As one of the three goals of this blog is to post various gems found across the Internet, this next video came as a happy surprise. When DivX was in its early stages, fan subs were becoming more of a household word, including anime fans here in the US. One of the results from this fledgling technology was that Anime Music Videos were able to be produced much easier. Of course issues like resolution or subtitles were considered a slight nuisance, but tolerable nonetheless. The process of making an AMV has become a lot more sophisticated, and our amount of resources – though often frowned upon – has become much more abundant. Now certain issues that were we let slide seven to ten years ago would now be considered almost taboo.
About seven years ago, Thorax Entertainment created an AMV based of the TV series “Love Hina” and using the song “Your Horoscope for the Day” by Weird Al Yankovic. It was an entertaining piece, and the group did a great job associating the scenes with music. Of course by now the video is showing its age, and with newer and more available resources, I was hoping against hope that a good remake of the AMV would magically appear. Well it looks like wishes do come as back in May Thorax Entertainment posted a remake of the video on their web site Antabaka.net…
For those who want to see the video before reading my commentary CLICK HERE!!!
And now back to the rant…
One of the first thing that I noticed was that there is less wider than the previous version. That is because when the original AMV was released, the video still had subtitles at the bottom of the screen; a portion of the video was cropped off a short time after. Hence a lot of the little nuggets that were cut off were once again visible. Also when I compared it to the original video I noticed that the resolution was much higher than before. The original video was publicly available in 320 * 193, the remake was released in a 640 * 480 resolution. The images were also far less corrupt, making a more sharper image. The result is a much better viewing experience. Something else I was how some of the scenes were modified from the original version. The most notable happens at the very end of the video between Naru and Keitaro. Not giving too much away, it does tweak one of the original ideas from the first video a bit, but it’s not too bad. At least they didn’t go Lucas on us.
Overall I was really surprised and pleased by the remake of the video. It’s just one of those things that you don’t really expect from any group – professional or doujinshi. So while I hope I don’t see this kind of thing happening too frequently, I am glad to see it if at all.
Source: Thorax