My Life In Fandom: Making AMV's Is Easier Than You Think

Following up from Monday's post:

This is a Japanese virtual talent agency, Riot Music. They're in the same sphere as Hololive, Nijisanji, and VShojo; they hire people to give voice to a fictional persona, which is used to attract and retain an audience. Riot's relatively new and is focused on virtual singers, so they don't stream live much; most of their online offerings are music videos.

That means that they're using covers of well-known anime opening and ending theme songs, many of which feature English-language subtitles as Closed Captions, and creating original videos to accompany those cover songs.

Remember what I said about anime music videos being good starting projects? Here's how low that bar gets; these videos are little more than motion comics on a loop much of the time, with the one embedded below being one of the few exceptions (because they are trying so hard to invoke the Sheryl-Ranka dynamic of the original).

Take a look at this video. How long would it take you to make something like one of Riot's videos? If you're an illustrator--not an animator, an illustrator--you have a client market out there that you may not have considered previously because you don't need to come up with 90-600 seconds of animation cells, but rather a dozen or less (often a lot less) static images that get some half-assed motion effects added.

(Saki's the blond doing the Sheryl role; Cocoa's the brunette doing the Ranka role.)

And this is typical of Riot's stuff to date.

Note that there is no half-assing the music. Riot knows its core business isn't animation; they know that they can get away with motion comics for videos so long as their covers are rock-solid, and to date that's what Riot and their girls have delivered upon. There are three other girls in the stable, and they tend to get the softer-voiced songs to cover and do the softer roles in collaborative songs like the main anthem of Sakura Wars.

(Alas, no ENG CC yet.)

Now, why this video talk?

Friend of the Retreat Rawle Nyanzi's pointed this out in a few chats and blog posts of his own in the last couple of weeks that A/V media is where Normies live and breathe, as most Normies don't read unless they have to. Therefore, while writing our novels and comics is necessary, it is not sufficient to replace the culture that hates us.

That's why we need a path that incorporates transitions from the written word and the static comic page to film and television, both of which inevitably mean incorporating music into our media creation projections, and that means learning how to work with video. Music videos are the place to start because (a) they're video media, (b) they're music media, and thus (c) a perfect staging ground for making our A/V media where we tell the tales where we win.

Have a good weekend, folks, and think on this.