in motion -- ghibli AMV

Outcome

The video is embedded below. Turn on HD, but I don't recommend watching in full screen (the quality isn't great).

Intention

My goal for this project was to create a mashup video that conveyed a sense of continuous movement, and I chose to use clips from Studio Ghibli movies because they are well-known and well-animated. Originally, I had wanted to put together a lot of run cycles, but the end result focuses more on any sort of "motion," not just running, so it includes some transportation and scenery as well. I personally really enjoy these types of sequences in animation, since they are often found at intense or otherwise important points in the story. They also capture viewers' attention and invoke strong feelings about freedom and change. So, I wanted my final result to evoke these kinds of emotions in viewers, as well as to simply convey the beauty of 2D animations.

Context

I think there are three main pieces/types of media that influenced my outcome.

First and foremost are anime AMVs in general. They are essentially mashups of scenes from one or more works that are set (well-timed) to a piece of music. Of course, this is exactly what I have created.

Along the same lines, next is the genre of Vines that are basically AMVs, but shortened to 6 seconds long. These generate a lot of views (sometimes millions), so I actually thought about these before full-length AMVs when confronted with the topic of "viral content".

Finally, as mentioned in the proposal, I had thought about the "run scene" from Millennium Actress. In this scene, we follow the main character, the actress Chiyoko, though a montage of films she has starred in, which symbolizes her journey as she continuously tries to chase after a man she met as a child. Though I guess Chiyoko doesn't actually do any running in this scene (maybe I remembered wrong, or watched the wrong scene on youtube -- but the background song is called "Run" for sure...), this influence is still reflected through my video as we move through several Ghibli films.

Process

I decided to take a "visual appeal" approach rather than a critical approach to this project. I wanted to make a final product that looked nice first and foremost. When it comes to viral content I think it is safer to have something pretty but not super thought-provoking, rather than having something that is intended to be thought-provoking but not well-executed enough for people to actually watch it. Having both is quite difficult for me since I'm not a writer and don't have much to say about society that hasn't been said before. With this mindset, I wanted to create a video with a lot of beautiful scenes and forward momentum that people would enjoy watching (or listening to). 

After making the video, I shared it on Facebook and my other social media profiles which have a decent following. It gained quite a number of views in a few hours, so that's nice. Plus, even if people just leave it on in the background (for the music), it still counts as a view :^)

Product

I made a mashup video with background music. The process of creating the video was straightforward. Using Adobe Premiere, I found clips from various Studio Ghibli movies and stitched them together in time to the background music, which is the song "Luv Letter" with DJ Okawari. I also did some color editing to enhance the look of the clips. I think the main issue that occurred was that the video turned out lower quality than I expected it to be. This might just be a problem with the source videos, but I've tried to re-export the video with different settings anyway. Unfortunately, I can't upload it to Vimeo anytime soon since they only have a 500MB per week(?) limit :(

Critique

I think that given my intent, my work fulfills my expectations quite well. The final result is nice to watch -- not too boring hopefully -- and I believe I did a decent job syncing the audio and video. Of course, it's not perfect. As mentioned before, there are issues with the video quality. I also was not able to find enough footage to last the duration of the song, so I had to cut it. Finally, I think if I had had more time I would have found more clips to create more rapid transitions, as some of the scenes are kind of long right now.

Reflection

My personal goal as a creator is to be recognized for things like technical skill, artistic sense, nice aesthetics, etc. Basically, I want to be recognized for my own work. Even if that work draws upon past influences, or even actively seeks to emulate an existing one, I want it to be stuff that I can still personally consider my "own". So it's difficult to be asked to create something that basically uses other people's works without altering it very much. It does take a lot of time and effort to create a good AMV, and that's very respectable, but it's not really something I want to do in life, although this was a definitely a good practice in video editing.

I also feel that it's extremely hard to "engineer" something that goes viral when it's not original content. I think that if it doesn't capitalize off existing things (i.e. an instance of a meme), then it either has to be really skillful (i.e. a very well-done AMV or supercut) or really thought provoking (I can't think of an example for this. If I were able to come up with a really interesting, provocative topic, then wouldn't I have done that instead?). Or else perhaps it's just clickbait. When it comes to memes especially, I think that most of the time they become popular by coincidence and not by the will of the original content creator, so even if you "study memes" in an academic way, you'd really need an insider's perspective of Internet humor in order to actually make a new meme and have it be successful. 

I guess what I'm saying is that -- what I learned is, while it's not beyond human control to have content go extremely viral, given the content and time constraints of this assignment, it certainly feels like it's a bit beyond mine!

References

See the "Context" section.

Thanks to Kevin for teaching us how to use Premiere in visual lab :)

Sources

Music: (youtube)

DJ Okawari - Luv Letter

Videos: (kissanime)

Kiki's Delivery Service

When Marnie was There

Spirited Away

Howl's Moving Castle

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

Software: (free trial) 

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015

Original Proposal

I want to edit together various clips of run cycles from Studio Ghibli movies, and set the whole thing to a song from some Ghibli movie's soundtrack (I haven't decided on which one yet). Originally I was thinking that I could essentially make an AMV ("animated music video") out of scenes from Ghibli movies, since I want to focus on the more on the aesthetic/entertainment factor of this project as opposed to maybe taking a very critical look at something. These kinds of videos generally get a decent amount of views too, even if only for the background music, so I think it's a fair choice overall. The idea was inspired by those "aesthetically-oriented" Vines in which a visually appealing scene, often from animation, is set to music. I settled on "running" as a theme because I was suddenly thinking about the run sequence from Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress and how it's a very energetic scene full of movement and emotion. (Edit! Ok, so I just rewatched this scene and it's totally not as good as I remembered it to be in my head. So, I will just recreate the one that I remembered (LOL).)