AMV chronicles #53: Pieces of Sky

AMVs don’t come much simpler than this. It’s not even “deceptively simple” in the way that we usually praise this kind of stuff, it’s as obviously simple as you can get and that’s a pretty risky move considering how tough it can be to keep a viewer’s interest without a deeper concept to string them along, not to mention how easily simplicity can be mistaken for laziness. If you haven’t watched Haibane Renmei then you’ll probably have no idea what’s happening in this video, but you might still be able to tell that most, if not all of this video, is clips taken from a single episode and possibly not even rearranged out of order. Watch any random Naruto AMV from ten years ago and you’ll see why this is rarely a good idea. But I think it works well enough here, probably because this is just about as perfect of an anime-song pairing as you’ll ever find.

Even for a nine year-old AMV, there’s something left to be desired from the quality of the video, and the initial scenes lose some of their impact from some lip flap that could have been corrected with a little bit of effort. I’d love to see what a cleaned-up version of this video would look like, but I wonder just how much it would really change the overall experience. This is a small, intimate, quiet little AMV, not a big blockbuster subjected to endless remasters and remakes, and if it results in insignificant improvement for a video of that scale, it would likely make little difference for an AMV like this.

This video was edited by neocinema AKA MasterV, who edited at least 3 AMVs in the mid 2000s and seems to have left the hobby (last logging into the Org exactly 1 year after this video was released). They left behind a Youtube channel that doesn’t seem to have been touched in 9 years and a website that seemed to be a film blog of sorts. Maybe there was more information about this AMV on it, but by the time the Wayback Machine had crawled the front page in 2007, it was too late. We do, however, get a look at what life was like in 2001 for the aspiring digital filmmaker.

Today is the first day of fall, and while the scenery in this video is a little too green for the occasion, you’ll have a hard time finding another AMV with such an autumnal feel as this one. How anyone can take it slow while drinking one of these is one of life’s biggest mysteries, but this AMV will help take the edge off.