operat0r: Notes

Video: Various
Audio: Operator (Papaya)
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In October 2000, Brad DeMoss announced the DDR Project to the AMV ML, which was to (as a group project) make a 72-minute anime music video to the Dance Dance Revolution 3rd Mix non-stop megamix CD. In the end, almost 30 editors made 41 videos which were joined together, and the DDR Project premiered at Anime Weekend Atlanta 2001.

I'd never edited a video to music like this before. I listened to the CD, and an idea struck me for the sixth track. So I emailed Brad at something like 4AM to request that track. Due to other projects and things, this video was (relatively speaking) kind of a rush job for me, but I'm still happy with the results, because I was able to put together what I originally imagined. I had envisioned a "traditional" (for lack of a better term) AMV pulling back to reveal four pictures-in-picture, connected together by a waveform and a phone, representing callers and their "lovers". There would also be phone numbers scrolling in the background, Matrix style. I later thought of adding another layer (there were 13 in all) which was a bunch of blue lines with yellow "signals" going across them randomly.

There's a picture of the format below. The video used techniques that I had done before in my Virus video. Using the picture-in-picture format, I was able to use over 155 sources in less than 70 seconds. I have a master list, but I think it's more fun to have people guess the shows. Note that the females are on top, and males below, joined diagonally. I also tried to keep the clips facing the phone, when characters faced left or right.

At first, in my haste, I noticed that there were a certain number of frames between two beats, and edited the picture-in-picture clips that way. This wasn't good enough though (the scene changes drifted out of sync), so I had to redo it. I was going nuts trying to find the beats easily in the waveform, until I ran a lowpass filter over the WAV and they were much easier to find. (I thought this was the coolest thing ever when I figured it out)

For Brad to put them together, we had to give him footage five seconds before and five seconds after our songs as well. Since my song started relatively "cleanly" with the "Are you ready?" I wasn't sure what to use at first. Then the picture-in-picture aspect made me think of a windowed OS, which gave way to the OS/"loading" screen.

The picture-in-picture was simply done with Premiere motion events.
The connecting lines are actually the waveform of the song. I dumped it from Winamp to VHS, then captured it back in.
The phone is a 3DS model converted to VRML, viewed in Netscape/Cosmo Player, sent to VHS, captured back in.
Numbers/Lines: I wrote software to generate a few thousand bitmaps for some layers. I thought the layers were too prominent, so I blurred them.

Two final things: 1) I was rather pleased with my choice of "operator" footage. 2) There's also a rotate-around-the-head-and-shoulders shot of Kyosuke in the second KOR movie, and I thought it would be neat to fade between that and the similar Madoka shot, but Kyosuke looked annoyed, and I didn't want that.