AMV: 9 to 5

[lizardjay]

a-m-v.org link (requires account)
google drive link
youtube link (apparently for USAmericans only...)

People from 248 other countries and territories, see the links above for both streaming and download. This is the first video I've had that's so strict with the licensing! (We don't talk about my earlier copyright strike, that was for the visuals anyway :D)

This AMV has kind of been my 2025: I started it in January and have finished in December. It wasn't really a continuous effort though, I abandoned it between February and September. But we'll call it the whole year, because it feels like it T_T I spent SO long on this. I don't count time but it was EASILY thirty hours, or maybe more... Nothing in this video really warrants that amount of time, it was a lot of me puzzling between 12 different options for every single possible choice.

Notes (including pointing out a lot of my Fancy Masking):

• I guess first I'll go into the concept of this video. Itachi becomes a black ops agent at age 11, is obviously miserable --> during the process of all his canon bullshit, he develops egg psychosis or something --> take Sasuke's eyes as eggs. Simple! It really just boils down to "wouldn't it be fucked up if this happened?" Idk exactly how it will be received of course, but I see it as both darkly funny but also... empathizing with someone who is just miserably trapped. (I will note, I think 'misery' probably my favorite emotion to build in a video, and it shows.)
• The bloody footprints at the beginning took a bunch of layers and a lot of time. By the time I finished the video I was unsure if this intro even worked, but people seem to like it! Don't look too closely at the shape of those footprints... I was freehanding the back side of them. (.... just noticed, did I randomly blur one of them partway and not notice until JUST NOW??? I'm in hell. NOBODY LOOK!!! I watched this video so many times before posting...)
• Really proud of the knife and blood drip at 0:40, I put in the shifting focus myself AND added all the blood. Blood drop beading on the knife was traced off a shot of Itachi crying, blood on the knife itself was freehanded (you can tell from the edges now that it's not in my tiny preview window...), blood as it falls and lands is taken from Sasuke's eye socket bleeding.
• I can't believe there wasn't originally blood at 0:47 either? They already had blood on the ground elsewhere, it's not like they needed to keep the animation sanitized...
• 0:50 - 0:58ish was the hardest section of the whole video to me. I didn't know what to put anywhere!!!
• 0:59 I did not realize but in shifting the wall color to red I made Danzo's hand green -_- truly this AMV is riddled with tiny little errors. I am really counting on everyone to focus on the big things because I didn't notice all this stuff.
• 1:04 Danzo's hand behind the surveillance screens, also my invention!
• My friend M about the eggs disappearing at 1:17: "this is a very You Coded edit" (me: what does that mean?) "yeah, it's like gaslighting" (I guess this is my brand.... XD)
• The massacre was also extremely difficult for me... I'm happy with the results though!
• I guess now I'll talk about the eggs. I wish I had even more good egg shots to put in there! I was really debating if I needed them in the intro, but I settled on this escalating egg presence. I just worry that it seems a little abrupt or confusing! My sister for example told me she watched it and asked "so what was up with all the eggs?" though I do think she got the general idea. She doesn't watch Naruto anyway so I don't really expect her to watch my stuff, it's just nice that she does.
• I think the egg/eye edits are generally obvious, so not much to say about them. Almost every single one uses the same screenshot of an agg as the base :D I just placed it appropriately, altered the color a tiny bit to match the lighting, and removed the existing eye. Mostly this worked really well; the one at 2:33 is not very good but that's because of my nemesis, the shaky cam. The eye was too dark to remove the color while keeping the sharingan pattern, so I just put in a new eye on top, but I had to position it frame by frame and I've never been successful at that with shaky cam. I did my best! As usual I'm hoping people's attention will be caught by other parts of the shot.
• The egg in the pan at the end actually takes from one of Danzo's arm eyes! They have some really pleasing motion that looks like the pattern is moving around a curved surface. Such as an egg.

I drafted a lot of general musings about why I think I have gotten slower and slower despite getting more experience, what it means to be 'better' at making AMVs, the importance of having a clear vision for my style of story-focused videos and how to facilitate that (short answer: I don't know :D), my thoughts on making this video after going to my first anime convention ever and seeing the AMVs on display in the contest, why I resonated with the emotions of this video a lot... but idk, none of it's really fully baked and I want to post this. Maybe later!