hmm. . . it's hard for me to say why i did this music video. i think it all began at the end of AX '99. when i heard that AX 2000 would be four days long and at the disneyland hotel. . .

i decided to do a video to magic knights rayearth, by CLAMP. my reasons were practical: i could borrow laserdiscs to capture from if i did rayearth.

about four months later i and the rest of the i360.com staff went out for hot dogs at Pink's, in hollywood, at around midnight. ( nothing better than a pink's hot dog at midnight. —ct ) we talked for a while about random whatnot until inspiration struck. 'we're going to disney. . . how about a song from disney?'

'IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL!'

;;^_^ well, rayearth has a lot of sd scenes in it!

fast-forward to a week and a half before AX 2000. i finally connected the ld player to my computer. began capturing. began having to hit the ld player really hard to make it work! it took me three days and 15 cans of coke to beat the ld player into submission. then i captured the clips. three days and 20 more cans. then i began to edit clips together. 20 hours and 15 cans of coke later i call a friend for help. 20 hours and some ungodly amount of coke later we have a nearly final edit.

pc stops working.

we curse. violently.

after rebooting. . . we've lost 2 hours of work, during which we moved most of the clips into position and timed nearly everything. so we work through the night and drink a fair-sized pond of coke to put together a video almost as good as the one we've lost.

my friend goes home. i pack for AX, then try to print the video to tape.

no audio.

more cursing ensues.

after the wee hours of the morning have come and gone and it's getting to 5 am on the day AX begins, i call another friend ( that's me! —jn ) and request a new cable. that's all i need. it works. (well, there's a minor problem with the aspect ratio, but we're running late, time to go, it's good enough.)

it's great! i'm done! yatta!

[ sidebar | the making of a music video ]

first things first:
we are not caldwell.

that said. . .

our system for editing video is completely digital. we capture the video from as clean a source as possible (ld or dvd) and save a ridiculous number of small .avi files on our computer. usually, we use the picvideo mjpeg codec, which is fast, clean, and free. ^_^

after that, adobe premiere comes into play. i usually work with about 7-10 video tracks, solely for the sake of convenience.

( the business of overlays, effects, stylistic whatnot, is beyond the scope of this sidebar. (i'm getting sleepy.) ^_^ )

however. . . the picture, of course, has to be synchronized with the music. it's possible to match every beat with a particular frame in the video. then the clips are simply moved to the right beats. when there isn't time for that process, i put a marker where i want the beat to be, listen to the section, guess, and repeat as necessary.

the final step is the output to vhs. (i say vhs because none of us actually uses s-vhs. . .) it's a simple enough procedure; hook the vcr to the sound card output and video out, attach a tv to verify that it's working, play the video full-screen, record, and check.

then we rush it to the convention and pray. ^_^