First things first: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS THE LAST SCENES OF THE SERIES. If you've seen it and don't want to see it again or don't want to see the spoilers, stop the video when the vocals end! Now you can't say I didn't warn you.

I should have written this months ago. I haven't seen the video myself in almost that amount of time.

It was made on a whim to appease my sudden shock of a creative urge. I think it took me about two and a half days to make. Of course, this was over summer vacation and so I had a lot of time on my hands and I could spend entire days and most of each night working on a video. Boy what I'd give to be able to do that again.

I think I had been listening to Hotel California on my playlist when scenes from Cowboy Bebop started flowing into my mind. Soon enough I opened Video Factory and went to work. There was something odd about the way the footage was recorded onto the computer. It was squished on each side, making a rectangle rather than a square. And it wasn't even like the way wide-screen DVDs work either. More like long-screen or something. I plan to use a seperate program for video capture next time.

I recorded bits of episodes here and there and things just fell into place. However, some clips started acting like I was trying to stuff square pegs into round holes and video transitions only worked sometimes. Sometimes the timing would change and the footage would slide down so that it's timed with the next line in the song rather than the one it was timed with originally. Fortunately, whenever it did that it wasn't crucial enough to fix. At least it was timed with -something-!

I had a lot of fun with the lip-synchs, though the preview of the video in the editing program looked a whole lot better than the actual file it made when I told it I was finished. One example being the missing transition when the woman from the first episode (I forget her name >.< the one that was helping Asimof smuggle red-eye) had her head facing forward in one clip and then tilted it down in another. In order to make it look like she was tilting it in the clips I used (rather than just having it be a sudden choppy sort of thing like it turned out to be in the final file), I set a fade-like transition between the two clips. However, this was not present after I spent a half an hour waiting for it to process the final file.

Also, there were a few times when the footage would blink black because of a very small gap in the footage. Those things probably frustrated me the most. I don't know if there are any in the final version, seeing as they appear sometimes and don't others.

I appologize for the JSE logo at the bottom of the screen, but I wanted to cover up the Adult Swim logo and personalize it to a point.

Despite all this, some part of me says that it was a good first effort. Sure, all the scenes have been used in a number of other people's videos and could easily be considered over done. But as you may know, when you've got an idea... it's very hard to make it go away without acting on it. Almost impossible in some cases.

Now I have the Perfect Collection and a new plan for video capture. I've been debating making a better version of this video in the future so I don't hate it so much. I might do this over Christmas vacation (which is in about a month or two from when I'm writing this) when I can dedicate whole days to video making in between science fair. We'll see what happens. ^-^ P.S. And maybe I'll do what everyone suggests and put Gren in there for the line "She's got a lot of pretty pretty boys that she calls friends." *chuckle* Universal thought.

3/25/03
Filled in what gaps I could. Still gives me trouble but that's all I'm gonna do with it. I can't bear the thought of redoing it completely. Especially the recapturing part.