Spring Break! A wonderful time of year for college students everywhere. Some go to the beach. Others return home. Me? I always stayed put and worked on term papers. And by “worked on term papers”, I mean, “sat around playing video games.”

When working on creative projects, I have a tendency to lose track of time, working and working until, next thing I know, it’s 4:00 AM and I’m too keyed up to sleep. I work some more, collapse into bed, sleep a few hours, wake up, and start again. This continues until I either finish the project or run out of ideas. Obviously, it’s difficult to partake in such a lifestyle when you have daily responsibilities to consider, so what better time to embark on a creative project than when on vacation?

When Spring Break rolled around in March of 2002, I was in need of an intervention. I was an anime junkie, watching everything I could get my hands on, buying DVDs left and right. I dreamt of magical girls and giant robots. It was during this period that I was first introduced to Cardcaptor Sakura, the uncut version of which was being released on R1 DVD at the time. Only twenty or so episodes in, I was hooked. Even to this day, Cardcaptor Sakura remains one of my all-time favorites.

A month had passed since I had completed my first music video, and I was already itching to create another. Cardcaptor Sakura was on my mind. I was staring at a week of precious vacation. And so, my second video came to be…

Sakura no Yume (57 MB XviD AVI)

Of all of the videos ideas I’ve had over the years, Sakura no Yume came most naturally. It took minimal planning. I intrinsically “knew” what I wanted the moment I started editing. In some ways, Sakura no Yume is an oddity in that it utilizes music from the featured show itself - another “rule” broken, I suppose. Yet, Iwao Junko’s Yasashisa no Tane was really a perfect fit for the story I hoped to tell.

That story begins in a simple enough fashion, with Tomoyo watching over Sakura as she drifts asleep. Since Iwao Junko provides the voice of Tomoyo in the show, it’s implied that Tomoyo is serenading Sakura, herself guided through her dreams by the luminous orbs of the Glow Card (featured in Episode 18 of the series, “Sakura, Yukito, and the Summer Festival”). Sakura’s dreams are framed for the most part by the lyrics of the song (English translation here), and often refer to the loss of her mother, either directly or indirectly. Students of Sigmund Freud are free to draw their own conclusions.

In many ways, this video is the model for every video I’ve created since. At the time, anime music videos were typically glorified clip shows (to a point, they still are even today). I was more interested in telling a semi-original story, however, and that required building scenes rather than stringing together seemingly unrelated clips to fill time. Sometimes, this is easy. Sometimes, it’s not. Occasionally, I’d find myself thinking, “I’d sure like a shot of Sakura pole-vaulting over a pool of lava here,” regardless of whether or not such a scene existed in the first place. Making do with what’s available requires some creativity, and it can be terribly frustrating when things simply refuse to work out.

Sakura no Yume, however, wasn’t an especially difficult video to create. I never hit “the wall” creatively, and even though I only had the first twenty episodes to work with (only the first five DVDs were available at the time), I had all of the footage I needed to properly tell the story I wanted to tell. Still, not wanting to rush myself, I took my time, completing the video the final night of Spring Break.

In a lot of ways, the video was an instant hit. Cardcaptor Sakura fans were plentiful at the time. Cardcaptor Sakura music videos, on the other hand, were not. Even today, I often find Sakura no Yume on lists of “favorite CCS AMVs” and the like, and have received more positive comments about the video than the rest of my videos combined. Despite that, it’s not my personal favorite. That distinction belongs to my next video…