames. Four added onto need and four padded onto a-big. We can pad beginning and end, two frames each.

a 12.81 - 12.97 .1622 total -- this is very short, too short to use? Combine with next? (I tried using it by itself. Didn't work at all.)
big 12.97 - 13.26 .290375 total (crotch grab, it's gotta be.) This is sku8.avi. And it's funny. Yay!
*minor bump* 13.26 - 13.46 .2049 total -- This is also very short, confusing. There isn't enough here for people to get it.)

REDO: 12.85-13.47, .6149 total (a big + thump), as crotch shot, sku8.avi, add four frames here.

fine 13.468 - 13.92947 .461184 total (this is going to be skuc25 -- needs edited it for more rubbing!!) This came out really nice with the additional editing. *ahem* At least I'm having fun. Akio's having fun too, even if I can't splice in the fountain cherub footage here to show you exactly how good of a time he's having.

car 13.92947 - 14.45 .5209 total -- This was cars rising. We need something else here if we're doing cars rising up in the subtext. So what the hell goes here now? How about him sprawling on the hood of his car? He does do that. I don't know if I have a clip of it, but he does it. (The only clip I have of him sprawling is on a bed, not on the hood of his car.) How about skub12 -- driving by in his car. With his hair down. And his sister beside him. It's beautiful. It's also THREE TIMES AS LONG AS I NEED. You do realize that we're going to trim out every other frame and then edit for length, right? Would you like to guess how long that takes by hand? Care to hazard an estimate of the MIND NUMBINGLY DULL NATURE OF THIS TASK?

I'm an idiot. There's got to be a better way to speed a clip up than manually deleting every other frame. I just don't know what that other way might be.

And hell, I can make footage go backwards if I want. Nothing is impossible for someone with a linear editor and a sufficient amount of determination!!

Back to the cars rising. Can we time the cars rising to the music? Yes.
But first, a question. Do you want to be sane at the end of this project? (Were you sane when you started?)

Total car erection footage needed: about 1.4 seconds. Clip? ~2.5 sec. Good.
*thump* -- 14.450 - 14.809 .358699 total (back when I was thinking cherub fountain, I referred to these sections as "money shots". Perhaps I watch too much porn.)
*minorbump* 14.809 - 15.287 .478265 total (drizzle of money shot.)
These two clips need to have the cars rising timed to them. I know. I *know* but that's the deal.
.8369 seconds of footage. Cars need to appear .04 seconds in, .3587 seconds in, and .52967 seconds in.

Okily dokily, neighbor. There you have it. Slightly less than four seconds of video. Now we move on to the next line:

I got everything that a man could want

Preliminary notes for that line: All the OTHER people he sleeps with in the thing. So that'd be everyone who rides in the car. Make a list. We need complete, here. More footage is better.

Guess what I'll be doing this weekend? *sigh* I should have taken notes the first time through. But slim, the line is like four seconds long and that bastard sleeps with like half the cast. So what if you miss someone? People will notice. Given the amount of work in making the thing, it might as well be right.

Just a note... if you plan on making an AMV, pick a song and an anime that you can stand to hear/watch four, five thousand times.