Vividcon 2005 Anime Panel Post-mortem
Doing this panel was a pretty daunting task due to the sheer immensity of the topic. See, this panel had to be part lecture, part discussion and part craft panel. With only 45 minutes of which to fit this all in to, it's a pretty tall order.
Then there was the problem of what topics to discuss. So, before vividcon I posted a poll asking people to try and prioritise the content. That poll was pretty useful although it meant I had to do some tech preparatory work that I wasn't expecting.
The Handout
For the panel handout, I decided to actually make a handout that would cover some of the things I knew I was not going to have time for. I also thought that it might be useful to inspire any questions. Time was pushing on before I had to leave for the con so I threw this together. It's likely that there are errors. Also, the name lists are completely random - I was going to alphabetise but I couldn't be arsed.
Anime Panel Handout - 95kb pdf
Note that for the editors and phases, editors were placed into the phase where they first made their mark rather than the phase they made the biggest impression. Vlad Pohnert, for example, has been most significant in phases 2 and 3.
The Panel
The Heart of AMV creation
I'm going to go though the stuff I think I talked about at the panel and also note down some of the things I never had a great deal of time to talk about or only made glancing reference to.
To begin the panel, I decided to define and contrast the different inspirations behind live action vidding and anime music video creation by pinpointing what I felt was at the heart of these two fannish activities. For vidding, I described how a large amount of vidding comes from the desire to create videos that illustrate things about characters in these adored shows often with the goal of providing a new insight or approach to the character (I made reference to the concept of telling deeper). For AMVs I decided to show what, in my opinion, represents a key inspiration for anime vidding in terms of craft and theme - the Daicon IV opening animation:
Daicon IV Opening Animation - 10mb realmovie
To me, this is what animation video making is mostly about - creating wonderous spectacle that celebrates animated geekdom. Of course that's not the only inspiration but it's what I felt was a major part of AMVs that distinguished it from live action vidding. My explanation for this was essentially what the whole panel was about but I stated at this point that the focus on spectacle was in part due to the limitations, necessities and temptations of animation as an artform and in part due to the way the AMV community has developed.
The unique nature of Animation as art.
For this section I compared a few different philosophies of visual artforms and tried to come up with a satisfactory definition of how animation works. The thought being that to understand the way that animation works will help understand how editing animation has very different concerns. To illustrate this I recalled Bob McKee's writings on movie narratives and how screenwriting aims to represent what it is to be human, our desires, fears, ambitions, spirit, losses and loves. Animation, on the other hand, expresses things through caricature where no matter how realistic the approach the ultimate quality of the animation is that it expresses big emotion aided by its larger-than-life fantastical quality. So, in conclusion, I noted that in order to create successful animated videos there needs to be a degree of respect for the fantastical spectacular nature of animation because a naturalised realistic approach will more than likely miss the target and be lifeless. In an attempt to back up this bold claim I mentioned that I spoke to Ray Harryhausen (of Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans fame) last year and asked him about what he thought of modern 3D CGI. His response was that while he appreciated that it was technically superior it lacked some of the mystery and magic of the old stop motion animation. With this I am in complete agreement and I think it extends to animation as a whole that the closer it approaches reality the more it loses its power and so people should try and resist using the same principles they would apply to live action video making when it comes to animation editing.
See, it's not that animation cannot express the same feelings that live action can, it's just that the approach is so very different. I commented how Dumbo has the ability to make people cry and that animation is no lesser a form of expression but in order to do that kind of expression it uses exaggerated visuals and it is in these exaggerated caricatures of emotion where animation has its strengths.
Live action vs Anime footage and the problems it presents
To explain how the practicalities of anime footage has promoted a lot more fast cutting, external motion and visual manipulation I decided to present two scenes without their audio for the audience to analyse. The first scene was the most visually mundane scene I could find in a randomly chosen episode of the recent Battlestar Gallactica. The second scene I picked was the most emotionally charged scene in a randomly picked episode of SaiKano - where the characters have a passionate falling out. You can see the two scenes here:
Scene 1 - 2.5mb divx
Scene 2 - 748kb divx
Comments from the audience on what could be done with the first clip included using the circling of adama footage and the visible embarrassment of the female character with the laughing panel behind her. I'd also add to this that there is plenty of call for Adama eyebrow motion footage :)
As for the second clip, it really speaks for itself. Anime, particularly TV series anime, relys on cheap animation for the bulk of the show with the majority of the budget being spent on "moneyshots" (usually action scenes) that give an overall impression of high quality animation. The point I wanted to get across that where so much can be done with character relationships in live action footage based on what you can see the same is not true of anime. The fact is that anime characters do not act. They cannot act. The voice actors do the acting, the anime characters simply do the mouth flapping. This is a key distinction between the footage types and one of the major reasons why editing these two forms has produced such widely different approaches. When dealing with mundane anime footage like scene 2 an editor has to use all kinds of tricks in order to make things look interesting. The first trick is to use faster cuts - a series of jump cuts with a sequence of mundane scenes suddenly becomes something more appealing to look at. The next step is applying external motion effects such as zooms. This naturally leads to the more spangly embellishments of visual effects.
cf - clip from memories of love and conflict
Taking things a step further - visual manipulations to create new settings, mood and alternate universes
Once the true mutability of animation was discovered by AMV creators, it was natural that digital manipulations would become an important part of anime music videos. If, as I claim, a large part of amv creation is about respecting and celebrating the animated form as spectacle then it practically invites such manipulations. The video which I showed to illustrate this was Playground Love by Nathan Bezner and Jeff Heller. The importance of this video is that an entirely original setting is created (in 3d no less) in order to produce a sexy mood piece that would fall pretty flat if it merely used the low-framerate animation of the original show.
From this point, I took the panel mostly down a discussion of masking. Masking has become a staple of AMV creation over the last few years and we can probably thank Eric Kobet for that. I discussed how animation is very maskable and how this means that alternate universe and constructed reality videos are within the grasp of AMV editors. Showed a section of Vlad Pohnert's Transcending Love Before and After as a point of reference.
Tech Demo - Masking in Anime, in Live Action and in Mordor.
I then went into discussion of how masking animatino differs to masking live action. The conclusion? They are essentially the same principle but with live action it is a significantly more time consuming. To demonstrate this, I opened up some of my After Effects projects from when I was making my Do It Right (Shake it) video.
Download the Masking project files and clips here - 20mb zip file.
The first project I demonstrated (albeit breifly) was monkey.aep which has the Super Gals clip that I used for the monkey dance. With this clip, the animation is very simple. It has a low framerate and it loops which means there aren't all that many frames that require masking.
The next project file I opened was walken1.aep which demonstrates how much harder it is to mask out live action. Every frame is unique in every way imaginable with masses of tiny adjustments to be made in order to make an effective mask. Closer inspection of this project file will demonstrate what a sloppy job I did of it, in reality.... and also how I gave up after 3/4 of the clip :P
At this point, I proposed the possibility of using the constructed reality masking techniques seen in AMVs in a live action video. As I had my Christopher Walken clip already masked, I decided to demonstrate the possibilities of putting this clip into Return of the King. The clip I chose to use from ROTK was this one. The initial project file for this is walkeninmordor.aep. It presents a number of problems - firstly the scene is very green so my walken clip needed to be tinted appropriately. The second problem is that the camera is moving and rotating so in order to make Walken look like he's part of the original scene the motion in the scene would have to be tracked. After a quick demonstration of After Effects' kickass tracking tool I produced the following result:
Walken in Mordor
The Q&A Section
At this point in the panel I'd hit the 30 minute mark. Having only 45 minutes for the panel I decided to have 30 mins me talking at people and 15 minutes feedback and discussion. Unfortunately, I totally can't remember what was talked about in this section. I know I was asked questions and I answered them but exactly what those questions were I just cannot for the life of me remember. So, if anyone can remember what we talked about in this section I'd appreciate it :) Oh wait, there are a couple I remember.
I was asked about Meta in the AMV community and whether there were a lot of discussions about form. To which I replied that there were practically none. While there have been many discussions on how you do technique X or effect Y there have been stunningly few discussions of narrative, cutting styles, POV or any of the other topics that frequent the live action vidding meta discussions. I noted that I felt that this was partly because the AMV community has grown out of a competition culture where new videos are created in secret in order to win people over at cons and that discussion of ones expertise is considered to be arrogant trumpet-blowing. This is a shame because it seems that while AMVs have grown through imitation there hasn't been a lot of learning from some of the more subtle insights gained from the actual editing process.
I was also asked about the possibility of making videos based on manga and I confirmed that it was definitely very possible. As an example, I played a section of Silence by Aluminum Studios, explaining that it mostly used art book scans and hand-drawn materials to create the video. I also added that although I'd not seen any hugely popular or successful manga-only videos that I believed that there was definitely a place for such a video in the future thanks to the acceptance of manipulated still images in AMVs
Stuff I didn't have time for
Looking back at my notes there are a few things I wanted to go into greater detail about. The first of these was the idea of effects and inappropriateness, how the use of effects has to honour the sources that it uses (either the footage or the music or both) and that any effects use has to be done with full determination. Once you go down the effects road that's it so you better make sure that your video can sustain the effects that you've envisioned because if you use them too sparingly they can be jarring and if you use them at the expense of everything else then you better have a damn good reason for it. Bad effects videos are common in AMVs but I'd imagine they would be even more common in live action if there were more effectsy live action videos. Where many effects can sit happily with an animated source this is not true of live action effects and very careful consideration needs to be made when making such an important stylistic choice.
The other thing I wanted to discuss a lot more was a female driven counter-aesthetic occuring in AMVs which has its roots in fan fiction. Despite the fact that you are unlikely to find any of these videos on the Top 10% list on animemusicvideos.org there are a huge amount of character driven Inu Yasha videos. These have, so far, gained very little notoriety in the community as a whole but they exist in massive quantities. As the AMV community has a pretty well-defined focus (and is predominantly male) these videos have not gained a lot of attention. They are, however, an interesting counter argument to the notion of AMVs as spectacle and offer the closest link between the anime and live action vidding aesthetics.
Response
I was very happy with the turnout of the panel - from what I could tell it was standing room only at the back. I had a lot of people come up to me and complement me on the panel afterwards which made me very happy. I felt it went really well, I got a lot of the main ideas I wanted to present across and I think it was entertaining and interesting enough for a crowd who were mostly either ambivalent or undecided about their reaction to AMVs as a whole.
If there's anything that I've not recalled that you remember me talking about, please comment so i can add it in. Also if anyone has any further questions on any of the stuff I discuss in this post (or things I said at the con) then please feel free to ask!
Then there was the problem of what topics to discuss. So, before vividcon I posted a poll asking people to try and prioritise the content. That poll was pretty useful although it meant I had to do some tech preparatory work that I wasn't expecting.
The Handout
For the panel handout, I decided to actually make a handout that would cover some of the things I knew I was not going to have time for. I also thought that it might be useful to inspire any questions. Time was pushing on before I had to leave for the con so I threw this together. It's likely that there are errors. Also, the name lists are completely random - I was going to alphabetise but I couldn't be arsed.
Anime Panel Handout - 95kb pdf
Note that for the editors and phases, editors were placed into the phase where they first made their mark rather than the phase they made the biggest impression. Vlad Pohnert, for example, has been most significant in phases 2 and 3.
The Panel
The Heart of AMV creation
I'm going to go though the stuff I think I talked about at the panel and also note down some of the things I never had a great deal of time to talk about or only made glancing reference to.
To begin the panel, I decided to define and contrast the different inspirations behind live action vidding and anime music video creation by pinpointing what I felt was at the heart of these two fannish activities. For vidding, I described how a large amount of vidding comes from the desire to create videos that illustrate things about characters in these adored shows often with the goal of providing a new insight or approach to the character (I made reference to the concept of telling deeper). For AMVs I decided to show what, in my opinion, represents a key inspiration for anime vidding in terms of craft and theme - the Daicon IV opening animation:
Daicon IV Opening Animation - 10mb realmovie
To me, this is what animation video making is mostly about - creating wonderous spectacle that celebrates animated geekdom. Of course that's not the only inspiration but it's what I felt was a major part of AMVs that distinguished it from live action vidding. My explanation for this was essentially what the whole panel was about but I stated at this point that the focus on spectacle was in part due to the limitations, necessities and temptations of animation as an artform and in part due to the way the AMV community has developed.
The unique nature of Animation as art.
For this section I compared a few different philosophies of visual artforms and tried to come up with a satisfactory definition of how animation works. The thought being that to understand the way that animation works will help understand how editing animation has very different concerns. To illustrate this I recalled Bob McKee's writings on movie narratives and how screenwriting aims to represent what it is to be human, our desires, fears, ambitions, spirit, losses and loves. Animation, on the other hand, expresses things through caricature where no matter how realistic the approach the ultimate quality of the animation is that it expresses big emotion aided by its larger-than-life fantastical quality. So, in conclusion, I noted that in order to create successful animated videos there needs to be a degree of respect for the fantastical spectacular nature of animation because a naturalised realistic approach will more than likely miss the target and be lifeless. In an attempt to back up this bold claim I mentioned that I spoke to Ray Harryhausen (of Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans fame) last year and asked him about what he thought of modern 3D CGI. His response was that while he appreciated that it was technically superior it lacked some of the mystery and magic of the old stop motion animation. With this I am in complete agreement and I think it extends to animation as a whole that the closer it approaches reality the more it loses its power and so people should try and resist using the same principles they would apply to live action video making when it comes to animation editing.
See, it's not that animation cannot express the same feelings that live action can, it's just that the approach is so very different. I commented how Dumbo has the ability to make people cry and that animation is no lesser a form of expression but in order to do that kind of expression it uses exaggerated visuals and it is in these exaggerated caricatures of emotion where animation has its strengths.
Live action vs Anime footage and the problems it presents
To explain how the practicalities of anime footage has promoted a lot more fast cutting, external motion and visual manipulation I decided to present two scenes without their audio for the audience to analyse. The first scene was the most visually mundane scene I could find in a randomly chosen episode of the recent Battlestar Gallactica. The second scene I picked was the most emotionally charged scene in a randomly picked episode of SaiKano - where the characters have a passionate falling out. You can see the two scenes here:
Scene 1 - 2.5mb divx
Scene 2 - 748kb divx
Comments from the audience on what could be done with the first clip included using the circling of adama footage and the visible embarrassment of the female character with the laughing panel behind her. I'd also add to this that there is plenty of call for Adama eyebrow motion footage :)
As for the second clip, it really speaks for itself. Anime, particularly TV series anime, relys on cheap animation for the bulk of the show with the majority of the budget being spent on "moneyshots" (usually action scenes) that give an overall impression of high quality animation. The point I wanted to get across that where so much can be done with character relationships in live action footage based on what you can see the same is not true of anime. The fact is that anime characters do not act. They cannot act. The voice actors do the acting, the anime characters simply do the mouth flapping. This is a key distinction between the footage types and one of the major reasons why editing these two forms has produced such widely different approaches. When dealing with mundane anime footage like scene 2 an editor has to use all kinds of tricks in order to make things look interesting. The first trick is to use faster cuts - a series of jump cuts with a sequence of mundane scenes suddenly becomes something more appealing to look at. The next step is applying external motion effects such as zooms. This naturally leads to the more spangly embellishments of visual effects.
cf - clip from memories of love and conflict
Taking things a step further - visual manipulations to create new settings, mood and alternate universes
Once the true mutability of animation was discovered by AMV creators, it was natural that digital manipulations would become an important part of anime music videos. If, as I claim, a large part of amv creation is about respecting and celebrating the animated form as spectacle then it practically invites such manipulations. The video which I showed to illustrate this was Playground Love by Nathan Bezner and Jeff Heller. The importance of this video is that an entirely original setting is created (in 3d no less) in order to produce a sexy mood piece that would fall pretty flat if it merely used the low-framerate animation of the original show.
From this point, I took the panel mostly down a discussion of masking. Masking has become a staple of AMV creation over the last few years and we can probably thank Eric Kobet for that. I discussed how animation is very maskable and how this means that alternate universe and constructed reality videos are within the grasp of AMV editors. Showed a section of Vlad Pohnert's Transcending Love Before and After as a point of reference.
Tech Demo - Masking in Anime, in Live Action and in Mordor.
I then went into discussion of how masking animatino differs to masking live action. The conclusion? They are essentially the same principle but with live action it is a significantly more time consuming. To demonstrate this, I opened up some of my After Effects projects from when I was making my Do It Right (Shake it) video.
Download the Masking project files and clips here - 20mb zip file.
The first project I demonstrated (albeit breifly) was monkey.aep which has the Super Gals clip that I used for the monkey dance. With this clip, the animation is very simple. It has a low framerate and it loops which means there aren't all that many frames that require masking.
The next project file I opened was walken1.aep which demonstrates how much harder it is to mask out live action. Every frame is unique in every way imaginable with masses of tiny adjustments to be made in order to make an effective mask. Closer inspection of this project file will demonstrate what a sloppy job I did of it, in reality.... and also how I gave up after 3/4 of the clip :P
At this point, I proposed the possibility of using the constructed reality masking techniques seen in AMVs in a live action video. As I had my Christopher Walken clip already masked, I decided to demonstrate the possibilities of putting this clip into Return of the King. The clip I chose to use from ROTK was this one. The initial project file for this is walkeninmordor.aep. It presents a number of problems - firstly the scene is very green so my walken clip needed to be tinted appropriately. The second problem is that the camera is moving and rotating so in order to make Walken look like he's part of the original scene the motion in the scene would have to be tracked. After a quick demonstration of After Effects' kickass tracking tool I produced the following result:
Walken in Mordor
The Q&A Section
At this point in the panel I'd hit the 30 minute mark. Having only 45 minutes for the panel I decided to have 30 mins me talking at people and 15 minutes feedback and discussion. Unfortunately, I totally can't remember what was talked about in this section. I know I was asked questions and I answered them but exactly what those questions were I just cannot for the life of me remember. So, if anyone can remember what we talked about in this section I'd appreciate it :) Oh wait, there are a couple I remember.
I was asked about Meta in the AMV community and whether there were a lot of discussions about form. To which I replied that there were practically none. While there have been many discussions on how you do technique X or effect Y there have been stunningly few discussions of narrative, cutting styles, POV or any of the other topics that frequent the live action vidding meta discussions. I noted that I felt that this was partly because the AMV community has grown out of a competition culture where new videos are created in secret in order to win people over at cons and that discussion of ones expertise is considered to be arrogant trumpet-blowing. This is a shame because it seems that while AMVs have grown through imitation there hasn't been a lot of learning from some of the more subtle insights gained from the actual editing process.
I was also asked about the possibility of making videos based on manga and I confirmed that it was definitely very possible. As an example, I played a section of Silence by Aluminum Studios, explaining that it mostly used art book scans and hand-drawn materials to create the video. I also added that although I'd not seen any hugely popular or successful manga-only videos that I believed that there was definitely a place for such a video in the future thanks to the acceptance of manipulated still images in AMVs
Stuff I didn't have time for
Looking back at my notes there are a few things I wanted to go into greater detail about. The first of these was the idea of effects and inappropriateness, how the use of effects has to honour the sources that it uses (either the footage or the music or both) and that any effects use has to be done with full determination. Once you go down the effects road that's it so you better make sure that your video can sustain the effects that you've envisioned because if you use them too sparingly they can be jarring and if you use them at the expense of everything else then you better have a damn good reason for it. Bad effects videos are common in AMVs but I'd imagine they would be even more common in live action if there were more effectsy live action videos. Where many effects can sit happily with an animated source this is not true of live action effects and very careful consideration needs to be made when making such an important stylistic choice.
The other thing I wanted to discuss a lot more was a female driven counter-aesthetic occuring in AMVs which has its roots in fan fiction. Despite the fact that you are unlikely to find any of these videos on the Top 10% list on animemusicvideos.org there are a huge amount of character driven Inu Yasha videos. These have, so far, gained very little notoriety in the community as a whole but they exist in massive quantities. As the AMV community has a pretty well-defined focus (and is predominantly male) these videos have not gained a lot of attention. They are, however, an interesting counter argument to the notion of AMVs as spectacle and offer the closest link between the anime and live action vidding aesthetics.
Response
I was very happy with the turnout of the panel - from what I could tell it was standing room only at the back. I had a lot of people come up to me and complement me on the panel afterwards which made me very happy. I felt it went really well, I got a lot of the main ideas I wanted to present across and I think it was entertaining and interesting enough for a crowd who were mostly either ambivalent or undecided about their reaction to AMVs as a whole.
If there's anything that I've not recalled that you remember me talking about, please comment so i can add it in. Also if anyone has any further questions on any of the stuff I discuss in this post (or things I said at the con) then please feel free to ask!