Video Information

Information

  • Members: Nightowl, gambitt
  • Studio: Nightowl Pictures
  • Title: Playground Love
  • Premiered: 2003-09-27
  • Categories:
  • Song:
    • AIR Playground Love
  • Anime:
  • Participation:
  • Comments: I'm told this video has a love/hate thing. People seem to either love it, or hate it. I'll let everyone know right now that it's slow. Well, slow for an AMV. A lot of blood went into this one, as well... I think it was worth it, but then, I made the damned thing.

    Once again, Jeff (gambitt) and I worked on this together. It'll be our last video for awhile, as it got pretty rough toward the end. If you look really hard you can actually see us fighting : ) Regardless, it was difficult... moreso emotionally than anything else. And I'm not saying the actual video is emotional (although I'd like to think it is), just what we put into it. But that's neither here nor there. I think we made something we can be proud of... or, at least, I hope we can.

    Jeff worked on all the compositing - 90% of this video was done in After Effects. He worked a lot of hours cutting out all of the frames from Kare Kano - sure, most of them are stills, as the show tends to use a lot of stills... however, he also masked the motion shots. If you'll notice, every single hair on Miyazawa's head remains intact. I think his head almost exploded as he worked on it, as a vein or two would pop out every once in awhile. Once again, he did amazing compositing work.

    In addition, Jeff animated the petal backgrounds in the particle generator Illusion - an amazing program. Every single petal that floats by is individual - that isn't a loop. He did two backgrounds with different movements - one for the film background, and one for the color masks. I'm not sure how many petals there are in total, but it ended up being a lot.

    We used a whole bunch of programs to make this thing as well, not to mention the two PCs and two Macs it was made on. Yes, a cross-platform video. Fun. If I can remember correctly, we used Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illusion, AVISynth, VirtualDub, Cinema Tools, Soundtrack, Lightwave... I know I'm going to forget a few, but oh well. Those were the biggies.

    Here's to Lightwave. The playground itself was modeled and rendered in Lightwave. We didn't have time to do a full 6,000+ frame render for the entire background motion, so we compromised - we have 480 frames stretched out and frame blended to the three and a half minute timeline. To achieve the film look we went with a plug-in I loathed before this video - CineLook. Everyone seems to use CineLook, and it usually looks like video with a film-look plug in thrown on top. So, in order to make it look as film like as possible, I pulled out my old projector and made sure the clicks, reel changes, and scratches looked EXACTLY the same as the reel I was working off of. The clicks themselves were then recorded and put back into the video, then edited to fit any clicks that didn't match up. So I suppose I click-matched.

    The classic iris in/out was stolen from a variety of different silent films, but the final version was more or less taken from Shadow of the Vampire. They had a beautiful iris effect.

    The music is Playground Love by AIR, from the soundtrack for The Virgin Suicides. I love their music - very haunting stuff.

    A lot was put into this video, more than I care to write about. Jeff and I bled and fought for it, and I, for one, am very happy with how it turned out. I know I've written a lot, but honestly, this is the short and dirty version - that, and I left a large chunk out. I just didn't want these comments to become too long-winded.

    It won best original concept and best artistic in the AWA9 Professional Contest.

    The copy I have up for download is an MPEG-1. I like compatibility.

    If anyone has any specific questions concerning the video, send me an email. I'll go on and on and on and on and on about it. Trust me.



Opinions (68)

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  • Visual
  • Sound
  • Synch
  • Lip
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  • Re-View
  • Overall
  • 9.94
  • 9.81
  • 9.78
  • 9.44
  • 9.96
  • 9.91
  • 8.74
  • 9.59

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