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katranatI'm not sure I'm the best person to be talking about this - for all my obsessiveness with this hobby I do still have massive gaps in my knowledge and oversight. It's also a topic I'm pretty sure gets talked about relatively frequently in AMV spaces in some form or another, and generally I tend not to engage with it as perceived AMV quality isn't something that usually bothers me. In fact I often enjoy many videos that contain typically agreed upon “not good” features.
This time though, it really got to me for some reason so I'm throwing these thoughts out into the world. Sorry if this rambles a bit.
Sometimes I'll hear a song and get a particular itch to watch it with an AMV. Depending on the song I may or may not get the desire to edit with it myself, and most recently in the case with “Hey Mama” by David Guetta, I simply wanted to see some anime go brr with it and I didn't have any urge to edit. So I did what I usually do in this situation and searched YouTube with the term “Hey Mama AMV” and sorted by date uploaded (tip for anyone who's getting sick of YouTube’s search results, sorting by date uploaded isn't perfect but it does get rid of all those pesky recommendations that don't have anything to do with your search term).
“Hey Mama” is a song I haven't heard much, but I listened to it the other day and was like - oh yeah I remember this song! I kinda like it! So I had no concept of just how ludicrously popular it appears to have been. My gosh, there are so many AMVs. I was anticipating being able to find an AMV I enjoy with the song quite quickly, however my naive foray into this subsection of AMVs turned into a massive chore which ran the gamut of almost every possible AMV outcome I'm aware of. I would expect these kinds of results if, for example, I had searched for AMVs for a popular anime, but a song? It's a bit crazy. I just wanted some easy eye candy, instead I’m doing this.
Anyway, in no particular order, here's a non-exhaustive list of all the kinds of things I saw in these AMVs while searching for at least one I enjoyed. Quite often videos contained a combination of several of these.
- Excessive and unnecessary interpolation on many videos - it's a still scene of some guy doing nothing but talking, you really don't need twixtor on that
- Editor name watermarks that took up at least a quarter of the screen
- Watermarks and subtitles from poorly ripped sources
- Watermarks from editing software
- Generally low quality sources, even though they were 1080p on YouTube, I dunno if the compression is just ass these days but a lot of these AMVs looked terrible
- 480p videos and one 360p video (using modern sources)
- Interlacing - not only a thing of the past apparently
- Slideshows
- Using chunks of other people's AMVs as the source… I identified this in at least two different videos
- Nightcore versions of the song (this could be argued to be a preference rather than a quality issue)
- Pitch shifted versions of the song (this could be argued to be a preference rather than a quality issue)
- Straight up deep fried sounds absolutely horrible versions of the song
- Footage that looked like it came from GIFs
Very few of these videos had less than 10k views. Several had millions of views.
I guess I had always been peripherally aware that in the hobby of AMVs, on YouTube at least, the cream does not rise to the top, and things that get favoured by the algorithm are often not quality examples of editing. I always somewhat assumed that those videos were random outliers - the AMVs that got millions of views were simply lucky and there wasn't any rhyme or reason to it other than it was possibly driven by using the right anime/song combination when these things were popular.
Not so in this case. The only similarity a lot of these videos in my search had was the song. All sorts of anime (surprisingly a lot fewer ecchi results than I was expecting for this song), uploaded at different times - the song was released in 2015 and these AMVs are from that year all the way until today and across the full spectrum they are pulling millions of views. What the hell?
Sometimes I'll watch a perfectly ordinary AMV and I'll see comments on it to the effect of “this is the best AMV I've ever seen. THIS is what AMV creation should be all about. Why isn't this more popular? It's so much better than other videos” etc. and I would think to myself - this is a fairly typical example of a good AMV and they're everywhere, where have you been? Now I realise these types of commenters have most likely been stuck in this algorithmic hell, and if they do a genuine search for AMVs to watch, they probably only stick to top level results which also feed into this hellish landscape.
Being in this hobby for so long it's hard for me to see from an outsider perspective just how difficult it can be to find videos that are worthwhile watching. This isn't usually a problem for myself because I already know where exactly to look and what to look for, especially as I grew with the hobby and also YouTube from very early. Someone who is new to AMVs looking for inspiration or something fun to watch on YouTube is going to have a rough time. I don't know for sure, but I suspect this also rings true with other video platforms.
I'm not saying that these videos are bad or unenjoyable for everyone. Even though there are objectively several things that could be improved in many of these videos, I feel it's wrong to dump on these AMVs when I don’t know the full intentions of the editor behind them. I have many assumptions about a lot of them, but giving voice to those would be unfair and unkind. Especially as obviously they have some appeal to many people as otherwise why would there be so much engagement?
Ultimately I think my takeaway from this is sadness and disappointment that anyone who looks at this hobby on a surface level will only find AMVs containing examples of things I've listed, and see that they have millions of views and possibly make the assumption that this is the pinnacle of the hobby. Which could feed into more people making videos with these characteristics, emulating them because that's what good looks like because it's popular right? That's a massive generalisation by me but I can't help but be disheartened at the thought of a whole cohort of AMV makers who may be actively blocked from creative inspiration by the almighty algorithm and are unable to dig deeper in the hobby.
Perhaps many people don't want to dig deeper and are satisfied with what they currently create especially considering the level of engagement it can bring.
Maybe all of these possibilities are an entirely imagined scenario in my head and reality is not like this at all, but I really can't wrap my mind around why videos such as these keep being created otherwise.
Going back to the reason for all this in the first place, did I find an AMV I enjoy among all that were there? So far my comments might come across rather harsh as I’ve only listed all those negative things I noticed about these videos, however I do want to be clear that while there were several which contained these elements, many did also show a concerted effort in editing to match the song in many different ways, to arguably differing degrees of success. However, several of them still were not enjoyable for me and I think I’m going to use this as an opportunity to try and really identify what I personally value when watching an AMV.
I don't need greatness from the videos I watch, but I do at least want heart. I want to be able to watch a video and identify something the editor has done which means they put themselves into the creative process in whatever way they were able. I don't want to watch rote copying of things just for the sake of content. It can be a hard thing to discern, and that's not to say some of the videos I dismiss weren't made with heart, but if that doesn't manifest in a recognisable way for me while watching the AMV then it's not a video for me.
To go deeper into this, here are two AMVs I found from this search that I did enjoy, which I’ll talk about more in depth as to why I like them and why they stood out to me from all the rest.
On one end of the editing scale we have “Uchiha Madara - Hey Mama” by Kira.
VPR: Motion, minor flashing, peripherals
This video contains a handful of the quality issues I listed in bullet points earlier, which goes to show that they really are not a deal breaker for me when finding AMVs I enjoy.
This is a video which uses the song as a backdrop to create a Madara character profile AMV. For the most part the video is very loosely synced using long unedited scenes - however these scenes match thematically and there’s an overall internal logic to them which suggests Kira has considered carefully how to structure the video. The AMV really shines during the upbeat choruses when the action scenes happen - these portions flow excellently and have some great moments of internal sync.
Something else to mention, this video almost completely ignores the lyrics of the song - I want to emphasise that’s a fine editing decision, most of the AMV’s I came across also do this and I don’t hold it against them in any way. “Hey Mama” is not a song that lends itself easily to lyric sync, nor would adhering to that necessarily make any AMVs with it better - it’s not really the kind of song where people care about the lyrics and not something I was looking for.
On the other end of the scale (and using a remixed version of the song) there is “Highschool of the Dead AMV Hey Mama Remix” by EcchiNerdeBenOrada.
VPR: All
CW: Violence, gore, sexually suggestive scenes
This is a solidly well put together action AMV, and if you enjoy the types of videos Highschool of the Dead AMVs tend to be, you’ll have a lot of fun with this one. I don’t think I should need to clarify much why I find this one enjoyable, but I’ll give a quick rundown at least. The sync is great - EcchiNerdeBenOrada has a lot of both internal and external sync and even manages an amount of lyric sync (which is why I was expecting to see more ecchi anime to this song). The anime chosen makes sense with the energy of the song in a kinda fun crazy way, and overall it’s a blast to watch.
Honestly when an AMV fully manages to match the song, I feel it somewhat defies explanation - it exists as this perfect amalgamation that should be immediately understandable. That immediacy of recognisable coherence for most people watching, is in my mind what makes AMVs “good” or “great” or “special” - these connections that the editor has managed to conjure up between the visuals and the audio to the degree that it lights up our brains with joy when we see them. Different people no doubt get differing levels of joy out of the many possible ways of making these connections, but the base is the same.
If there is no discernable effort to make a connection between the sources, then there’s no heart to the video and thus no joy for me. I will also get no joy from what I feel are superficial connections, or only one type of connection without another (other people will feel differently here). For example - if external sync is used to match the song, but there’s no other type of connection (internal sync, vocal sync, lyric sync, visual storytelling), to me this feels somewhat pointless. If the only thing that connects external sync, then surely it doesn’t matter what the source was? You could substitute the visuals for absolutely anything in these cases and the end result would be the same, therefore they feel soulless to me.
I’m unsure if I’ve managed to tease out some sort of conclusion to any of these thoughts here, and apologies for the potential incoherence of this post. I am glad to get these out into the world though, and I hope this was somewhat constructive for anyone reading to build on in some way.
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Date: 2024-01-24 04:11 pm (UTC)My personal amv sadness though is countless folks talking about the "good old days"and acting like it is a dead art that nobody does anymore, or all that is left is on tiktok and instagram. Like the person who only sees the first three amvs that comes with googling a song a source is at least looking. however shallow the search may be. Nothing grinds my gear more than ppl acting like something doesn't exist if it isn't served up to them by a personal waiter.