Music Videos

I assume anyone who actually reads this blog realizes by now the kind of nerd I am, so I doubt my image will be tarnished much further by sharing these.

Last night I ran across a music video (an anime music video, no less) I made some years ago, and it occured to me that not everyone has seen them. If you have, you're free to stop reading, or to roll your eyes at me for making a post about this.

The first, which I made 2 or 3 years ago, is a fairly straightforward video of Final Fantasy VII Advent Children to Nightwish. This is not the most original combination of source material, but the editing and timing is exceptional, if I do say so myself. This was actually a collaborative project with UntoldForce, who came up with the combination, the outline for the video, and a couple key moments. Unfortunately, the original draft also included full minute-long clips of footage without any original cuts, which I found heretical. I gutted the video, left most of the outline in place, and recreated it.

Of course, it lacks anything resembling a plot, meaning, or purpose beyond "that was cool." In other words, I was very faithful to the source material.



My single favorite moment of the video is at 3:43, when the motorcycle bounces. There were plenty of well-timed shots, but that one was truly perfect. I crack up every time I see it.

Alright, second video. This one is a little...um...less faithful to the source material. It's also one of my greatest high school accomplishments. This video was created in an editing frenzy not unlike the Vulcan Pon Farr - a ritual in which I could only expel the demons that possessed me through a primal act of creation, by completing the project in 48 hours.

Unfortunately, the concept will not be immediately clear to most viewers. Basically, I took the audio from a legendary scene in Transformers: the Movie (not the Michael Bay movie, the animated one) and edited it together with footage from the Escaflowne movie so that, I hoped, they would look like they were meant to go together. There's a bit of story behind its creation, but I'll save it for after the video.



Reactions to this video vary from "huh?" to "that was the greatest video I have ever seen." Your reaction was likely between the two, and may have tended on the "huh?" side.

Now the story. In my second year of video production in high school, we were all expected to complete an "independent project" in one quarter. I was making a highly pretentious video set to Philip Glass music, and had collected all the footage I needed, so I asked my teacher if I could borrow one of the editing machines (a G4 Mac) over the weekend so I could edit the project. He said ok, but unfortunately (or fortunately for those who liked the video above) I forgot to bring my footage home with me, and the video lab was locked.

Not wanting to show up empty handed on Monday, I decided to take advantage of having an editing machine for another, more dubious purpose. I knew immediately that I wanted to make a video that used the audio from Transformers, but I wasn't sure what to edit it to. I went through a list of candidate series and movies, considering what each had to offer, until I just stumbled upon the Escaflowne movie and discovered that if had everything I needed. I did sleep and eat food that weekend, but I'm not sure that I did much else.

Now, there's another piece of background I skipped. In my first year of video production, discussions about anime had derailed the class often enough that my teacher had declared all anime forbidden in his classroom. Additionally, my friend, UntoldForce, had dropped the class a week after school started, in a move that thoroughly disturbed my teacher. Knowing this, you can probably imagine his reaction when he came into class on Monday and saw my friend sitting in the classroom viewing my final product, which at first glanced didn't even appear as an edited project but simply a scene from an anime series.

I escaped punishment by convincing my teacher that it was impressive that he hadn't been able to tell it was something I'd edited together from two sources. He rejected my attempt to turn this in as my indepent project however, so I ended up finishing Pretention in 3 Parts (I don't remember what the original title was, but that works just as well).


I've made other music videos, but they do not appear here either because they're not in digital form (they're on VHS tapes in my closet - I really should digitize them), or because they are unspeakable horrors that were created in order to please other beings and not myself.

-Silent Ellipsis