Truthfully I would have rather turned one of my video game articles into a video but that would have required me capturing game footage and I have no way to do that without going out and buying a peripheral. So I decided to do one of my anime pieces instead since I could relatively easily acquire video clips for those. From there it was a matter of deciding which anime article to use. In the end I settled on my "Sympathy & Empathy" article because it is the one that I feel most proud about and is also one of my most received pieces. I would later come to realize that I was biting of a little more than I could chew by choosing this piece.
So first things first, I had to record my narration. I put on my gaming headset that was the only mic I had and spent an hour recording take after take of each line. Listening to the raw audio after I was done taught me my first lesson: and that's the importance of a quality recording environment. My mic had picked up the sounds of my chair creaking, my upstairs neighbor stomping around, and cars passing by outside, among other things. Luckily, all of my best takes were miraculously untainted and I was able to use all of them. But it taught me to find a way to limit atmospheric noise next time I do recording. Listening to my voice-over also made me realize that my mic isn't the greatest, but it's the only one I have so I didn't have an option.
After I was done cutting and editing my voice-over it was time to get into the actual video editing. Immediate realization: I had a lot of footage to work with and I didn't even know where to begin. Not only that but I had to find a way to split the footage between 3-gatsu no Lion and Kuzu no Honkai during the first portion of the video.without it being too jarring. The only solution I could think of was to use relatively mundane scenes so that the transitions didn't seem too abrupt while I got through my video exposition.
Once I got into my specific talking points, choosing video clips became slightly easier as I simply had to choose clips to prove said points. Finding those clips was the difficult part, though. 3-gatsu no Lion has 22 episodes while Kuzu no Honkai has 12 episodes. Part of the reason I write articles as soon as I think of them is to get words down while the idea and scenes are still fresh in my head. It's been about 2 months now since the two shows have concluded and recalling when specific scenes that I wanted to use occurred proved challenging. This issue was even worse when I simply knew in my heart a scene existed that shows my point but I didn't remember exactly what the scene was. Needless to say, a large chunk of my time was spent skimming through video footage to find the specific clips I needed.
Next challenge was learning how to create video effects, particularly the scene transitions, highlights, and magnifications during the NIMH screenshot. The fade-ins would mess up the video, editing effects would crash my program, and the timing of effects just refused to cooperate. Eventually I got all the effects in working order and then immediately realized that I did it the hard way and could've saved myself so much effort doing it the proper way. But hey, lessons learned.
By the time I got through the contrasting portion of the video and arrived at the conclusion I realized another problem. I didn't really know how to end the video. It's one thing when writing a blog post and the post ends when the writing does, but it's another for a video that has visual and audio elements to it. How could I naturally bring the video to a close? Well, frankly I got lucky. The song I used for the conclusion just happened to have a tempo that perfectly synced with the first video clip I was using for it. From there it got me thinking to end on a positive note. Seeing as how the entirety of the video beforehand was composed of rather heavy scenes from the two anime, I wanted to show that there is more to 3-gatsu no Lion and Kuzu no Honkai than just doom and gloom. I took the warm and comedic scenes from the shows and made a pseudo-music video out of them to hopefully lift the spirits of whoever is watching. It just so happened that the ebb and flow of the music track coincided nicely with my narration. Making this conclusion was probably the most fun I had during the whole editing process.
All in all, making this video was quite the endeavor. I started work on it during Memorial Day weekend and worked on it for roughly a week and a half to see it to completion. If you count the time I spent to write the script, which is the original blog post, it took me approximately 24 hours in total to complete the nine minute long video. There are definitely areas that I need to improve on. My narration still seems pretty stiff, my mic quality is trash, and my script didn't lend itself to a video format as much as I had hoped it would after I watched the final cut.
In spite of all that, though, I had a fantastic time making this. Going through the process of learning a new skill on my own and watching my video timeline grow longer and longer was immensely satisfying. I even forewent video games entirely the last three days of editing not because I had a deadline to finish or anything, but because I was so engrossed in my work that I couldn't stop. Those of you who know me know how big a deal it is for me to willingly place video games on the back burner. This was something that I genuinely enjoyed creating from beginning to end and I hope that shines through in the finished product.
(TL;DR): I'm really proud of this video and hope you like it please praise me!
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