[Davis 51] Showdown! Battle of the Heartbeats

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Cowboy BeBop, nor do I own music by the band Arcade Fire, specifically the song “My Body is a Cage“. This is merely a fan production under fair use meant to serve as a tribute to the original work. Please support the official release by purchasing the Cowboy BeBop DVD’s or the song “My Body is a Cage“ by Arcade Fire. DOWNLOAD LINK: ENTERED FINALIST (Non-Winner): AnimeUSA 2011 AMV Contest ENTERED (non-finalist): Anime Mid Atlantic 2010 AMV Contest ENTERED (non-competing Beta): Nekocon 2010 AMV Contest What started here as a side project became my main video project for several months. With my big Avatar video, where the effects were made center stage and given the spotlight, and where the spotlight was subsequently stolen by crappy Youtube output), I decided to institute a rule of no major effects until after I completed the editing itself. Once that was completed, I decided that unlike my other video, where I was using the effects to complement the story, the story could not be complimented in the same watercolor/sketchbook/crumpled paper kind of way. Instead, Cowboy BeBop required a more subtle approach. I instituted a rule early on in that regard for this video: If the viewer is unfamiliar with the series, they should not notice any of the effects. In other words, the effects would be “hidden“ or “invisible“. In fact, the most complex thing I did were the addition of three light-ray effects with a backglow, something no one who hasn’t seen the series has noticed. The rest of the effects are centered around brightness, contrast, saturation, a single solitary instance of lip sync, and some mild chroma key/video splitting/overlaying. In Cowboy BeBop, many scenes tend to clash with each other when placed side-by-side on the timeline, so much so that it’s distracting. The end goal of all this was to smooth things out, so that the scenes “flow“ in tangent with each other instead of just “jumping.“ The song is one that I find very emotionally overpowering, and one that fits the mood of Cowboy BeBop perfectly. The show is one with complex characters and powerful parallel/intersecting narratives. I tried my best to grab the strongest of these narratives and re-tell them in an accessible form, taking all the subtle visual cues and visual motifs, and reconstructing them in a way that pays tribute to the montage styles of Director Shinichiro Watanabe. Hopefully you all enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it! This video was entered as Non-Competing at Nekocon 2010, and was sent into AnimeUSA 2010 but didn’t make the finals (though A Million Little Gods did, interestingly enough, check it out on my video page if you haven’t seen it!). Somehow, however, it made it into the AnimeUSA 2011 finals, though, so we’ll see if I can’t get it into the Katsucon 2012 finals.