Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGuIUmaZ1Tk
My very first AMV, this one starts out pretty boring but it gets really intense during and after the solos. PLUS this was made in Windows Movie Maker, which I had to turn off all of the "video filters" in order for it to save the movie properly (before then, it would always save it as a black screen with music in the background, which really pissed me off.)

woah, this is about as original as Dragonball Z / Linkin Park

Rule number one of AMV making: Subtitles are ack.

Needs more Maito Gai.


For starters, choose a shorter song, try to come up with an actual concept, then put more effort into every single scene. Try to make the speed of the action fit with the speed of the music. It doesn't match up at all here. It's possible to make a scene powerful by making powerful music play while the action seen is going very slowly, but that only works about once per video during a really dramatic scene. If the whole video is like that, it only looks disjointed.

An AMV should let the images be enhanced by the music, and the music be enhanced by the images. If the two are disjointed, both become less powerful than they would be on their own.

Of course, if you are going down the path of the standard cheap techno music mixed with anime video that is oh so common on YouTube, feel free to add as many Hue, Entire Cycle and Fade In From White for flashes on beats as possible.

Other than that, listen to Faw, and start out short with the songs, around 2-5 minutes, because you definitely won't be familiar with WMM enough for something like seven minute videos for your first few goes at it. It took me about 30 of them to get decent 7-9 minute videos that point, so it takes a while.

Well, I have used WMM, and it was annoying as hell to save. Anyways, pretty much the only music I have is either video game music or DragonForce, which is usually all 5-9 minutes long.

Then explore! Extend your musical interests!

I would suggest Spiralmouth (disregarding all your musical interests like a true music aficionado of course), but their non video game work is either rather long or near impossible to find. So instead I will suggest watching all of the Zero Punctuation reviews and paying close attention to the opening and closing song snippets.