All about AMVs

Any fan of gaming, anime or the Internet has probably heard about AMVs. AMV stands for Anime Music Video or, more recently, Animated Music Video.

For those of you who visit the Nevada Appeal Web site (www.nevadaappeal.com) for your daily dose of news, you may have noticed that a lot of the videos on there have my name on them. I do a lot of the video for nevadaappeal.com, but my first adventures in video compilation were with AMVs.

To see examples of AMVs, visit www.YouTube.com any day of the week. Do a search on your favorite song plus "AMV." Nine times out of 10, you'll get a hit. Whether the person who made the AMV is any good at it is debatable, but they're there, and searching YouTube for them is a good way to find them.

There is some question as to the legality of AMVs. Technically, if you own the game or anime that you're making the AMV to, and you own the CD that the song is on, there shouldn't be a problem as long as you clearly label the AMV as to who made the original source material (the artist of the song and the makers of the game/anime). Also, you can't sell AMVs.

However, some artists (such as Evanescence) have requested that fans not upload AMVs using their songs to the Internet. They don't want fans to confuse fan work with officially authorized work.

A good chunk of today's video games are produced and created in Japan. Japanese culture is permissive about AMVs, fanfiction and doujinshi. (Doujinshi are unauthorized comics made by fans, and are encouraged by most forms of media in Japan - they see it as a good way to get word out). So if you want to make an AMV using footage from a Japanese video game, you're in. Finding a song to use is a different matter altogether - pay attention to the copyright rules of the artist you want to immortalize.

So generally, making the AMV is not illegal, but distributing it might be.

I'm not going to go into a how-to of how to make AMVs, because the actual how-to varies depending on which program you use to compile video, and what kind of computer and operating system you're using. But here are a few tips from the wannabe video editor on creating interesting, un-clichéd AMVs.

If you want to make an AMV, you need source material. At animemusicvideos.org, you can view several tutorials on how to get source material. You shouldn't make AMVs of source material you don't own; however, AMV.org's strict disapproval of downloading source material isn't something I agree with. If you own the video game, I am fine with you downloading (high-quality) source material for use in your AMV - video capturing is sometimes above my (tech-minded) head. One site where you can download video is www.bluelaguna.net. Pay attention to the site's disclaimer. This applies to audio source material, as well.

Pay attention to the timing of the video. Timing is essential to a good AMV - just putting video anywhere in the song because it looks pretty doesn't work. It needs to look pretty to the beat of the song.

You're telling a story, just as you would with any other video. If the song doesn't make sense to put to the video, don't.

If you finish your AMV and it doesn't look right, mess with it before you compile it and upload it to the Internet. As far as what looks good - use your best judgement. Some people have the knack for it, and some don't.

If you want to see my AMVs, you can visit my YouTube profile - my username is Tashabot. If you have a YouTube profile and want to share your AMVs with me, leave me a message at my blog at http.//techtasha.wordpress.com or e-mail me at tgonzales@nevadaappeal.com.

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I wanted to apologize to anyone who might have noticed that my column wasn't in the paper last week (Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.). That's ...well, I'll just say it was my bad.

I had it, it was ready to go, and I forgot to put it where my editors could find it.

Bad Tasha!