melodytree

Title: Run Like Hell
Fandom: Yuri on Ice, Yuri/Yuuri
Song: Run Like Hell by Biometrix ft. Neoni (nightcore remix)
Contains: Stuttery cuts between clips and very quick fades/flashes to and from dark and light.
Notes: Nothing can slow Yuri down as he competes with Yuuri. Made for everknight for ficinabox
Download: Here (contains lyrics in softsubs)
Embed: (also has lyric subs)


Misc notes:
I picked this song out ages ago with the vague idea of making a Yuri AMV to it some day, but I didn't have any particular concept in mind; then I saw everknight's request in FIAB, and I knew I wanted to make something about his rivalry with Yuuri. The ending was originally different, but it felt too focused on the 'rivalry' aspect and less their relationship, so I replaced it with them meeting up again and dancing together, which I think fits a lot better.

I don't have much in the way of technical notes this time, but I did do some slight redraws to a couple of the ending pictures to make Yuri look less grumpy :)

Title: You're Really Pretty, Girl
Fandom: Hikari no Densetsu, Hikari/Hazuki
Song: Pretty Girl by Hayley Kiyoko
Contains: N/A
Notes: A rhythmic gymnast strives to become good enough that the older gymnast she admires will notice her, too.
Download: Here (contains lyrics in softsubs)
Embed: (also has lyric subs)


Misc notes:
I finished the first draft of this quite a while ago, but I wasn't satisfied with it. Then I saw that the newest effect exercise at vexercises was masking, and that made me revisit it. The main thing I wanted to try masking on was an effect I've seen in AMVs where an object/character is masked for a very short time to make a smoother transition between clips; I mostly used it on the ribbons here, but also on the ball once. I'm very happy with how the poster mask about a minute in came out, too. I also tried using masking on top of lowered opacity/fades, and more boringly to cover up some lip flapping and a couple of video errors.

All of it was done using the pen tools directly in Premiere. This worked out okay and was convenient, but for more complex masks, it quickly gets frustrating because the controls are not as good as they are in Photoshop. Next time, I would probably look into how to best import/export from Photoshop for anything more difficult.

I also experimented with using whip pans as transitions. One or two of them might've been a bit gratuitous, but overall I like the motion they add.

This was not the easiest source to work with; it's an anime from 1986 that had a DVD release of poor quality and, as far as I can tell, that was it. (I think it might not have even been released on DVD in Japan; the only references I could find were imports from France.) The footage is shaky and has ghosts, poor colors and color shifting, a serious noise problem, and torn frame edges. I did my best to fix the frame edges through duplication and occasionally masking and also brightened the footage by a lot before adding in my color effects.

I experimented with anime upscalers, but I didn't get good results (even with the one I could even get to run over all the footage instead of skipping most of the frames...). I noticed that it did do a great job of denoising the footage, which made the AMV look much better, but unfortunately, it also added contrast and saturation, and that made some of the scenes I'd color-corrected darker and muddier or kind of eye-searing. There doesn't seem to be any way to disable this effect, so I ended up not using it after all the time it took to process. Afterward, I found that Premiere had added a new denoise filter since I'd last checked (the old one looked terrible on this footage) - it's marked as being for VR film, but it worked well on this anime! Got almost as good results as with the fancy neural net denoisers with only a tiny bit of tweaking, and it looks so much better with the majority of the noise gone =D

Storytelling-wise, although we do see the characters using the other apparatuses, the ball and the ribbon are by far the most prominent. (I suspect this is because ball = easy and cheap to animate and ribbon = icon of the sport.) Early on, I decided to pretty much only use those clips of those two and to shift from the ribbon at the beginning to the ball in the middle. My thinking was that ribbon == metaphorical 'red string of fate' and the ball is like a mirror that reflects themselves and each other.

I know this is probably not going to be seen by a lot of people because the anime is so obscure, but I had a great time making it :)

Title: Spin Me!
Fandom: Figure skating!
Song: You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), Ninja Sex Party cover
Contains: Lots and lots of spinning skaters, if that might make you dizzy
Notes:
I'm sure this has been done a million times before, but when I heard this cover, my brain demanded I cut out the more stalker-y lyrics and make my own version.

Features:

• Spinny Swiss skaters (Tumblr post I made a while back - contains gifs)
• Satton, our tiny lady of spins
• Both directions, baby, right round round round
• Spinjumping
• Jumpspinning
• Old-fashioned layback arms
• Making fun of bad spin camera work (to be fair to the Ruh shot, that was saved for the replays; too many are not)
• and some groovy jamming

When possible, I tried to match up the blade positions of clips next to each other to create a more smooth and continuous effect.

Download: Click here (contains subs for lyrics on track 1, skaters on track 2)
Embed: (also has both sets of subs)

Watch on YouTube

Title: Stamina
Fandom: Gymnastics (Oksana Chusovitina)
Song: The Greatest by Sia
Contains: One shot that might look scary - it's a fall that she rolls out of and is okay.
Notes: In honor of Oksana Chusovitina, the gymnastics legend with five(!) skills named after her, who competed for three(!!) different countries, and made it to eight(!!!) Olympics - even after her son was born in 1999. She has finally retired at 46 years of age and received a standing ovation from the few in the stadium at the 2020ne Olympics after completing her last competitive vault ever.

Despite not liking bars, she has two bars moves named after her, including the hop full turn featured in the vid. She kept the same backwards roll sequence on her beam for over two decades. At the 2016 Olympics, she brought out the 'vault of death' that even Simone Biles thought was too dangerous and which had become infamous for being chucked by young gymnasts from underfunded feds without much equipment - without a great landing, but at least she rotated and landed on her feet. In 2008, she won her first individual medal (silver, on vault) despite being the oldest female gymnast there. She retired after London 2012 and un-retired less than twelve hours later. After a mistake on her vault at 2019 Worlds, she still managed to qualify for the Olympics... via her all-around score. Amazing. (I'm even a little amazed that she still has joints left after watching some of the older footage of her.)

Also, she seems to have a great personality in her interviews. Blunt and straightforward, but kind, and not without the occasional joke.

Download: Click here (contains softsubs for song lyrics)
Embed:

Title: Swans and Princes
Fandom: Figure skating!
Song: Swan Lake mix
Download: Here
Notes:
Vid contains notes on who each skater is in the subtitles (included as soft subs in the download).

After doing a previous collection of Carmens, someone asked if I'd do Swan Lake as well... and I do love Swan Lake.

This is every Swan Lake program I could find (which was skated at least once as a competitive program at the senior elite level), edited down into five minutes. There are 94 programs in there - if I missed your favorite, double-check that you aren't thinking of a program set to The Swan instead :)

I also did another full write-up with stats and graphs about the whole list of Swan Lake programs, from which year had the most Swan Lakes to how many were Black Swan programs to how often women have feather skirts as part of their costumes. It's here on DW and also over on Tumblr.

About the vid itself: since I got a question about this last time, I didn't try to match clips to the original Swan Lake music used in them except once or twice - I dropped the clips into Premiere without the matching audio. My process was more efficient this time, and first consisted of finding two or three good clips from each video as I watched them and clipping them into a 'storage' timeline. After I had gone through all the programs, I color-coded each one as having movement toward the left, toward the right, or various directions/no real directional movement. This made it much easier to match surrounding clips in the vid timeline to achieve flow. I also had three layers in the storage timeline: 'used' 'used [but not this particular clip]' and 'not yet used'. These organized which programs I had and hadn't already integrated into the vid and to make it easier to swap out clips that weren't working.

(There's also a very silly additional vidlet on Youtube here - explicit language in lyrics.)

Embed:

Title: Like the Way You Do It
Fandom: Yuri On Ice
Song: Don't Stop the Music (Jamie Cullum cover)
Contains: Suggestive content
Notes: For vexercises challenge: side character study. Tried to reflect both the humorous and flirty side of Chris and his more sincere competitive side. I chose the cover because of this Lambiel EX that I love.

Having a short time limit (even beyond the challenge, there's not that much high-quality footage of Chris) made this more relaxing than a full-length vid, though it didn't stop me from picking at the timing. I don't think I'll make short things on a regular basis, but it was nice to do it this time.
Download: Click here
Embed:

Title: Come On, Zhenya!
Fandom: Figure skating feat. Evgenia Medvedeva
Song: Come On, Sailor Moon by the Super Moonies
Embed:

Download: Here (soft subs of the lyrics are included)
Notes:
Happy birthday to Zhenya! Here's to her first four years as a senior (this was made before the beginning of this season); I hope she has many more happy ones.

I like how cute she can be. I like how openly fannish she is about K-Pop and her favorite anime. I like how she seems to be a very determined young woman. I like her skating! I like her efforts to improve herself and her drive to be able to make her own choices about her career. I like her costumes. I like her murder face.

Is her skating perfect? No. But she doesn't deserve even an iota of the ridiculous hate that's been thrown her way for crimes like winning competitions, not winning competitions, moving to another country to train while continuing to represent her home country, not being able to take flowers to her old coach because she couldn't find her, saying nice things about Canada, liking anime, or whatever other nonsense they've come up with this week.

Anyway, screw the haters. Haters gonna hate, Zhenya's gonna skate as long as she likes.

Thought it would be fun to set her skating to a Sailor Moon song (I edited together the English and instrumental versions of the song to make it less repetitive), and right after I started it, it was announced that she's going to be starring in the first Sailor Moon ice show next summer! Good for her.

The other skaters she's shown with in the 'Sailor warriors will be forever friends clips' are Anna Pogorilaya, Wakaba Higuchi, and Serafima Sakhanovich. (Because of the Sailor Moon theme, I chose friends of hers who are also young women.)

More technical note: Made in Resolve, since I wanted to try a program that might be less crash-happy than the old one I was using, and bonus - it's free. There were a few things about it that I liked, but I found it to be so glitchy and freeze-happy on my system that I promptly uninstalled it as soon as I was done. Oh, well. Added a couple of effects this time for fun, as I haven't really tried much before other than fussing with colors.

Originally meant to post this back in August, but then it got hit with copyright restrictions on Youtube due to the music and I never figured out what (if anything) to do about it. Then I checked it again today and it was magically cleared up to 'copyright owner can put ads on this' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Not going to complain!

Title: Skating Forward
Fandom: Figure skating!
Song: Time Back by Bad Style




Embed:

Download: Here
Notes:
Vid contains notes on who each skater is in the subtitles (included as soft subs in the download).

This vid is a history and celebration of figure skating. Not the history of figure skating (it's biased in terms of who and what I decided to include, in the decades and people and disciplines that got more emphasis than others, in who I could even find footage of even before the Great SBS Purge starting hitting YouTube, in terms of what I could fit into two and a half minutes) but I think it's interesting to see the changes over time all the same.

For example, you can see:
・skating change from 'evening dance and simple (often badly-done) jumps on ice and figures' to something much more difficult and action-packed
・women's skirts shorten dramatically
・men eventually stop wearing suits and dress up like the ladies (well, sometimes)
・if you peer closely enough at the feet, you might be able see the change in the shape of the skates from something longer to shorter but more supportive - certainly there's a change in the color, for women
・figure skating (slowly) gets a little more diverse over time, though obviously there are still biases in who one might see at the top levels
・figure skaters used to compete outdoors, and now only compete on controlled indoor rinks.

N.b. while the years are all in order, a couple of times, I messed with the order of footage within a given year to fit the music better.

More specific notes:
The three skaters in the first image are the inimitable Madge Syers, the ice dancers Eva Romanová and Pavel Roman, and if you don't recognize Yuzuru Hanyuu, you probably don't watch modern skating.

Madge Syers - the footage is of an unknown date. I found this clip in an ISU archive video that didn't give it a specific date/place; it was in another video that was supposedly taken in 1910, but she had retired in 1908 due to her health, so clearly that's wrong. In any case, Madge Syers won the silver medal at 1902 Worlds, despite the fact that women weren't supposed to compete - they forgot to make it an actual rule until after she medaled, at which point they banned women with bullshit reasons like 'their skirts are too long to see their feet', sigh. (She lost only to Ulrich 'yes he invented the jump' Salchow.) She won the 1908 Olympics women's event and took bronze in Pairs with her husband.

[next unknown pair] - footage is from here and despite later efforts, I couldn't ascertain who was in the video, or when/where it was actually taken.

Ulrich Salchow - I found this footage interesting because there's this huge crowd of people there to see him do things that are less advanced than you can see on any freestyle session today. Sometimes even a quiet public session. But he did win pretty much everything in the early days of figure skating, so. (I mean, I'd show up if one of my favorite figure skaters was going to go skate around a nearby pond and do a couple of singles.)

Sonja Henie - she did not get several clips in this video because I particularly like her or her skating (I don't) but because she was HUGELY influential in the early days of the sport. She's why 99.9% of women wear white or occasionally tan skates in competition, and she pioneered short skirts. At her first Olympics, she was 11 and could get away with short skirts instead of long ones that were too heavy for her, and ditto a few years later when she was 14. (I believe that's 1927 Worlds - while one source said she was already wearing white boots by then, I found other descriptions of what she wore that matched the footage but didn't mention her newfangled white boots.) She won a bunch of things, then became a movie star and toured ice shows. Also she might have been a Nazi sympathizer? I need to read a biography on her.

Dick Button - first man to land a double axel and a triple of any kind, he was the only non-European man to ever win Euros (another loophole to close, especially since that same year, Barbara Ann Scott was the only non-European woman to win Euros). He was a two-time Olympic gold medalist, won Worlds five times, and later provided figure skating commentary. As of this writing, he's still around and occasionally posts on Twitter.

Karol Divin - Divin is shown doing compulsory figures here (one of like, two clips of this in the vid), back when figure skating still included skating figures.

Carol Heiss - I recommend giving her 1960 long program a look - while simple by today's standards, it's still interesting to watch, not least because of the section where she does four axels in a row in alternating directions.

John Curry - okay, he got multiple clips in here because I love his skating. They did have jumping beans who little choreography back then, too, but Curry wasn't one of them; he was a lovely skater who brought his ballet training to the ice.

Cherkasova & Shakhrai - she looks tiny compared to him, because she was - they won a bronze medal at Euros when she was 12 and he was 18, since age rules were different back then. They did the world's first quadruple twist when she was 13, one of which is in the vid, though I don't know for sure what year or competition that was.

Debi Thomas - for a long time, I had other clips here, but decided it wasn't working, and also wanted to put a little more diversity in this vid. As far as I know, she was the first black woman to compete internationally (the first period was probably the men's singles skater Bobby Beauchamp), though other black skaters had competed domestically in the US, and of course there were earlier skaters like Mabel Fairbanks who weren't allowed to compete. Anyway, I highly recommend giving her 1986 long program a watch.

Kurt Browning - this clip is of him landing the first ratified quad.

Midori Ito - also got multiple clips because I love her skating. She was the first skater from an Asian country to win a Worlds title, was the first woman to land seven triples in a program, did back counter entrances to axels and rippon'd jumps before they were cool, was the first woman to land a triple axel, and is just a very fun, bouncy skater to watch. (And she still does the occasional adult competition!)

Torvill & Dean - this clip is of their Bolero EX from '94 Olympics, not the famous competitive program, since this one was in HD. I showed my dad this vid and his one complaint was that there wasn't enough of this program in there, haha.

Vise & Trent - this clip is of them performing the first ratified quad throw jump.

Savchenko & Massot - if I were in charge of the Netflix pair skating series, I would file the serial numbers off of them instead of that nonsense it sounds like they're doing. Will not-Massot get his citizenship in time to go to the not-Olympics? Will not-Savchenko, on her fifth not-Olympics, finally get her gold medal? Will they be able to climb out of fourth place with a beautiful free skate and reach the top of the podium??? (Savchenko herself is one of the most decorated pairs skaters in history, having medaled at Worlds with her partner 11 times, and at Euros and the GPF 9 times.)

Premiere did not like the ending sequence (and some wonkiness with the way it resizes/crops things makes it not pixel-perfect despite my math), but it kindly refrained from crashing this time around.

Thanks for watching!

Title: Sugar Feathers
Fandom: Genesis of Aquarion
Pairing/characters: Touma/Apollo(nius)
Contains: Brief shots of blood and religious imagery
Notes: Premiered at Con.txt 2016. Longer notes after embed.
Download link: coming soon.
Embed:

I loved my experience at Con.txt 2014, but one thing I wanted at Con.txt 2016 was more representation from non-Western Live-Action fandoms. And that did happen, in panels I went to, in discussion I had with other fans, and in the Vid Show, but before the con, I wanted to be able to contribute something to help make that happen. I also was pretty into Genesis of Aquarion, having watched it relatively recently, and kind of wanted to try making an AMV again (I hadn't in years). Thus, this project happened, after a lot of searching to figure out what song would work for a pairing for this series. Another goal I had was trying to make this comprehensible for someone who hadn't seen the series - I'd be surprised if anyone else in the room ever had. I was very nervous at the screening, especially as it was shown right after a humor vid featuring more well-known fandoms, but I was later told that it works great as a recruiter vid! (And I was glad to see more variety in this vids this year, and really enjoyed the show.)

Although I found that the AMV came together quickly and was a lot of fun to work on, there were a couple of challenges. The main one is that Touma (white-haired angel guy) is from a species that primarily speaks telepathically and doesn't walk, and there are a lot of shots where he doesn't or barely moves. Great for their animation budget, I'm sure. The series is also a giant robot series; if you didn't get that from the AMV, well, I avoided using most shots of them in the giant robots, which was a decent portion of most episodes. Those were often full of mouth-flaps, anyway. Also, I was using a demo copy of the software (Trakax), and the company apparently folded like a week after I downloaded it. Thankfully, I had plenty of time to finish/export it.

While I can still see a couple of rough edges, overall I'm pretty proud of it, how some of the shots flow together, all the feather and pretty magic motifs I managed to fit in, the ending I gave them with the magic of editing. I'll stop here unless someone actually wants to hear more detail.