AMV Roundup 01 - April 2023
Apr. 15th, 2023 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katranatHello everyone, and welcome to a new feature which I’m hoping to do once a month!
I had the idea for this near the end of 2022. I watch far too many AMV’s and have a strong desire to share them with people. If I shared every AMV I wanted to through usual means there would be far too many videos and I would completely flood any channels.
I also don’t often feel strongly enough about a lot of videos to be able to dedicate an entire blog post to only one video at a time.
Finally, while I will no doubt be sharing many videos at the beginning of next year, it seems like such a long time to be sitting and waiting to share things. Some of these I may also never get a chance to share otherwise.
Thus, AMV Roundup was born!
I would like for this to be a place where I can highlight any new AMV’s I’ve come across in the past month, as well as showcase any older videos I may find that I’d never encountered before.
I will mostly be focusing on any AMV’s that aren’t already well known in the AMV spaces I’m familiar with (unless I particularly want to gush about them for some reason). So hopefully a lot of these videos will be new to anyone reading.
Ideally I wanted to start this at the beginning of the year at the end of January, but AMV fatigue hit me hard, in addition my attention became monopolised by the RICE contest. So this first post will be focusing on AMV’s that I found during the first quarter of the year.
Thankfully due to my attention being elsewhere there aren’t a huge amount I want to include here, additionally the majority of the AMV’s I watched over the past 3 months are fairly prominent within the AMV community.
I have 10 videos for you today. I hope you find something to enjoy!
New for 2023
Video title: New Gold
Editor: BoxJoe
Anime: Chainsaw Man
Song & Artist: New Gold (Dom Dolla Remix) - Gorillaz
Comments: Chainsaw Man started airing only half a year ago and I’m already tired of seeing AMV’s with it. Why? Because 98% of Chainsaw Man AMV’s use a high amount of the opening and ending credit sequences. I understand why people do this, the credits are highly dynamic and visually interesting, however it does mean the pool of scenes AMV editors are pulling from is very small, therefore even these beautiful images get stale after so many repeat viewings.
Enter BoxJoe - who has made the wonderfully refreshing “New Gold”, which despite the small amount of audio occasionally in the background from the anime, has managed to captivate me since the start of the year. There’s nothing super fancy here - this is a fairly classically edited video with effective sync to a really cool song, while including a bunch of Chainsaw Man scenes that I seldom get to see in other AMV’s, and I adore it for these things.
VPR: Flickering, Major Motion, Peripherals, Flashes to white, Red Emphasis, Quick cuts
CW: Gore & Violence
Video title: It’s Not So Impossible!
Editor: Zeal Makes Vids
Anime: Sarazanmai
Song & Artist: Impossible Soul - Sufjan Stevens
Comments: Out of all Ikuhara’s works, Sarazanmai is possibly the most impenetrable for me. My only knowledge of it is what I’ve seen from AMV’s and so far I’ve only really been able to glean that it’s a Magical Boy Anime where they turn into Kappa. Any further understanding has not been helped by most Sarazanmai AMV’s I’ve come across so far being comedic in nature.
Zeal Makes Vids is someone who seems to be dedicated to making AMV’s specifically for all of Ikuhara’s anime. The absolute love for the source material in “It’s Not So Impossible” is palpable. I still have no idea what’s going on in this anime, but for the first time I’m able to see the emotional heart of this anime, and I find myself connecting in a way I hadn’t been able to before - so it doesn’t really matter if I understand or not.
VPR: All
Video title: Ah, Poor Bird
Editor: Eccentric Fanboy
Anime: Liz and the Blue Bird
Song & Artist: Ah, Poor Bird - ?
Comments: “Ah, Poor Bird” is just really damn pretty. Like, all of it. The anime, the music, the editing, the way it’s put together. So gosh darn beautiful.
Eccentric Fanboy seems like a very interesting person as well - I would recommend checking out their twitter, they’ve been doing some neat deep diving into anime convention/fandom archive material.
VPR: Flickering, Flashes to black, Brightness & contrast
Video title: i walk this earth all by myself
Editor: Godmode.mp4
Anime: Serial Experiments Lain
Song & Artist: i walk this earth all by myself - EKKSTACY
Comments: I find the way Godmode.mp4 has edited “i walk this earth all by myself” utterly fascinating. They use stock transitions/effects while also incorporating some interesting ideas and moments of brilliance (looking at you 01:28).
I also really enjoy this anime/song combination. There’s a bleak sadness here that works very well.
VPR: All
Video title: The Shadow
Editor: Amy Forest
Anime: The Boy and the Beast
Song & Artist: Let It Go - Dragonette
Comments: Wow, I just wow. I want to say thank you to CrackTheSky for drawing attention to this video in the Bentovid chat, because I doubt I would ever have seen it otherwise.
I really love this video. Every time I watch it I find something new to appreciate about it that I didn’t notice before. I get goosebumps, GOOSEBUMPS(!) every time the sword clash at 01:49 happens.
Hat’s off to you Amy Forest for creating such a captivating and profound video.
VPR:All
Video title: Monster
Editor: SeNniN
Anime: Chainsaw Man
Song & Artist: Godzilla - Eminin ft. Juice WRLD
Comments: Yeah, I know what I was saying about Chainsaw Man AMV’s earlier, and yes this video contains a bunch of OP & ED scenes, but I find there’s still something interesting here. I think my enjoyment of “Monster” stems mostly from the song choice and how well it naturally works with the source material. I also like the flow SeNniN creates, it’s not quite what you’d expect from a rap song of this pace.
VPR: All
CW: Gore & Violence
Video title: ANXIETY CREEPER
Editor: MESSY!
Anime: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Song & Artist: ?? (it might be the editor’s own composition)
Comments: This is not an ordinary AMV. MESSY! states that this is “Anxiety told through Music + NEON GEN”. Which, yeah I can see what they were going for. If you didn’t have anxiety already, then watching this video will definitely do something to your nerves.
VPR: Major All
Older videos
Videos which premiered before 2023 that I’ve only recently found and have been enjoying.
Video title: Rabbit Heart
Editor: The Commune
Anime: Tokyo Babylon, X(TV), X/1999
Song & Artist: Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) - Florence and the Machine
Comments: I can’t remember how I found this vid. I could have sworn it was shared somewhere, but I can’t find any reference to it. It could also easily have come up in my YouTube recommendations.
Tokyo Babylon was the first Manga I ever read, so I’m an absolute sucker for anything made with it and “Rabbit Heart” is no exception. I love the storytelling in this, and for once I finally get the song lyrics.
VPR: Flashes to white, Peripherals, Flickering, Black wipes, Motion & patterns/particles, Red emphasis
Video title: Timebomb Zone
Editor: edeets
Anime: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
Song & Artist: Timebomb Zone (Conrank Remix) - The Prodigy
Comments: I came about this in a very roundabout way. I was trying to find any and every AMV I could that was set to Rebecca Black’s “Friday” on YouTube. So I was doing some simple searches such as “Friday AMV”, and one of edeets’ older videos came up in this search. I thought it was pretty neat, so I checked out their channel and saw they had a fairly recent upload, which I inevitably fell in love with.
“Timebomb Zone” is a baby bear of EDM editing for me, it’s never too much nor too little. edeets matches the scenes so perfectly to the sounds of the music, with a lot of excellent internal sync and restrained editing to keep everything together.
VPR: All
CW: Gore, Violence, Nudity
Video title: ASCENDED
Editor: SeNniN
Anime: Genius Party Beyond - Dimension Bomb
Song & Artist: Let Go - Imogen Heap, Mt Eden remix
Comments: Yes, I have two SeNniN videos in this post. This one I found first, and then checked out their channel and surprise, they were still editing (and with Chainsaw Man no less!).
I recently had an urge to revisit some Mt Eden remixes of Imogen Heap songs and I was curious to see whether anyone had edited with “Let Go”. There are no end to AMV’s which use “The Walk”, but “ASCENDED” was the only AMV I found using “Let Go”, and I was not disappointed.
I feel “ASCENDED” perfectly encapsulates a particular point in AMV history. It’s incredibly typical of its time - the Imogen Heap and Genius Party combo almost brings parallels to Linkin Park and Naruto. The exact combo wasn’t infamous in the same way, but these sources absolutely were.
There’s something wonderfully nostalgic about watching this, while also being beautifully timeless.
VPR: All
