Blog Like Grace Kelly

I don’t remember the first time I saw a Manga Music Video (MMV). It was probably at an Otakon. I do remember the realization dawning on me quite quickly that this was not anime footage, and that the editor was digitally animating manga pages. I was immediately awestruck at the amount of effort and talent required to produce such a video. Having not been an editor at the time, I will say that my understanding of how challenging an MMV might be was somewhat insufficient.

The first MMV to ever break my brain was Killing Kind by Nekokitkat. Seriously, everyone should watch this thing:

The movement! The color! The animations! There is nothing I don’t love about this thing. I actually got to sit down with Kitkat when she was describing her process and showing her timeline in Vegas. She was sharing her screen and took me on a tour of what Killing Kind looked like *inside the program* and boy howdy did that flatten me. The number of layers, lines, pieces, parts, whatever was absolutely mind boggling. I also use Vegas so I was able to follow along a little, and I actually hope I never have that many rows in a project EVER. I am admittedly not familiar with the source material, so I wasn’t always able to follow along with the video’s story (and the source seems to have a lot of characters). That did not detract at all from my enjoyment of the complex spectacle that is Killing Kind. Watch it a few times; it’s worth it.

Even if I was interested at some point to make my own MMV, I had a pretty big hurdle to overcome. I don’t actually read manga. I’m interested in it, but I also just don’t take the time to read in general. I used to love to read, and I am sure if I took the time to pick up a book, I would devour it—I read fast. My interest in making an MMV kinda sputtered because of this lack of exposure. Where do I start? What manga do I pick up? And critically, how do I even come up with a pairing to go with with the source after the fact? When making an AMV, I nearly always start song first—that is, I listen to a song and think of the source second. So was not only choosing where to start and what source to pick a massive hurdle, trying to pick a song afterwards was going to be a challenge. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to make an MMV. However, by being immersed in the editing community, I was given a great opportunity.

In January of this year, I was invited to a discord server for MMV editors. Having zero manga experience and less than a year of AMV editing (at time of joining), I had no idea what to expect. Any fear I might have had was wholly unnecessary. The moment I joined, everyone was supportive and welcoming. I value all the people there (even if I lurk most of the time!) and it has been a great experience so far.

When one of the server owners announced an Iron Chef event (timed editing challenge), and I was eager and excited to join. I would be assigned a manga (I didn’t have to try and pick one myself!), and all I had to do was read it and make an MMV of any length that I wanted. This was exactly the opportunity I needed. All of the manga sources for the challenge were also required to be short, so they would be quick reads. Participants were supposed to suggest manga for the pool of sources, but someone was kind enough to add a manga to the pool for me. The first hurdle of selecting a manga would be taken care of.

Random assignments were given in July. I was given a manga whose title roughly translates to “Our Happy Hours” (Watashitachi no Shiawase na Jikan). I'll attempt to summarize the story with minimal spoilers. This manga opens with a woman attempting suicide. Her aunt, who is a nun, visits her in the hospital and convinces her to come along when she visits death row inmates. The aunt and the woman go to meet a specific man, who is in prison for murdering three people, and has also tried and failed to kill himself. Over the course of the (quite short, only 8 chapters) series, the woman and man get to know each other, share their tragic backstories, and form an emotional bond. The tale is quite dark, so if you choose to go read it, be aware of content warnings of suicide and sexual abuse/assault.

The second hurdle, as I had mentioned, was picking a song to pair with this sad story. I knew that song selection would be particularly challenging because of my usual process--song first, source afterwards. In the case of this manga, I had a hearbreaking tale of bonding over trauma and lost love, which is fortunately a common subject for a song. I asked around, had a few options, and ultimately decided on Tommee Profitt & Ruelle’s cover of Iris, originally by the Goo Goo Dolls.

I had my source, I had my song, and now all I had to do was… make a video. Easy peasy right? Well, not only is MMV editing more challenging than AMV editing, the approach to editing is quite different. My previous blog post outlined the differences between editing with live action, anime, and manga. I attempted to start editing the video the same way I make AMVs—start at the beginning, put some things down to get initial energy, and confirm that the concept works. I animated my first panel and it looked… fine. Not great, just OK. The female lead stands in front of a window, peering out, with her hand on it. I thought it would be cool if her hand slid down the glass, sort of like a sad acceptance of defeat. I separated her body and background, her forearm was the next layer, then the hand was on top. That was my second “clip” on the timeline. It took me one whole evening to make the equivalent of one second of AMV. I decided pretty quickly that a strictly linear approach wasn’t going to cut it.

My next step was to fill a timeline. I wanted a storyboard to see where the key beats were, focus on the primary plot elements of the manga, and try to fit the story with the song (which I had trimmed to a manageable length). It also helped me to identify where animation could amplify the story. I selected manga pages, added them to my Vegas project, and arranged them in approximate chronological order. Seeing the big picture was a huge help for me. I was able to teach myself some rudimentary photoshop and dive into some more complex animations. I also played with effects that I had never used before. For simplicity, I ignored the two characters’ tragic backstories and focused on the present—visiting at the prison, drawing, writing, and the haircut.

The resulting video feels quite amateur, but I am debuting it here on the blog at the same time as the official YouTube release. Here it is, my first MMV:

Last weekend, I was at Momocon, a huge anime and geek convention hosting about 48,000 people at the Georgia World Congress Center. It’s the largest convention I’ve ever attended. 40 AMV editors attended a variety of social and AMV events, and I had the great opportunity to meet several of them for the first time. Previously I blogged about how much energy I get from seeing my videos on the big screen, and this convention was no exception–I saw six different videos that I had edited over the course of the weekend. At four days, the convention is also on the long side, with lots of things to do and an absolutely massive dealer hall. The whole event was a lot of fun, and Tyken and I had a really nice time.

The AMV competition at Momocon is interesting, too. It has a standard contest, with audience judging and categories, and a VMix competition. The AMV contest allows any animated or video game source regardless of origin, and the VMix is for videos that are predominately live action. Any video that doesn’t make finalist in the AMV competition, however, moves over to VMix. During the contest, the AMV contest ballots are printed by category, with separate sheets for Drama, Action, Romance/Sentimental, etc. The sheets are collected *after each category* to allow tabulation as the contest is actively being presented. VMix awards, by contrast, are selected by the judging committee. VMix awards are announced in between the AMV categories to allow the Momo AMV staff time to tabulate the ballots. Then, at the end of the whole competition, you find out who wins! Immediately! It’s a little insane, it’s really fun, and it’s a great thing to not need to go to a separate awards show after the competition. 

I like conventional AMV contests. I have no major complaints about them. The Momo competition is exceptionally well run. My goal here is to not disparage this format in any way. I do want to take the time to talk about a more rare competition format–blind judging.

There are two main AMV contests (of which I’m aware) that feature blind judging. One, The Accolades (Accys for short, formerly PRO), is the primary AMV contest of Anime Weekend Atlanta (AWA). The other, RICE, is hosted by Vars (Standard Quip), owner of the Bentovid discord server. In both contests, participants can submit up to two videos, provided that they have not been available online for others to see. The video entries are then randomized and blinded so that no one knows who made what. Only people who have entered videos into the competition are able to view, review, and judge the submissions. Both competitions also have some form of category voting in 2023. RICE has all categories selected by participants, and Accys is planning on 10 fixed categories and 5 participant-selected categories. After category, semi-final, and final voting, the awards are held via stream in the case of RICE, or at the convention for Accolades/AWA.

What makes these competitions special? Accys and RICE are both hosted primarily on Discord, where they foster conversations, support, puns, and a real sense of community. I was able to meet many editors in person at Momo, but the consistent excitement and interaction of RICE/Accy are uniquely special. These contests play out over the course of several weeks, and you get to spend real quality time with people who are just as excited about editing as you are. As a bonus, blind competitions are completely new videos, a clean slate, and watching these new releases is very satisfying. 

During Accys 2022, I was a very new editor with only four months of experience, but several years of AMV watching under my belt. I had low expectations about how my videos would perform. However, I got to see amazing videos for the first time, videos that continue to make an impression on me to this day. Waving Through by Opner was possibly my favorite video from that competition. I have never seen My Hero Academia, and to that point I had only seen fast-paced action edits. This video told such a great story, followed the rise of Deku as a character, and hit all the right sentimental notes for me. I was absolutely delighted to see it early, and I have been thrilled to watch it at conventions since. I had a lot of feelings from this video despite never having seen the source, something I don’t always experience.

Blind judging also removes some of the ego out of the competition. People can take risks, make whatever, and not worry as much about success. Some subset of the community gets really excited to guess who edited things as well. I participate in the guessing as a courtesy, but it’s not my favorite part. With everyone unaware who made what, it’s a really big compliment when someone guesses 1. That you made a video that you perceive to be really good, or 2. That someone else who you really admire made your video. I love the watch parties, too, where everyone has opportunities to be in calls and talk about videos. It helped me a lot starting out, because I was able to interact closely with editors whose names I’d only seen at awards ceremonies at my local competitions.

Conventions can offer an in-person connection, but people are more casual online, more interactive. People watch videos with fresh eyes, unhindered by knowledge of the editor. It’s a great experience, and I eagerly await many more Accys and RICE to come. 

I have always liked conventions. Even though I am an introvert, being able to wander around anonymously in a crowd is fun to me. Similarly, I like festivals, faires, and basically any activity that involves milling about with vague purpose. Ideally the purpose involves things besides consumerism, so just shopping isn’t enough (boo wandering around the mall). If there’s a band, a stage performance, or a speaker, I’m there. Bonus points if I get to wear stupid outfits.

The Renaissance Faire was my first convention-adjacent activity, and I really loved it. Arts festivals and steampunk festivals soon followed. I didn’t attend my first anime convention until 2013, when I was 30 years old. I already felt too old to be there on some conceptual level. However, conventions were just festivals but indoors, with a wider variety of activities. I was hooked. 

AMVs have always been the highlight of my convention experience. Still, I love to attend voice actor panels, fan panels, workshops, dances, and concerts. Anime conventions offer the whole package of activities... and my husband and I probably attend too many. This blog entry idea came to me because we will be at Momocon this time next week. Momo will be our third anime convention this year, and we’ve already booked tickets and hotel for Otakon in July. I am currently planning on Otakon being our only other anime con in 2023, but my whims are fickle and I’m easily swayed. 

My local convention is not very large, fewer than 6000 attendees. Compared to Momocon, with 42k+, or Otakon, which is almost as large, my local con feels quaint and manageable. The panel room sizes are all decent and tend not to be too full (except maybe the panel on Himbos), the convention center is small and easy to navigate, and the celebrity guests feel up close and personal. 

On the AMV contest side, I get the sense that smaller conventions tend to get fewer entries. There is definitely some prestige about being accepted as a finalist at Momocon or Otakon compared to smaller convention (though being a finalist is ALWAYS exciting). Seeing an AMV on the big screen is a very different experience, though, than seeing it on your own personal computer. This year was my first year seeing my videos at an AMV contest, and seeing your own work compete is rewarding in an unexpected way. Even if the videos you are competing against are much better, knowing that your video was good enough to be considered in the same prestige as some really jaw-dropping work is always an honor.

I find myself largely ambivalent to the competition scene. Due to how I approach video editing, it’s about the journey for me. I spent so many years making outfits and cosplay, and my satisfaction comes from a job well done. The outfit or video being complete is basically sufficient for me. I’m excited to submit my videos to conventions that I plan to attend of course, see previous comments about the big screen. Similarly, I never felt the need to enter cosplay competitions. It was always art that I did for me, for art’s sake. The community AMV competitions are definitely more about the social aspect than the accolades (pun intended), and I have so much fun in the screening calls and the voting process that being a finalist or even a winner is mostly tangential.

Still, I’m really excited to attend Momocon next week and see my video in the auditorium. Even though my masking is going to look flatly terrible because I didn’t take time to fix it up before submission, I have a lot of hype seeing my work and the work of my friends surrounded by large groups. I’m also really hopeful that the video I’m working on now makes it to Otakon finals. If it doesn’t, I’ll be a little sad, but I will still thoroughly enjoy the convention anyway. Walking around in stupid outfits is really enjoyable to me.

I should make my next post about Accolades/RICE, both community competitions with blind judging. I have a lot to say about why I like them and what makes them special.

(Author’s Note: as a new AMV editor, this is just, like, my opinion, man. People who have been doing this for longer will possibly disagree with me)

If your AMV lacks sync, it is probably going to look bad. Sync, along with flow, are the two key elements to a successful AMV. If your AMV doesn’t sync or flow, it will look wrong. While flow is just kinda feels, sync is a lot more obvious when it’s not working. 

Typically, there are four types of sync: internal, external, lyric, and lip. Lyric sync is the easiest to explain–if they say the word “holding hands” in a song, you show an image of someone holding hands. Really straightforward stuff. Lip sync is when a character’s mouth looks like they are saying/singing the audio. External sync is cutting scenes to the beat. It’s more necessary than lyric sync for a good-looking AMV because if scene cuts are too early or too late, it’s jarring. People who don’t know how to edit an AMV but know about basic rhythm can determine when something doesn’t look quite right. The third type of sync, internal sync, can really make a video pop. Internal sync is when the *action* of a clip syncs to the beat. Well leveraged internal sync looks awesome. 

Lyric sync is where my ideas start. When Iisten to songs, I listen to the overall feels/vibes of the song, but moreso listen to the words. The lyrics inspire me to search for a source, and if I really like a song, I’ll write it down on my list without having any ideas for it at all.

The video I want to use to demonstrate these concepts, where I think I succeeded in combining lyric sync, external sync, and internal sync the best, is Stay Paranoid!, my week 1 POE video about Bill Cipher. If you’re reading this blog you  probably know what POE is, but in case you don’t, let me explain. Project Org Editor is a competition hosted every other year by animemusicvideos.org (often just called “The Org” for short). There are weekly prompts, and you have seven days to finish a video that fits the prompt of that week. In 2022, the prompt for the first week was Villains, and I chose Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls because he’s so unhinged I thought it would be a good source. I did *not* realize that the coordinator of POE is a die hard Gravity Falls fan, so that didn’t hurt either. This is my first video to make Momocon AMV finals, a huge accomplishment, and I’m very proud.

So the song starts with this intense sound. The sound is almost siren-like, a warning noise, kind of panicky. I like that intensity and how it pairs with Bill Cipher as a character. Then the drum beats start in around 0:05, and the hole in the sky pulses to the beat. The internal sync in those sections feels really satisfying to me–the width of the beam increasing in width as the tone changes, the rising of Bill into the sky as the music’s pitch goes up, and the pulsing X set the stage. At 0:08, I liked how the close up of Bill’s eye matched the distorted low notes, but I used masking to make his eye have more interesting stuff going on (don’t look at the mast too closely, I had only been editing for about 4 months at this point). The scenes in the mask change with the beat. The next section from 0:15-0:40 was to set the tone of the video, do some lyric sync, build some tension. The beat sync during this driving part of the song sets the stage for Bill Cipher as the villain, he melts statues, rearranges faces, and turns people to stone. The internal sync at 0:55 when the birds slow down makes me particularly happy. 

I’m not going to go frame by frame through the rest of the vid, but it has a other places here and there that I consider my favorite parts of the video. Going into editing it, I wanted something important for the lyric “because I’m dancing”. I wanted it to be Bill, but I found his underlings, so there’s a joyous scene for that line at 1:16. I really liked 1:37 how the drums felt like they really worked with the slot machine Bill. The section with Bill and Ford from 1:54-2:08 is excellent lyric sync if you know the show and encompasses the relationship those characters have. The use of Gideon for “my vendetta” is another small lyric pair that I enjoy. The clock sync at 2:27 makes me happy, too. The section from 2:38-2:50 I struggled with, and I think that section could be tighter, but I made it in a week. I also struggled with the end because I rely so heavily on lyrics, and the ending of the song should have been a little more random and not trying to follow a story/plot. 

Relying heavily on lyric sync is both a blessing and a curse. It helps my video feel connected, like the song and the source pair really well (see my Puss in Boots AMV, Purrgatory, for a pairing that I’m really proud of as well as my best lip sync ever). It gives me road blocks, though, because sometimes a single lyric can throw off an entire pairing for me. A song in my “to edit with” list, for example, mentions a cell phone. While that shouldn’t be enough for me to discount any show that isn’t set in modern day, I struggle to find a pairing no matter how insignificant that line is. When I watch videos, though, I don’t have that same hangup. Unexpected pairings, where the lyrics don’t fit to a level that I usually force myself to meet, can really catch my attention. One such video is Oroborous, by Standard Quip. I’m probably going to dedicate an entire post on why this video just works for me. The lyrics to the song, however, are the point I’m trying to make. The song is called Soviet Trumpeter, by a great steampunk/electroswing band Katzenjammer. There are zero trumpets in the video. I know that sounds *VERY* stupid, but that’s how I approach lyrics. I would have listened to the song and completely written it off as a viable AMV song because the words are just kinda weird. The pairing, however, really feels right. 

I might dedicate my next post to this video, or maybe a few videos that I perceive to be unappreciated gems. I find myself to be VERY picky when it comes to AMVs. Talking about AMVs that have fewer than 500 views and why I think they’re great might be interesting to someone. Sure, I could talk about Killing Kind and why this video is amazingly mind-blowing beyond all reason and everyone should watch it. However, I think I would rather bring the hidden vids that really speak to me.