The Storm [Bouře] MEP AMV

Audio: Vanessa Mae - Storm

Video: Fate/Stay Night, Gankutsuou, Kara No Kyoukai, Mahoromatic, Noir, Wonderful Days

Date: 05/2009

This AMV is a result of the first Czech MEP (Multi Editor Project). Six renowned AMV creators (me among them) joined forces to create something new and unexpected. Each participant had 10 days to finish his part.

I volunteered to create an intro, part 1 and credits. More is written on Czech AMV Wiki (in Czech).

My parts

For intro part I decided to form an impression of a gathering storm, using my favourite Blender. The camera moves over boring gray landscale, then raises up through stormy clouds (consisting of three image layers) and closes up on the pulsating core of the storm (done via particles).

Part 1 (featuring clips from Gakutsuou) is my first AMV edited entirely in Blender Sequence Editor. I made heavy use of Sequence Editor plugins and even tried to compile my own ones. This also concludes my dream of an AMV made using purely open source tools :)

Online vs. offline editing in Blender

Interesting part was switching between online (full resolution source) and offline (low resolution source) editing. Because editing in full resolution was to slow, I re-encoded two episodes of Gankutsuou to lower bitrate and resolution and used them during editing process. Just before rendering, I replaced the low quality file with original full quality version. This little trick spared me a lot of nerves :)