Guys, I have a shameful secret to tell you. Once upon a time, I was…

...a teenager.

Just thinking about it brings back sordid memories of Hot Topic and reading Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Linkin Park. There are many regretful things I had done as a teenager, and even embarrassing activities I had partaken in. Yet few are as humiliating as the act of actually using Windows Movie Maker to create an Anime (or Video Game) Music Video.

Good thing I never did that, right?

Oh…well…um…

Yes, I was one of those kids that figured they’d share their love of Japanese entertainment and whatever music with the rest of the world. My brother discovered other people making videos on the Internet, and at some point we discovered that Windows ME came with a free copy of Windows Movie Maker. Windows XP had to be the best operating system upgrade if only because it stopped the endless inexplicable crashes. We had to save our work every five minutes when using ME just because Movie Maker, like ME itself, loved nothing more than to crash. When my old man got us XP we continued to save constantly, but it never crashed on us again.

I will not be sharing some of my first videos with you, as they are awfully generic. By generic I mean Neon Genesis Evangelion set to Linkin Park (though let’s face it, if any anime were a match for that band, Evangelion was it). I will, however, share the method of video making.

See, at the time YouTube didn’t exist, and even though we had Broadband the modems, routers and speeds were pretty crap. Optimizing data for net transfer was better than in dial-up days, and the very fact that you could actually download a video of such qualities was astounding. However, unless we used a peer-to-peer file sharing program called KaZaA or downloaded directly from certain websites, we had no video clips. Most of our anime was on VHS as we lacked DVD players at the time. We were forced to use whatever video was available on the Internet.

This limited the number of clips we could use by a lot. If BitTorrent was around, we didn’t know about it. Even if it was, people weren’t sharing subtitled anime as freely then as they are now. We were at the mercy of other people’s music videos and any clips we could happen to find. In order to be fair, we wanted to make sure we didn’t use any clips that contained transitions or special effects from someone’s own unique video. We felt that was unethical, plus we didn’t want anyone getting angry at us for using something they had made in their own expensive software (you know, something better than Windows Movie Maker, like Adobe Premiere).

As a result, if we wanted to make more than one video to a certain anime we’d likely end up using the same footage for each video. In addition, one ten second scene might have been forced to stretch out across three or four separate clips throughout the video in order to fill up space. It proved incredibly difficult and typically impossible to fill each second of each video up with proper footage (hence the constant use of Cecil on a Chocobo for the first embedded video for Final Fantasy).

Yet the biggest struggle was in trying to make an entertaining video to music without having any special effects available. At the time Windows Movie Maker was nothing short of elementary, allowing you to split up video clips, overlay some audio and be done with it. Transitions, text effects, these were non-existent. If you wanted them you needed to shell out big money for the professional software (or, as I’d learn later, just download it off the web with a cracked key).

So we had to focus on getting imagery that could fit the tone of the song as best we could as well as timing the clips with the song. As stated, we were at the mercy of whatever video we could grab (if you watch the Metal Gear Solid video, you’ll notice a lot of clips from the opening credits and others with subtitles. In modern AMV competitions, this is enough to get you disqualified and openly mocked. That and the GameSpot logo in the lower corner. This is also why the end of the video is only using a small handful of clips. I literally ran out of anything else to use except for the last shot, which, well, I was saving to be the last shot).

So in the end we just had to split and splice the footage up as best as we could, trying to match the very millisecond of timing we required. What really made me feel like a hack were all the clips that just went together surprisingly well (over 50% of the Macross Plus video was unintentional). It was tedious and laborious work, and yet for some reason putting everything together was greatly enjoyable.

What really makes me nostalgic, however, aside from a time where I was actually a fan of Linkin Park and Metallica, is the second video my brother had made…

He had Blind Guardian’s album Nightfall in Middle-Earth for a while, but never really listened to it until that year in 2001. When I first heard him working on the video I thought I was listening to a band as old as Kansas or Yes. Turns out the album was from 1998. I borrowed it and became hooked to the song. Finally I purchased the album for myself and became addicted to the first track. It took me over a month before I finally managed to listen to the whole album instead of repeating the songs one by one. I had never known a band like them, and to this day I can’t find a truly fitting equivalent.

Which I suppose is why I’m nostalgic about all this. Other than being an activity I shared with my brother, making AMV’s introduced me to my favorite band. The only band, in fact, that I’ll actively blog about. So yeah, I’m feeling pretty reminiscent right now for old times.

I stopped making these videos by time I hit College. One of the reasons is that I started to fall out of anime, and another is that my music didn’t fit a lot of the subject matter anyway. I must confess that I do wish to go back one day to it, but I just don’t have the time anymore. However, despite being a hack and an amateur, I can’t help but see a lot of modern AMV’s and sigh. For all the special effects and transitions, there are a lot of people out there with no sense of timing or matching the tone of the video to that of the audio.

I mean, come on, if we could make what we did with Windows Movie Maker you’d think they’d be able to do something worthwhile with a pirated copy of Final Cut Studio.

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