I first discovered the anime music video scene in late 2001, in those uncomfortable Autumn days following the September 11 attacks. It was also around that time that I first watched Neon Genesis Evangelion and discovered just how much I loved anime. You can probably imagine the sort of significant impact a post-apocalyptic angstfest like Eva had on me at the time, with my college graduation rapidly approaching and the world falling apart all around me. It was a difficult time, and I’ll admit to having found psychological refuge in Japanese cartoons.

As for my introduction to anime music videos, I can’t recall the details. Most likely, I merely stumbled upon a web site hosting the most popular videos of the day, downloaded a few, and ended up hooked. Animemusicvideos.org might have existed in some form at the time, but even if it did, videos weren’t particularly easy to find and download online. If you knew the right people or were a creator yourself, however, you could gain access to massive video libraries via FTP.

So, I decided I’d give it a try. I had zero experience in video editing, but having had years of experience writing music with the aid of computers, I figured I could pick it up fairly quickly. And I did. One rare snowy day in February, I sat down at the computer and got to work. A week later, on Valentine’s Day, I had completed my first video.

Over the next week, I’ll be sharing the videos I’ve created since then, starting with the very first…

After the Rain (27 MB XviD AVI)

I watched To Heart for the first time around Christmas of 2001 after stumbling upon some horrible, third generation VHS fansubs encoded in Windows Media format on a friend’s FTP server. Nonetheless, I fell in love with the show, and was still riding a To Heart high a month or so later when I first got it in my head to create a music video of my own. Clearly, To Heart was the show to use. But what of the music?

Around the same time, I was finishing Angelic Layer for the first time - its television run in Japan had wrapped up a few months earlier - and had fallen hard for the show’s second ED theme, Ameagari. After taking a close look at the song’s lyrics, I recognized similarities to the story of To Heart. The gears started turning and the motif of the video revealed itself to my mind’s eye. Clearly, Ameagari was the song to use.

There were a couple of problems, however. Obviously, my crappy To Heart fansubs weren’t suitable for video editing, and I didn’t have a copy of the full version of Ameagari. I was reluctant to import a bunch of expensive R2 DVDs simply for the sake of creating a video, so I instead went searching for DVDs of, ahem, questionable legality. As for the song, I had a legal copy of the Angelic Layer soundtrack on CD, and thus had a TV size version of Ameagari to work with. Not wanting to bite off more than I could chew on my first try, I decided the TV size version would be enough. A short video would be good practice, I figured.

Even after all these years, To Heart has never received a decent video transfer to DVD - the original R2 release included. Since my DVDs of questionable legality were essentially copies of the R2s crammed on to two discs, they suffered from poor video quality (to say the least). But, as is the case with many cel-based shows, poor video quality ain’t the end of the world - film noise and compression artifacts tend to blend together, after all - and I was satisfied with what I had to work with. Of course, knowing squat about proper video editing or how to prepare a source, the final product was bound to look like crap anyway. Better to just whistle past the graveyard and get to work.

After the Rain, as the video would later be titled, is essentially a brief overview of To Heart from start to finish. To Heart in two minutes, if you will. Akari and Hiroyuki’s story is spotlighted, of course - in fact, it was initially my intention to focus on them alone for the entire video. As I was editing, however, I realized the lyrics of the song also alluded to Shiho’s situation with regard to Akari and Hiroyuki (I don’t like to call it a “love triangle”, as it’s not quite). So, she gained a starring role as well. As for the rest of the girls, they show up here and there to fill time and make Hiroyuki look good. Multi intentionally gets the shaft, I admit. The reason? I never liked her character.

With the video being so short and so to the point, there’s not much that can be said about it thematically. There is a recurring motif that ties everything together in Akari and Hiroyuki’s visits in front of the stairs on the way to and from school. Every time the location was featured in the show, the camera framed it in a similar fashion, allowing me to fade easily from one shot to another, even when the cuts were culled from completely different episodes. Laziness on the part of the animators really worked in my favor there.

I also broke a “cardinal rule” of anime music video editing by not avoiding lip flap (i.e., talking characters) in my cuts. Honestly, I don’t think the lip flap detracts from the video in any way - I took care to minimize it, at least - and it’s not like the “rules” are something that should be followed in every situation. In fact, as much as people like to complain about lip flap when critiquing a video (it’s an easy target, after all), I don’t recall it ever coming up with regard to After the Rain. The most common complaint, actually, has been “it’s too short!”

It’s worth noting that the version of the video I share today is actually a remastered version of the original. In August of 2002, I sat down and cleaned up some obvious editing mistakes and made some (very) minor changes here and there. At it’s core, however, the remastered version is no different from the original. In fact, I’m not even sure I have a copy of the original any longer.

After the Rain is nothing amazing, but for a first video, I’ve always felt it’s remarkably good. It was definitely an excellent introduction to the editing process. A month later, I’d put what I learned to good use in creating my most popular video to date…