AMVs — Likes and Dislikes

I’ve decided to write about what I like to see in AMVs and what I don’t like. If you don’t know what a AMV is for some strange odd reason, google it.

I watch AMVs quite often and have edited before as well, so I felt the need to write this post.

First, I’ll start off with the things I don’t like see­ing in AMVs in gen­eral. Let’s begin!

Abso­lutely Fail Lip-sync

Self explan­at­ory. I’ve tried lip-syncing before. Kind of hard, but at least I got sort of close. It irks me to see the AMV maker not even try­ing. They just have the char­ac­ter move their lips while the song goes on. The lips won’t match at all and it’ll go on for a while.

Excess­ive Usage Of A Musical Moment

What I mean by musical moment is a con­cert scene or dan­cing scene like in almost EVERY Haruhi AMV. The anime series should be long enough to have other moments to include for those parts. Why use the musical moment then? Are you try­ing to make the people watch­ing your video go UGHMUSTDESTROY once they see your video is using the same clips as every other video? Maybe you are. If you are, good job.

Voice-over At The Wrong Time

It’s at the best part of the song. The singer is singing loudly in the middle of the chorus. BAM! The editor decides to put a voice-over where no one can here it. It just takes you out of the moment. You can’t hear what they are say­ing so you rewind, thus tak­ing out of total watch­ing mode. You are ripped out of the moment. The voice-over turns out to be some­thing stu­pid too. If you want to add a voice-over in the song, why don’t wait till an instru­mental part or something?

Too Much Feath­er­ing On Masks OR None At All When It’s Needed

If they have Sony Vegas Pro, Adobe Premiere, or any other video edit­ing pro­grams that have mask­ing as an option, you’ll see them attempt to mask. Mask­ing can be a bit of a pain, so I can under­stand some feath­er­ing added to make it look bet­ter. At most, I’ll go to 3.0. No more. How­ever, some will go all the way and it looks hor­rible. Too little feath­er­ing annoys me a bit too. Some­times, they just need to feather to make those stray parts look bet­ter, but they leave it unfeathered. It looks like kid with scis­sors gone wrong.

Unne­ces­sary Effects

You have a nice slow/semi-slow song, yet it’s like you’re get­ting a seizure. Why add all those effects? They don’t even match the song.

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Now for the things I like see­ing in AMVs.

Con­nec­tions Between Two Characters

Most com­monly, I’ll see this for Inuyasha and King­dom Hearts videos. It’ll be a scene where the char­ac­ter is doing some­thing and it fades to another char­ac­ter doing the exact same thing. That kind of thing makes me go: “Huh, I didn’t notice that before.” Like the whole Sora retra­cing Kairi’s steps in the cave in the cred­its of KH2.

Good Mask­ing That Makes A Story

If the editor can mask well, that’s great. If they can mask and make a good story between two char­ac­ters, that’s even bet­ter. I love see­ing the little AU stor­ies in the video and see­ing the char­ac­ters “talk” to each other through the mask. That’s interesting.

Simple Effects

Because that’s all the song needs sometimes.

Stor­ies

Some­times adding a story to a music video looks a lot bet­ter. I think it gives off more emo­tion and shows more effort because you had to make your story fol­low the song’s lyr­ics somehow.

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Videos I added are examples. Some the examples may not be the best, but they at least fit slightly. I know I have more examples in Likes than Dis­likes. I find it hard to find examples for dis­likes currently.