All About AMVs

Hi.

My name is Jason, and I'm here to talk about AMVs. Every week, I'll post an AMV that I think is praiseworthy, and tell you what it does right, what it does wrong, and what makes it stand out. Note that most of the AMVs I talk about will not be my own work, and when possible I will give credit to the creator in the footnotes. So with that out of the way, let's get started.

In The Beginning...

In this first post, I would like to establish, for those new to AMVs, what I believe AMVs actually are, and why they deserve their own blog. If you already have a basic familiarity with AMVs and/or the AMV community, then feel free to skip this post and jump to the second one, which will have the first video.

As for those of you who do not know much about AMVs, no more than the fact that AMV stands for Anime Music Video (and if you didn't even know that, please email me because you need an immediate crash course), you probably think that AMVs are just interesting little clips made by anime fans set to cool music to try and emulate real music videos. In that regard, as you may have already predicted while reading this, you are dead wrong.

What It Takes

Firstly, AMVs have nothing to do with real music videos. They are called AMVs because they meet 3 criteria:

1.) They are a compilation of anime clips

2.) They are set to music

3.) They are videos

Those criteria may seem pretty obvious just from the name AMV, and they should be. AMVs are extremely diverse and encompassing; it should not be difficult to pin down an AMV when you see one. The difference between a "music video" and an "anime music video", however, is in more than the fact that one contains anime and one does not.

Where music videos focus on the music, anime music videos focus on the project as a whole. Music videos are made to accentuate the music they carry, without real regard towards making the video itself a piece of art. Often times, you'll hear a song well before you watch the music video, and the experience is not often dramatically changed when you see the video anyway. If you liked the music before, then you might watch the video, but you'll no doubt continue listening to the music afterward, and the experience will be mostly unaffected by what you've seen.

This is where anime music videos shine -- the music, clips, and effects used in an AMV all come together to create one single, beautiful experience. The experience you get from listening to Ellie Goulding's "Starry Eyed" can be vastly changed, for better or worse, by watching Shades Of by Leberate. You may not have liked the AMV, but you can't get the same feeling you got from the AMV by listening to the music alone. That is, to me, what makes an AMV an AMV.

Happy Editing

By now I hopefully have you interested. This is my first post however, and I don't want to scare anyone away with a lengthy article, so I'm going to cut this off here and talk about the AMV community in my next post. If you are already interested and don't want to wait on my silly blog posts, then animemusicvideos.org can teach you all you need to know and more. It's a great place to start for aspiring editors, and an excellent hub for AMV fans to strike it up with some like-minded individuals. For now, this is Jason wishing you happy editing.