Zarxrax
10-08-2010, 04:14 PM
The History of AMV Hell
As told by Zarxrax
I don't really remember how it all began.
The year was two thousand and four. SSGWNBTD had been on my AIM buddy list for a while, and we would chat sometimes. I hadn't met him yet IRL, and I don't remember how he got on my buddy list, but there he was. Quite freqently, usually several times a week, he would send me a message that simply consisted of a song and an anime title. Sometimes he would send me short clips that he edited. He rarely actually fleshed these out into full AMVs.
So after quite some time of this, one day I said to him "hey, why don't the two of us make an AMV that just consists of short clips like these?"
And so it began.
We began work on our AMV of short clips. I don't remember how much time we spent on the first one... maybe a few weeks or months. Since the theme of it was comedy, I figured it might be a hit at conventions. However, since some of the ideas that we were coming up with weren't exactly "convention friendly", this posed a small problem. But we quickly came up with a solution. We will just split it into 2 videos: one that is safe to show at conventions, and another that could be viewed online.
At this point, we needed to come up with some sort of overall theme, or a way to tie the videos together. I think SSG mentioned something about the game Wario Ware. I had just started playing Wario Ware twisted, so I thought I would take a look at some of the transitions that they used between the games. In the first level, Mona Pizza, it had a really cool tv transition. I didn't need to look any further, we had our transition.
But, I didn't want to use the same transition for both videos. I figured they should be different. I had been using "Freakazoid" for one of my clips, and I remembered that it had an interesting transition, so I took that and used it for the 2nd video. Nate Bezner of Nightowl Productions also caught wind of our project, and sent in a clip of his own, which I put into the 2nd one.
The title, "AMV Hell", was actually something we came up with almost at the very end. We had been bouncing around different ideas for the title, but were having trouble coming up with anything that felt fitting for the project. The previous year, I had attended an anime convention for the first time, and I remembered seeing an event there called "Anime Hell". This event basically consisted of some random video clips. I thought it might be funny to parody this by calling our project "AMV Hell". Some convention goers might get a kick out of it.
AMV Hell. I liked the sound of it. This is where AMVs go to die. Of course, at the time, we were just making two simple AMVs. I had no idea that the scope of the project would soon grow exponentially, and then potentially cause confusion with the original Anime Hell event.
I decided to premiere the video at Animazement, because it was a local con for me. Fanime also happened to be occuring on the same weekend, so we sent it there as well. I remember the audience at Animazement went crazy for it, with huge uproars of laughter. It was the first time I had seen such a response to an AMV. It reportedly had a great reaction at Fanime as well. After that, SSG wanted to send it to Otakon, because he would be attending that convention. It ended up winning both "Best Humor" and "Best in Show" at Otakon, which is kind of a big deal. SSG took home two huge trophies.
That was supposed to be the end of it.
But then, people started asking me when AMV Hell 3 would come out. Now, at the end of AMV Hell 2, I had included a short advertisement for "AMV Hell 3: The Motion Picture". This was, for all intents and purposes, a joke. I figured that it should be obvious that we weren't going to make an actual movie. But apparently it wasn't. After several people asked me about it, I finally started actually thinking about the idea seriously. A few years earlier, the concept of the "multi-editor project" had been born, thanks to the DDR Project. I thought, if we make this a multi-editor project, maybe we could really pull this off. I consulted with SSG, and it was on like Donkey Kong.
Google had just launched their new Gmail service, so we made a shared email account that we could use to manage the entries that everyone was sending in. Me and SSG both got to work making lots and lots of clips.
Videos from other people were coming in... rather slowly. There were many times when I wondered if we would really be able to pull this off. It seemed like my and SSG's clips were going to make up the majority of the project. I was hoping we could at least get it to be about 30 minutes long. But as the deadline drew near, videos started coming in at a rapid pace. Apparently everyone had been procrastinating. Finally, right before the deadline, this guy "Kitsuner" sent in like 50 videos, all at once. The project was saved!
For the opening sequence, I thought the song "Highway to Hell" would be really fitting, but I didn't really know what to do with it. Zephyrstar offered to do 3d animation for me, so I got him to make a car driving on a desert highway. In hindsight, the opening was probably a bit long and drawn out, and theres not really any humor to it, but at the time, it seemed like a cool idea. For the ending, SSG took a popular AMV, "Shounen Bushido", and he re-edited it to a remix of "Country Roads". Once I saw what he had done, I knew that there was no better way to end the project.
For the transition in this one, I decided that the way we handled it in AMV Hell 1 was really good, so I went with the TV transition again. This time I tweaked the design a little so that it would look better, but its still based on the graphics from Wario Ware Twisted.
One thing that we were struggling with at the beginning, was figuring out the best way to give recognition to the creators of each video. I felt that simply having a huge list of credits at the end wasn't enough, because who reads credits anyways? I thought of maybe putting the info on the screen when the clip comes up, like on music videos, but that seemed like it would be too distracting. Finally I decided to let each creator send in a small logo or avatar, and these would go on the bottom-right corner of their video.
I almost forgot, but just like we had split the original AMV Hell into 2 videos, we decided to do the same with AMV Hell 3. The alternate video this time would be called AMV Hell 0. I specifically told people not to hold back... they should make the most nasty, disgusting, or offensive things that they could. Nothing would be censored. This basically resulted in a lot of Hentai videos. Now, there were a few videos submitted which even made me uncomfortable, particularly a few which contained racism, solely to offend. However since I had particularly told people to make offensive videos, and that nothing would be censored, I decided to let some of these in. However, as AMV Hell 0 ended up being known as a hentai video, these videos (and some of the tamer videos) do feel out of place in it.
The last few weeks leading up to the premiere were pure hell. Most people have no idea of what goes into assembling a project like this. Most of the entries were coming in at the very end, so you can't work on it all throughout the year, you have to just make a mad rush right at the end and hope you meet the convention deadline. For almost every video, there is back and forth communication with the creator, you've gotta get all the video info together for the credits, you've gotta get the person's logo on the video, and you've make sure all of the videos conform to certain resolutions and framerates, all of this different stuff. PLUS I was putting together two projects, not just one! And then you have to arrange everything on the timeline, and put transitions between every single clip, and try to make sure that the volume levels don't jump around wildly from clip to clip. Arranging the clips is actually a very involved process. They aren't just placed randomly. There are many factors to consider: you've got to look at how funny you think a video is, so that all the really good videos aren't bunched up in one place. You have to look at where the joke accurs in each clip. If people are going to be laughing at the very end of one clip, you've got to consider that they may not be able to hear the start of the next clip, so you have to take this into consideration. You don't want a bunch of spoken dialogue clips to be right next to each other--they need to be broken up with clips that use songs. You don't want a really loud clip to follow a really soft clip. Clips that use the same anime need to be split up so they aren't all bunched together. You don't want all of a single creator's clips to be bunched up together, either. Long clips need to be seperated by short clips, or else the audience may start getting bored. Some clips have a certain synergy together, and work really well when put next to each other. And finally, special care has to be put into selecting the first several clips, and the last few clips of the project. I probably made at least 5 different revisions of AMV Hell 3, changing the placement of some videos each time. The sheer number of clips make everything really complicated. It's difficult to know if you accidentally forgot to include a clip, for example. Making the credits is probably the worst part. Trying to collect all of the information together for each clip is a huge hassle, and then putting it all in the same order that the clips appeared in the project is very time consuming.
(Continued)
As told by Zarxrax
I don't really remember how it all began.
The year was two thousand and four. SSGWNBTD had been on my AIM buddy list for a while, and we would chat sometimes. I hadn't met him yet IRL, and I don't remember how he got on my buddy list, but there he was. Quite freqently, usually several times a week, he would send me a message that simply consisted of a song and an anime title. Sometimes he would send me short clips that he edited. He rarely actually fleshed these out into full AMVs.
So after quite some time of this, one day I said to him "hey, why don't the two of us make an AMV that just consists of short clips like these?"
And so it began.
We began work on our AMV of short clips. I don't remember how much time we spent on the first one... maybe a few weeks or months. Since the theme of it was comedy, I figured it might be a hit at conventions. However, since some of the ideas that we were coming up with weren't exactly "convention friendly", this posed a small problem. But we quickly came up with a solution. We will just split it into 2 videos: one that is safe to show at conventions, and another that could be viewed online.
At this point, we needed to come up with some sort of overall theme, or a way to tie the videos together. I think SSG mentioned something about the game Wario Ware. I had just started playing Wario Ware twisted, so I thought I would take a look at some of the transitions that they used between the games. In the first level, Mona Pizza, it had a really cool tv transition. I didn't need to look any further, we had our transition.
But, I didn't want to use the same transition for both videos. I figured they should be different. I had been using "Freakazoid" for one of my clips, and I remembered that it had an interesting transition, so I took that and used it for the 2nd video. Nate Bezner of Nightowl Productions also caught wind of our project, and sent in a clip of his own, which I put into the 2nd one.
The title, "AMV Hell", was actually something we came up with almost at the very end. We had been bouncing around different ideas for the title, but were having trouble coming up with anything that felt fitting for the project. The previous year, I had attended an anime convention for the first time, and I remembered seeing an event there called "Anime Hell". This event basically consisted of some random video clips. I thought it might be funny to parody this by calling our project "AMV Hell". Some convention goers might get a kick out of it.
AMV Hell. I liked the sound of it. This is where AMVs go to die. Of course, at the time, we were just making two simple AMVs. I had no idea that the scope of the project would soon grow exponentially, and then potentially cause confusion with the original Anime Hell event.
I decided to premiere the video at Animazement, because it was a local con for me. Fanime also happened to be occuring on the same weekend, so we sent it there as well. I remember the audience at Animazement went crazy for it, with huge uproars of laughter. It was the first time I had seen such a response to an AMV. It reportedly had a great reaction at Fanime as well. After that, SSG wanted to send it to Otakon, because he would be attending that convention. It ended up winning both "Best Humor" and "Best in Show" at Otakon, which is kind of a big deal. SSG took home two huge trophies.
That was supposed to be the end of it.
But then, people started asking me when AMV Hell 3 would come out. Now, at the end of AMV Hell 2, I had included a short advertisement for "AMV Hell 3: The Motion Picture". This was, for all intents and purposes, a joke. I figured that it should be obvious that we weren't going to make an actual movie. But apparently it wasn't. After several people asked me about it, I finally started actually thinking about the idea seriously. A few years earlier, the concept of the "multi-editor project" had been born, thanks to the DDR Project. I thought, if we make this a multi-editor project, maybe we could really pull this off. I consulted with SSG, and it was on like Donkey Kong.
Google had just launched their new Gmail service, so we made a shared email account that we could use to manage the entries that everyone was sending in. Me and SSG both got to work making lots and lots of clips.
Videos from other people were coming in... rather slowly. There were many times when I wondered if we would really be able to pull this off. It seemed like my and SSG's clips were going to make up the majority of the project. I was hoping we could at least get it to be about 30 minutes long. But as the deadline drew near, videos started coming in at a rapid pace. Apparently everyone had been procrastinating. Finally, right before the deadline, this guy "Kitsuner" sent in like 50 videos, all at once. The project was saved!
For the opening sequence, I thought the song "Highway to Hell" would be really fitting, but I didn't really know what to do with it. Zephyrstar offered to do 3d animation for me, so I got him to make a car driving on a desert highway. In hindsight, the opening was probably a bit long and drawn out, and theres not really any humor to it, but at the time, it seemed like a cool idea. For the ending, SSG took a popular AMV, "Shounen Bushido", and he re-edited it to a remix of "Country Roads". Once I saw what he had done, I knew that there was no better way to end the project.
For the transition in this one, I decided that the way we handled it in AMV Hell 1 was really good, so I went with the TV transition again. This time I tweaked the design a little so that it would look better, but its still based on the graphics from Wario Ware Twisted.
One thing that we were struggling with at the beginning, was figuring out the best way to give recognition to the creators of each video. I felt that simply having a huge list of credits at the end wasn't enough, because who reads credits anyways? I thought of maybe putting the info on the screen when the clip comes up, like on music videos, but that seemed like it would be too distracting. Finally I decided to let each creator send in a small logo or avatar, and these would go on the bottom-right corner of their video.
I almost forgot, but just like we had split the original AMV Hell into 2 videos, we decided to do the same with AMV Hell 3. The alternate video this time would be called AMV Hell 0. I specifically told people not to hold back... they should make the most nasty, disgusting, or offensive things that they could. Nothing would be censored. This basically resulted in a lot of Hentai videos. Now, there were a few videos submitted which even made me uncomfortable, particularly a few which contained racism, solely to offend. However since I had particularly told people to make offensive videos, and that nothing would be censored, I decided to let some of these in. However, as AMV Hell 0 ended up being known as a hentai video, these videos (and some of the tamer videos) do feel out of place in it.
The last few weeks leading up to the premiere were pure hell. Most people have no idea of what goes into assembling a project like this. Most of the entries were coming in at the very end, so you can't work on it all throughout the year, you have to just make a mad rush right at the end and hope you meet the convention deadline. For almost every video, there is back and forth communication with the creator, you've gotta get all the video info together for the credits, you've gotta get the person's logo on the video, and you've make sure all of the videos conform to certain resolutions and framerates, all of this different stuff. PLUS I was putting together two projects, not just one! And then you have to arrange everything on the timeline, and put transitions between every single clip, and try to make sure that the volume levels don't jump around wildly from clip to clip. Arranging the clips is actually a very involved process. They aren't just placed randomly. There are many factors to consider: you've got to look at how funny you think a video is, so that all the really good videos aren't bunched up in one place. You have to look at where the joke accurs in each clip. If people are going to be laughing at the very end of one clip, you've got to consider that they may not be able to hear the start of the next clip, so you have to take this into consideration. You don't want a bunch of spoken dialogue clips to be right next to each other--they need to be broken up with clips that use songs. You don't want a really loud clip to follow a really soft clip. Clips that use the same anime need to be split up so they aren't all bunched together. You don't want all of a single creator's clips to be bunched up together, either. Long clips need to be seperated by short clips, or else the audience may start getting bored. Some clips have a certain synergy together, and work really well when put next to each other. And finally, special care has to be put into selecting the first several clips, and the last few clips of the project. I probably made at least 5 different revisions of AMV Hell 3, changing the placement of some videos each time. The sheer number of clips make everything really complicated. It's difficult to know if you accidentally forgot to include a clip, for example. Making the credits is probably the worst part. Trying to collect all of the information together for each clip is a huge hassle, and then putting it all in the same order that the clips appeared in the project is very time consuming.
(Continued)