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Information

• Member: CrackTheSky
• Title: Victims of the Night
• Premiered: 2015-01-31
• Categories:
  • Fun
  • Dance
  • Romance
  • Sentimental
• Song:
  • Walk the Moon Shut Up And Dance
• Anime:
  • Kimagure Orange Road (TV)
• Participation:
  • Middle Tennessee Anime Convention (MTAC), MTAC 15 AMV Contest (2015-04-03)
  • Anime Expo 2015, Anime Expo 2015 AMV Competition (2015-07-02)
  • Nan Desu Kan 2015, Nan Desu Kan 2015 (2015-09-04)
• Comments: Wall of text warning!
  
  This is the first in what is going to be three Kimagure Orange Road videos that I made to basically celebrate KOR, a series that has become very dear to me, despite having only just seen it for the first time last summer. It has everything, it made me feel everything, and I wanted to put that into video form...unfortunately, doing so would have been pretty much impossible with one video, so I decided to make three. The second one is here, and the last one is here.
  
  KOR is a phenomenal anime. It's not perfect, but even its flaws can be charming. The characters are excellent -- some of the absolute best I've encountered in an anime -- and the love story was relatable for me in more ways than one. When taken as a whole (meaning, the series, plus the OVAs, plus the two movies), KOR is a sweeping slice-of-life high school epic, and I love it. It made me laugh and smile, it made me choke up and almost break down in tears, and it did everything in between.
  
  These videos were, in a general sense, inspired by Pwolf's ginormous Macross tribute video, Angel's Voice. Although his is one huge epic video that basically encompasses everything Macross, and I have three separate videos that are completely different from one another, I think the general approach I took in making these videos was very similar to Pwolf's: I wanted to take all the emotions, all the little bits and pieces, everything that makes KOR what it is, and make a video out of it...but it was just not feasible for me to do this with one video, so I ended up making three.
  
  These three videos are, essentially, KOR in a nutshell. Not always from a story perspective, granted, but I at least wanted to convey the various aesthetics and motifs that permeated the series and movies. I hope it comes across; KOR is at various points fun and happy, painful and heartbreaking, wistful and melancholy. I wanted to treat you to all these different emotions and provide a kind of overview of KOR in the process. If you watch these videos, you'll know exactly what KOR is like. You should watch the series, but in case it's too much trouble...hopefully these videos will serve as an acceptable substitute.
  
  Enjoy!
  
  
  In my experience, the most fun videos to make are the ones that are easy. What I mean by this is, every so often the stars align and you hear a song, envision an anime that will just fit so perfectly that, as an editor, it's unthinkable to NOT make a video by combining the two. And then when you start, the video basically edits itself. Everything comes together flawlessly and that's that.
  
  Now, I'm not saying this is a perfect video -- not even close -- but the creation of this video was very easy. I had watched Kimagure Orange Road over summer 2014 and had been wanting, desperately, to edit with it ever since I saw it. It's a flawed anime in many ways, but it's incredibly charming and as far as old-school anime goes, pretty top-notch. It's also a really versatile source and it seemed like it would be really fun to edit with...but I needed a song. I wanted to make a video with a fully 1980s aesthetic. I searched for songs but nothing really struck me, so I waited until I had the proper inspiration.
  
  That inspiration came in the form of hearing the last minute and a half of the song "Shut Up And Dance" on the car radio one day while Christmas shopping, six months later. It was like a bolt of lightning struck me, I swear -- this was the song! There could be no question about it. It was fun and happy, it was incredibly catchy, the lyrics were perfect, and it had a distinct, '80s throwback sound. I loved it.
  
  I waited until after the holidays and threw this together in three solid editing sessions over about a week. It didn't take long; like I said, the video basically edited itself. It was an absolute blast to make and I'm entirely satisfied with the outcome. It's not as tightly synced as it could be, but that was a conscious decision -- I don't like over-synced videos so I went with my gut in a lot of places on the timeline and decided against making the video too flashy or beat-driven...but still enough to make me smile.
  
  The concept is simple enough to not need any explanation, at least I would hope. It's not entirely representative of what actually happens in KOR though. KOR is basically one big, long, high school love triangle, but I focused on just one side of it and left the other character (Hikaru) out of the video completely except in a few innocuous scenes. I really liked the idea of destiny bringing Kyousuke and Madoka together, which is kind of a thread that runs through the series and movies. The song was perfect in this regard.
  
  Also worth noting is that this is my first attempt at a dance video in my 8+ years of editing. For what it's worth, I think "dance" as a genre descriptor gets thrown around a little too often. (People, this is a dance video, this is not. Learn the difference.) In any case, I think I succeeded, although there ended up being way fewer dance scenes in KOR than I remember. As such, I had to take a few creative liberties which resulted in a few problems with consistency in some places...ah well, deal with it.
  
  And, final thing -- I decided against going super LQ with this release as I have done in recent videos; even though the editing is super simple in this video and it uses an older source, part of what makes old-school videos "old-school" to me is the audio as well, and this song is just too new. Call it an old-school video if you must, but since the song is so recent I didn't think it would look right to go the whole nine yards and emulate the full "old-school" aesthetic as I've been doing recently. I'm sure no one will complain about this.
  
  Enjoy!
  
  
  Technical notes:
  Edited entirely in Sony Vegas 8, no other video or image editing programs used (other than the usual scene prep and encoding programs). I'd guess this took me something like 12-15 hours to put together.
  
  Oh, and thanks to my beta testers, and by "beta testers" I really just mean a couple people who got to see the video before anyone else (Cirera and Koopiskeva). Yaaaayy.
  
  
  Note on spoilers:
  KOR the series is pretty hard to spoil with an AMV, since the romance part of the story (i.e. the main, most interesting part) is not resolved until the first movie. So, if for some reason you're thinking of not watching this until after you see the series or something, there's literally nothing in here that you wouldn't pick up on within the first few episodes (or even the first five minutes of the first episode) of the series. KOR is episodic and pretty thematically repetitive until after the series ends.