AMV stands for Anime Music video, basically a mash-up of anime footage with any song. In Japan, the corporations are much more open with creative usage of their Intellectual Properties (ie, characters), and the fan community is also exceedingly good with not using the official pictures but come up with their own creations. In fact, the general population seem to be much more copyright law abiding than an American. It is a fine line between original creation and copyright infringement for AMVs, because AMVs do usually use footage from the anime itself, but this is not going to be a post on that.
At an American anime convention, AMV contest is often one of the major events, while in Japan, most of the distribution seems to be online. I have several American friends who love AMVs, likes to make them, and consider AMV contests the best thing at a convention. Personally, I am not a big fan of AMVs, but then it is probably because I prefer a plot over cool effects. Despite my disinterest in AMVs, I nevertheless always wanted to make one. It is really part of being an anime otaku: while I don’t spend hours and hours online watching AMVs , my friends will always show me the best ones. After watching so many good ones, you just have to try it yourself.
After realizing that the only video editing software I have is Windows Movie Maker (WMM), I settled down and decided to make an AMV featuring
Irresponsible Captain Tylor. The choice was slightly forced since it is the only anime I have without hard subs1, but I do like Tylor.
After two and a half hours of work on WMM, which, by the way, has very limited video editing features, my first AMV was done. I would say that I am quite satisfied with it, considering I was able to make up some sort of plot with footage I captured, and I did not spend that much time on it (some people work for months on their AMVs). A lot of the cool things I would like to do cannot be done using the free WMM, but good video editing software are so expensive that it is prohibitive to the public.
After uploading to youtube, I start tracking the number of views. You know the feeling, that you don’t really care if people watch your video, but you still want to feel obliged to check? I guess youtube is really good at doing that… I will see if the AMV will get higher traffic than my other random videos.
Do I like AMVs more now that I made one myself? I have to say that one video is really enough for the experience. Watching well made AMVs is fun, but the process of making one is really quite boring… Unless of course, if I ever make one for Full Metal Panic, my favourite anime…
- Hard subs are subtitles encoded into a video file. Soft subs on the other hand are subtitles in a different file and can be loaded as a layer on top of the video. Videos without subs are called RAWs, and to make an AMV, it is generally considered necessary to remove the subtitles to enhance the presentation [↩]
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