Anime music video - Definition

For the military vehicle, see AMV_8x8.

An anime music video (sometimes abbreviated AMV) is a music video consisting of clips from one or more anime television series or movies set to a particular song. Most are not official music videos released by the musicians, but fan compositions taking clips from various series and synchronizing them with a musical track. As such they are most commonly released over the Internet. Anime conventions often run AMV contests or AMV exhibitions.

The creation of an AMV centers around using various video editing techniques to create a feeling of synchronisation with the audio. Several techniques are available to achieve this:

• Editing - Using different clips from the video source and changing between them at specific times is the most important tool the AMV creator has. Often both the events in the video and the transitions between the clips are synchronised with events in the music.
• Lip-sync - the synchronisation of the lip movements of a character in the original video source to the lyrics of the audio, to make it appear as if the character were singing the song.
• Digital Effects - Using video editing software (like a non-linear editing system) the video source can be modified in various ways to add events to it. Popular effects include lens flares (a simulation of the flare effect that occurs with real cameras), 'piano keys' (images of piano keys or bars of video flashing on screen to piano notes in the music), video overlays (having multiple video tracks playing over one another with various opacities), and split screen (two or more videos on screen simultaneously).
• There is a growing movement in the AMV community to use original and manipulated animation, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, in AMV works. Such additions are often used for visual effect or to convey a story that cannot be done using only the original video source. Computer animation techniques are almost always employed in this regard.

External links

AnimeMusicVideos.org, an online catalog of nearly every AMV. Includes downloads. (http://www.animemusicvideos.org/)