Video Tips

So you’ve decided to make an AMV aka an Anime Music Video. You’ve seen everyone else’s spectacular music videos and now you want to make your own wonderful video. Here are some tips on how to make that five star vid.

Most likely who ever is watching your vid, has seen the show before, whether they only catch it when it’s on or count down the minutes until everyone airs (even the reruns). It’s easy to slap clips together and put music to it, but it takes true artists to make those flawless works of art. So how do you do it?

First, take a look at your song. First things first. Listen to the song! I mean carefully, not just how you’d listen to it while your cleaning your room, doing your book report and babysitting your younger siblings all at the same time. Listen to the lyrics and what they really mean and try to match the lyrics as closely as possible. Nothing turns me off and screams bad video if the song is heavy metal rock and portraying an ‘I hate you!’ message yet there’s really fluffy soft scenes. If you can’t understand some parts clearly, search online for the lyrics! Simple. If you love a song and how it sounds and are itching to start making a vid to it, but you don’t fully understand it or have a clear picture, find a song meanings site. It can help you start to mould the idea for your vid. Who wants to watch a happy vid when the music’s meaning is so much darker?

Now that you’ve found the lyrics it’s time to look at the music behind the lyrics. A fast moving song should be put to fast moving clips. If it’s a fast song it won’t fit with slow scenes. (This is CRUCIAL if your putting clips to music with no lyrics such as Japanese music). This ties into our next segment here.

Effects and Transitions. We’ve all seen them…the best…and the worst. They can be your best friends or your worst nightmare. Like I said before most of the people watching your vid has seen the show, so they aren’t interested in the clips you use. They’re interested in the presentation. First off, let’s start with effects.

Going back to listening to the music behind the lyrics, incorporate your clips into the music. If the music sounds fuzzy as if being transmitted through a bad radio station, then match that with adding a film grain or an old movie effect or both combined. If the music echoes make it look echo-y. Listen to the drumbeats in the background. Sometimes I like to divide my clips by the drumbeats and add a fade in effect to them look like they’re intertwined with the music. I know your basic run of the mill Window’s Movie Maker doesn’t have that many effects. But be creative! Mix effects around to see what they look like. Sometimes you can make even your simple WMM products look professional! I’ve had people tell me some of my older videos done on WMM look so professional and then they asked me what program I use. I was astounded the first time I got this comment and just replied simply I used Window’s Movie Maker! But if you long for actual movie editing software that doesn’t freeze up and crash everytime you use it and without paying your life-savings, I’d recommend Magix Movie Edit Pro 11. You can find it for around $50 and in the video editing software world, that’s pretty cheap compared to expensive software such as the newer versions of Sony Vegas. It has plenty of effects and transmissions and you can save your movies in more than just WMV. The only con I can think of is that if you don’t have your episodes files split up, you have to drag your entire episode onto the timeline and shorten down to the clip you want, unlike WMM that breaks them into under one minute clips that are easier to handle. This gets extremely annoying when you’re trying to put about thirty different 0.3 second clips together. Anyway, transitioning into transitions.

If you look at any television show you don’t see them using a keyhole or a star to transition into the next scene. Those are fine to put on a slideshow of your family vacation photos, but to make these vids more professional use only fades. Sometimes the wipes you can get away with. When you get into the bigger editing software’s there are more and better transitions that don’t look too cheesy, that you can get away with. But don’t go overboard, sometimes it’s best to stick to the basics.

I hope that helps you better understand the world of AMV’s. Good luck on your own and if you have any questions contact me here at storybender92@hotmail.com.