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Information

• Member: ShonenDizzyCow
• Studio: Shonen Productions
• Title: Evangelion Opus
• Premiered: 2001-11-16
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
  • Serious
  • Horror
• Songs:
  • Queen Bohemian Rhapsody
  • Queen Bohemian Rhapsody (Live at Wembley '86 Version)
• Anime:
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion (Death & Rebirth)
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion (End of Evangelion)
• Participation:
  • Anime Weekend Atlanta 7, Anime Weekend Atlanta 7 (2001-09-21)
  • MindWarp 2001 Fall/Winter AMV Contest, MindWarp 2001 Fall/Winter AMV Contest (2001-11-30)
  • Megacon 02, Megacon 02 (2002-02-22)
  • CSUN Anime AMV contest, CSUN Anime AMV contest (2002-11-30)
• Comments: AWARDS WON:
  
  MEGACON Feb, 2002
  
  WINNER : BEST OF SHOW
  
  MINDWARP FALL/WINTER 2001 CONTEST
  
  WINNER : JUDGES AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE (BEST OVERALL)
  WINNER : BEST EDITING
  
  INTRO:
  
  Well here is my Evangelion video.
  
  Evangelion, a truly amazing anime and my all time favorite, in many ways a step away from most others. It is grand, it is different, it is epic, it is personal. It's filled with emotion, symbolism, action and drama. It makes you think. This is my tribute (and hence contains spoilers) to it and I hope the video does the anime and song justice. This video is dramatic, but has occasional comedy and action elements (much like how Eva had comedy and action, even it was mostly dramatic). A little bit cross-genre I guess. There's a lot of talk about Eva being over used, partly because not many video creators take Eva seriously anymore (mostly parodies/non-stop action/asuka videos now adays), I hope this video helps to change that.
  
  This video's major focus is Shinji (see lyrics) and to a certain extent Rei/Asuka, but also takes time in representing a kaleidoscope of aspects and other characters that is key in Eva.
  
  THE VIDEO:
  
  Generally I try to mimic the visual style of how Eva was presented, especially those very quick shots/flashes. I have included what I though was the really nice snippet of those quick flashes that's so hard to catch in Eva sprinkled across this video. Each named character screen time appearance in the video is roughly proportional to the time each character appears in EVA. Notice many characters get their focus at various parts of the video.
  
  Creator comments:
  - The Opening Title credits show 2 Evangelion titles superimposed perpendicular to each other...as if forming a cross symbol, a tribute to all the symbolism in Eva.
  - Some Eva wallpapers images I made earlier for my desktop are used in this video, some are hard to spot.
  - My favorite composite 'shot' happens at 5:22. An interesting shot of all the 3 children.
  
  I could go on with more details but I think it's better to let the video do the talking.
  
  THE MUSIC:
  
  The actual song in this video combines, mixes and unites 2 versions of the same song, made within Premiere, which were recorded in a span of almost 10 years. The original version was recorded in 1975 and the Live at Wembley version was in 1986. It combines the full lyrics of the original and the powerful performance of the live version. About 70% of it is the very well recorded and re-edited live version so it's more upbeat and sounds sharper compared to the studio version. The song is an excellent showcase for Eva and offers many opportunities for the creator as well. I hoped that I have made a seamless, transparent mix (also as a bonus for those who downloaded), and to make this video more "Original".
  
  The song, Bohemian Rhapsody has many similarities to eva, the highs, lows, the opera, and the power. It invokes images of drama, dreams and tragedy and all that. I recommend watching this video above a certain volume and full screen for maximum enjoyment. For full lyrics go to http://www.queenwords.com/lyrics/songs/sng04_11.shtml You'll notice that it's an excellent matchup for Eva.
  
  THE MAKING:
  
  This video was a fun, sometimes painful and a great challenge to me in more ways than one and very educational.
  
  Honestly, it became quite painful to make this video at parts. Not something I want to repeat immediately. A large percentage of the video is a result pretty tedious or meticulous work, but it's worth it in the end. I must admit that it took more effort that I initially expected (I already expected a lot), but I really wanted to be fully satisfied with this video. Sifting though the entire Eva series and movies also was quite hard, even if I roughly knew the show well. I think things got complicated because of the length and complexity of the video. Ouch. I still hurt.
  
  Additionally, there are quite a number of edits are rather invisible, what might seem to be a normal uncut scene can sometimes actually consist of 3-4 cuts, and a similar number of effect, mainly to achieve what I wanted to achieve.
  
  This video took about 60+ solid premiere hours over a span of mainly about 3 weeks to make, then I went back and re-did another quality pass over it about a month later, and changed about 5-15% of it, to further improve it which took about another 30+ hours, over a period of about 1.5 more weeks. I then returned to it about 6 months later for about another 90 or so hours. (SEE REMAKING THE VIDEO section below).
  
  For a rough minimal guide of how much effort the video took, try simply counting the number of (obvious) scene changes. Even just counting them makes my head spin, imagine editing them. The actual number of edits is somewhere in the region of 900+ edits. That means an average of about 2.5 edits for each second for over 6 mintues. In addition I had to go through 15 hours of footage to obtain the best scene for each edit to synch with the lyrics, theme/focus and music. Also note that this is not even counting the number of audio edits yet. x.x
  
  This is my most complicated project thus far (not my longest video though); the adobe project file grew to over 1.6MB, slowing down Premiere on my machine to almost a crawl after a while. The timeline window _is_ a sight to see. ^_^
  
  RE-MAKING THE VIDEO:
  
  I went back to re-work on the video from the start of February-End of March 2002. For some reasons or another (mostly lack of time) I didn't have time to fully finish the video the way I really wanted to originally. So here is the final version of the video. I spent a total of about 80-90 hours on the video bringing the grand total time spent on this video to about 200 hours. It brings the following changes:
  
  1. DVD-quality footage. The main reason I wanted to re-work the video. Now it looks absolutely great, with really nice bright colors. I had to manually replace each and every single one of the 900+ edits of the video which took a lot of time and effort.
  2. A consistent framing throughout the video. No more annoying switching from full-frame to wide-screen. This required me to customize all full-frame edits individually one by one (roughly 400 edits) for the best composition.
  3. Fixing technical bugs. Effect mistakes are all now corrected and those that existed were further cleaned up. Some interesting new enchanced video effects are employed and added to enchance the drama.
  4. Better editing/timing, since I had to re-time EVERY clip, I made sure the timing is even better than the original, made sure each on of them was on the spot where I wanted, and made sure a lot of the footage 'moves' to the music. Also from feedback gathered, I corrected all the pacing issues where there was ‘over-editing’ (especially the beginning) where it had more cuts that the music beats would allow.
  5. Better lip-synching. This was my first real lip-synch video when I first made it, so now with much more experience, I went back and re-did all the lip synchs using a combination of frame-by-frame and other techniques to really improve them.
  6. Better content. The original had some less than focused footage (eg, Ritsko hitting the enter key), but now they have been thoughtfully replaced with much better footage for improved continuity and transitions of subject focus.
  7. Better character profiles - more character get better moments, especially for Asuka, Ritsko and Hikaru. There’s more emotion.
  8. The original video was made with subtitled footage, believe it or not, which I believe was one of its most amazing unknown facts of Evangelion Opus. So certain scenes were less then ideal due to the methods I used to dodge the subtitles, Now with un-subbed footage the video is no longer limited by this and this makes the video better.
  9. Manual Keyframe Insertion. Man was this a chore, considering how many scene changes the video had (over 900). It took literally hours to finish – however I think I will perform this in all my future works – it helps the video and it also acts as a great q/a technique since you are manually inspecting each and every frame of the video (11000+ for EO). I actually did find error while I was going through the video which I am grateful for.
  10. Improved Title Audio Credits Sequence – now remade the way I originally planned it, for the tape player now properly displays the credits within the LCD, including a reference to one of my other video’s song.
  11. I meticulously and almost using a frame-by-frame scaling, re-did the effects and editing-heavy ending sequence to give it more structure and interesting meanings with the marriage of text and images.
  12. Many, many other improvements.
  
  Half of the re-working time was spent substituting footage with their DVD-equivalents and the other half making improvements to the video.
  
  For people who have the ‘original’ version, it is highly recommended to have a copy of this version. Also this version is the final version of Evangelion Opus designed for long lasting goodness.
  
  SUMMARY:
  
  I hope this video entertains. Good to watch and keep. I hope it goes well for both Eva fans and as well as people who hasn't watched Evangelion. This is my 'little' grand opus gift.
  
  Please take time to download it, and do tell me in your review what you think and feel about it. This one goes out especially for Evangelion fans. Thanks to Gainax for making such an excellent anime. Thanks for reading this far!!
  
  ***************************
  
  SPOILER WARNING: This video contains MAJOR EVANGELION SPOILERS. You have been warned. Since Evangelion has been out so long, I assume everyone that wanted to watch it has already did. It also contains Eva-type nudity and bizarreness, but that shouldn't be surprising. If you however have yet to watch NGE, what are you waiting for? Go watch Eva then immediately come back and watch this. If you already have watched NGE, enjoy! Once again this video contains MAJOR EVANGELION SPOILERS.
  
  ***************************
  
  Download, turn up volume, full screen it, sit back and Enjoy the video!
  
  ******
  2004 update, I guess I should update this specifically for the download status of this video since I get so many request for it each week. This video (and every other video listed here for that matter), as far as I know is not downloadable from any web source since my host died in 2003. Other members who have been around may have a copy of my video and you may want to source it from them if possible since I can be rather irregular online (therefore transfering via IM apps are not prefered by me, besides there will be too many request and it will flood my upload stream). I've tried to upload to this web site before, but ran into problems and also found the new encode to be rather bad, so I removed it. I will have to find the time to re-do or simply upload the 'original' mpeg encode (which isn't very hot) one day. Until then, thanks for the interest, and I apologize if I cannot personally reply each and every e-mail requesting for the video (too many, not enough time).