Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	Wonderwall - [Ryan Adams]
Entry tags:	hikaru no go, new vid

Hikaru no Go vid (AMV) - Rival


"A masterful game cannot happen with just one genius, you need two people with equal genius. Two. When you have two, you can finally take a step towards the Divine Move."

Rival
Fandom: Hikaru no Go (anime)
Song/Artist: Wonderwall covered by Ryan Adams
Duration: 4:00 minutes

Summary: A slow-paced slash shipper vid for Akira/Hikaru, focusing on their interlinked destinies through their love for Go.
Spoilers: Pretty much all episodes of the series, but not the specials.

Download:
Good quality version (zipped mpg, 34.08MB)
Mirror download from animemusicvideos.org
(ETA 23 March 2006: the small version is no longer available for download.)

This is my first 'proper' AMV, and feedback will be very much appreciated. :)


Boring vidder commentary

Akira/Hikaru is definitely my OTP for this show; there's such a sense of destiny between them, of being perfectly matched. It always amazes me that some people can't see the heavy slash subtext in this rivalry! ;) I'd already done a Tru Calling vid to Oasis' original song a while back, but Ryan Adams' cover is so different in texture, and quite perfect for this 'ship, that I had to go for the little bit of self-indulgence. There's a POV shift halfway through the song, I hope it came through clearly although I get the feeling sometimes it might be hard to tell.

I'm not familiar with many anime shows, so I don't know if this is a common anime feature or something more specific to HNG, but a lot of footage consists of one single still and a slow camera track over it, whether it be a pan, push-in or something else. There are also a lot of stationary frames, so most of the challenge for this vid ended up getting through some sort of coherent internal movement. To me that didn't seem all that different from live action vidding - but maybe I'm just doing it wrong! Am terribly new to the whole AMV business so still finding my way around the wherefores and how-tos.

The original footage has embedded English subtitles, which severely limited my choice of footage, so I decided to crop it to widescreen. The bad news is that, when exporting to MPG, my piece-of-crap program then decided to either A) squash down the footage a bit if I tried to export in NTSC or B) stretch the footage a bit if I tried to export in PAL. Choosing the lesser of two evils, I found for the latter, even though I'm fervently against the use of stretched clips in vids. Am terribly ashamed but sadly that was the way things had to go. Program being a singularly persistent piece of crap was also the reason why there's no watermark on the MPG version.

Hmm... what else? Vidding to slow songs with no clear timing cues is interesting and challenging, but sometimes it does make for a dullish vid. I do plan to make a faster, more rhythmic A/H vid sometime in the future. And that's about it, I think. Over and out.