Loose Ends

Oh, how this one raked me through the coals.
It started out fine. My mom introduced me to the song and the more I listened to it, the more I wanted to do an AMV to it. My first instinct was "Cowboy Bebop", but having done a few with it, I wanted another anime. I had just finished "Trigun" and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to use it the video. But, my love for Bebop was still there, so I chose to do a combination video (my first).
The decision to go from black and white to color came from a few things. The first was that I was still in love with how Bebop looked in black and white. The other came from me wanting to do something tricky, even though I didn't have a handle on Adobe's effects. So, I chose something simple that I though would add style to the video.
I wanted to present the parallels that Vash and Spike have, because I thought they were obvious, almost embarrassingly so that I thought I should almost avoid it. The fact that Spike and Vash are both men who surround themselves with people but still suffer from being loners was interesting. So was the fact that their brother figures were their antagonist. I wanted to show how both characters are running from their pasts, and how they're going to have to deal with what happened soon, and painfully.
I started editing in May 2005. I was done with the first part with Spike when I started my first relationship. Leave it to a chick, but editing was at a standstill. Other problems arose. I couldn't edit the two animes together without the system crashing, and exporting was not happening. So, I had to make separate projects, edit the video in three parts, and then combine them in post-production. The song was also two long, mainly for the second chorus, and it through off the symmetry I was trying to achieve. So, I cut the song down and spliced it together at a part I won't reveal, in order to keep you from noticing it. I'm actually proud of how well the cut worked out.
When you watch the video, you can tell the video quality suffers. It's from all the post-production work I had to do in order to get the pieces together. I wish it had come out better, because I really like this one. I though that as an action AMV it worked well, and with not to many effects it came out well. The swipe effect was used because I kept wanting to be like VicBond007 but I still have not achieved that man's skill.
A video I'm happy with, though wish it's quality was better. It took 8 months to finish the video but I felt great when it was done. What do you think?