Original Content: Your Name [AMV] - "You've Always Known You're Not Alone"

I've been making anime music videos since Windows Movie Maker became available for all XP owners back in late 2000. Everyone who lived through the early oughts remembers a time when every single AMV released and playable on Real Player (yeah, you know you're old if you remember that!) featured footage from Dragonball Z (usually from movies and episodes not yet aired in the U.S.) and had either Slipknot, Linkin Park, or Rage Against the Machine as the music of choice. It was an angsty time but it made for humble beginnings for those interested in video editing. Eighteen years later here's my latest entry in my AMV portfolio and I got to say it's fun to see how much growth has been made since stringing together DBZ clips!

I had the pleasure of seeing Kimi No Na Wa (Your Name) during its initial theatrical run in Japan. Being able to recognize many of the landmarks made the movie feel so much more impactful than if I were to have first seen it as en English dub back in the states. Now, my Japanese is super basic, so while I could understand a few ideas and sentences here and there, without subtitles I could only guess as to what the whole story was about. And without help I was able to get about 75% of what had happened, but had to pick up the finer details on a second viewing when it was dubbed.

As for the project here itself, I first started working on this when I met my girlfriend. I remember one day listening to the song "The World is Watching' by Two Door Cinema Club while walking home from work one night and just drew an instant connection to it. This new friendship that had begun seemingly out of nowhere was taking hold of my heart and made me realize I had been living in a daze for too long. But not only were we separated from each other by distance but by so many more things that seemed insurmountable. The movie had so many parallels that I couldn't ignore the concept of making the video, though, it had gotten delayed months at a time. But I finally finished it a few days ago and I can wholeheartedly say that I feel my thirteen year old self who first downloaded WMM would be proud of it.