I know I said 2 whole weeks ago that I would release the final "Flyers" blog post within a couple days of that post, but here we are and this still isn't a blog post with "Flyers" in the title. Well, never fear. The flyers page is still coming... sometime... but I was working on something a bit more labor intensive that took up my time.

But before I get into all of that, I will just link the video for any blog readers that are actually just here for video content. See the embedded (or go to real YouTube) for my version of 宙でおやすみ by Aiobahn featuring Yuka Nagase. (It's called "sora de oyasumi" on Spotify which confused me becasue the kanji is for "space", not "sky", so I hadn't seen that reading before)

The music and vocals are unchanged in my version, but I aimed to recreate the original graphics with images from this year's trip and drawings I made to represent myself

On the actual YouTube desktop site, it can play without letterboxing

The original had made me feel a sense of anemoia - which is like nostalgia for something you haven't actually experienced yourself. I hope my video can convey that to you in some way as well!

The Making Of

Since the audio is unchanged, the video has a Copyright claim on YouTube, and I'm just mainly hoping it doesn't actually get a Copyright strike. I'm less worried since my YouTube channel isn't monetized or anything like that though so I think the copyright owner would still get the ad revenue anyway? Worst case scenario, I could edit the one on YouTube to be soundless (it'll make more sense a bit later in the post) or just upload to my blog directly since the video itself is (relatively) small

So I had originally heard this song a few months before going to Japan and the music video really resonated with me, so I thought it would be cool if I made my own version of the video. All during my trip, I tried to remember to occasionally take photos of normal things or things without a specific well-defined subject, kind of to match the vibe of the original. I didn't actually do that great of a job remembering, actually which ended up making me a little nervous while doing the initial edit. I actually thought about talking about the project earlier in the trip, since I had mentioned Aiobahn at that time. Good thing I didn't though, or I probably actually wouldn't have followed through lol

Here's the original video in case you haven't seen it yet and wanted to

As far as actual content, the video contains 226 (I think) photos from my trip overlayed by 18 illustrations. The photos unfortunately don't all get the same screen time, with some spanning less than half a second and a few taking a full 1.8 seconds. Because I had decided to order the entire thing chronologically, that means that sometimes entire days take up less time than photos in other parts of the video but that's just how life is sometimes.

I had a number of setbacks that resulted in me not finishing this sooner.

The largest time loss was me not even deciding to actually do the project for real until last week (a full week after my last blog post lol).

Disregarding that, it took me a day to get all of the photos and then import them into an iMovie timeline and cut them all to the right length based on the original video. After exporting just the photos from iMovie because I decided I hated iMovie, I moved my photos into DaVinci Resolve (another free video editing tool). However, when I added the oginal video so that I could cut it up to figure out the illustration timing, I was aghast to find out that somehow the videos weren't in sync

I didn't know anything about anything when I was starting so I failed to notice that some point one of the videos had changed from the expected frame rate of 30 frames per second to a ~cinematic~ frame rate of 29.97! This meant that over the course of my 5000 frame video, I would drift by 5 frames!!!

But since I didn't even realize why this was happening at first, I wasted time trying to find the frames that were wrong (I looked at every single frame...) and remove them. This was even more tedious that finding the places to cut the images in the first place so I stopped working on it for like a whole day.

The reason why it was tedious this way is because at every frame transition, I would have to check to see if either the original or my video was changing/not changin unexpectedly

After coming back, I realized that the framerate for the project and one of the videos was wrong, so I moved everything to a new, correct timeline. I then figured out where the frames would be added (every 1000 frames starting at frame 500) and then checked that I saw the difference at those spots and then fixed accordingly. I wanted to be frame perfect!!

At this point, I realized I was procrastinating doing the actual hard work of drawing something so decided to buy a wacom tablet off Amazon so that I could actually do it. Just kidding, I was actually super close to convincing myself to buy one of those sick Cintiq drawing tablets but then I remembered I literally already have a regular tablet that I don't even use. I even have a stylus for it and everything. A bit dismayed by my lack of retail therapy, I began drawing.

At first, I tried to just look at the original art and then draw that but as me. And wow, we as a society really need to start respecting artists way more. I was unable to get anything that even looked human basically lol So then, I decided that I would use the original art directly to create like the skeleton of the drawing and then go from there, but even that didn't help me. I don't really think tracing others' art is a good or nice thing to do so I didn't want to go that route and so I ended up taking photos of myself in various positions and then tracing that (tracing in this context isn't as negative a connotation hopefully??).

Here's an example of that process from later on in the journey. The video might look like it restarts in the middle but I actually draw the frame twice so that when you layer them, the slight differences create a slightly cooler photo (in my opinion)

Actually, the process of figuring out how to frame the photos and then take the photos of myself was a bit of an ordeal in and of itself. Luckily sometimes the apparatus was just my phone stapped to a limited edition copy of Valkyria Chronicles 4 stacked on top of 2 tables, but even then I'd have to press the shutter button and hope I could get to whatever position before the maximum length timer finished

Faces were by far the hardest part for me. I think the illustrations where I am wearing a mask generally look most like me since on those the eyes were just circles. The mouth and nose gave me immense trouble and even the face shape I was confused on if it was supposed to be that anime face shape thing. I think for a few it makes me look like a Berenstain (Berenstein AM I RIGHT??) Bear or something. At some point I just gave up on the face entirely, althogh I did stop myself from doing the following at least

Channeling my best Iseri Nina face

I think probably the worst of the drawings, and the ones that look the least like me since I didn't trace myself, were the up-close face-only drawings where it's a sequence of 3 that goes from slight smile to open mouth grin. I'm not particularly proud of almost any of them and this one least so. I was considering redoing them but I'd redone a lot of drawings a lot of times and I don't think it would have helped in this case, unless I put it off for like a month and then practiced drawing every day. I mean that is definitely feasible but I wanted to get the project done before I decided to not actually finish it?

It was kind of fun thinking of how I should pose or what acccessories or outfit I should use for the photos though, and also fun doing the drawings and simplifying everything and kind of coming up with a canon of me as a character.

Like there were definitely some things I made sure to try to follow

• Three hair spike things (even though I don't have any of those IRL, at least any more lol)
• Shoes always have 4 Xs instead of drawing shoelaces for real
• Should generally have a bored facial expression lol

Not that I'm good enough at drawing to have any self-consistency is them anyway though. Maybe if I practiced I could remake the video in like 10 years but much better!

IDK where to put this in the blog post, but one thing I noticed while editing my version is that the origianl appears to have scenery in Kansai (like Osaka) and also Okinawa and mine has Tokyo and Hokkaido so it's like the full North/South range of Japan in our combination lol

Oh also, I had redone my drawings a ton of times but the most recent time that I had decided to redo all of them was when I watched this cover of the video that had really cute drawings that they had done themselves! Since they not only edited the video but drew the cute illustrations with their own original character (I think) AND did the cover, I felt that I had to try at least a bit harder. Definitely check theirs out!

Frame Perfect?

Okay so I know I said I wanted to make it frame pefect... but did I succeed? You'll have to check for yourself and let me know! Luckily, there's are sites that let you play multiple YouTube videos at once. For example, using this link you should be able to play both at once. Once you get both buffered and then play, they should be pretty close. If not, try the resync button ;p

Actually when I say frame perfect, at best I can only mean for the transition times. I bascially gave up on editing the video. I did try a lot of the built in plugins but couldn't quite get it how I wanted, so I ended up applying a few small effects (a small displace and some waviness) in Resolve and then doing a slight chromatic aberattion and adding noise via ffmpeg (a command line video processing tool). I also added some like jitteriness intended to be like rogue scanlines but IDK how people felt that effect turned out (I also used ffmpeg for that). I wanted to add the restless footer thing that the original video has but the plugin to do that in DaVinci was part of the $300 upgrade to the pro version and I didn't want to try to figure it out in ffmpeg lol

Also I couldn't figure out the watermark/symbol in the top right corner. I'm unsure if it's actually something from like an old camcorder or something custom for his project, but I had originally hoped it would be tied to a camera so that I'd be able to easily find a filter that I could apply to my video. As you can probably guess, I was unable to make that leap into greatness.

Gallery

I'm not including the 226 main images since they are not actually that interesting on an indivdual level, but here are the drawings I did for the project in the order that they appear in the video (I think lol). I didn't slip in that many anime references, but there is a Frieren plushie, a Haru Urara horse, and a Hatsune Miku sweater. I'm basically a Miku simp and a huge Frieren fanboy, but although I do like Haru Urara (the Uma Musume version), I'm not nearly as well-version in their lore (in game or IRL). I basically just used my most out-there bag (the horse is actually a phone holder/bag thing I think) for a good photo. I'm sorry for using you, Haru Urara!

Also for most of the photos I tried to match the general idea of the one in the original if possible but also to depict scenes of how I might look if you happened upon me in the wild while visiting Japan or something. I'm not sure I captured either properly but that was my thoguht process!

Wrapping up

I hope you managed to feel a sense of anemoia from the video. I certainly don't feel anything watching it anymore. After editing it and seeing the same thing 100 times I'm unsure I feel anything at all lol But I think probably in like a year from now it will make me nostalgic?

Anyway, thanks for following along on this year's journey! See you next time!! (or if I post the flyers post lol)