It’s the end of the year and not only did I make good on my resolution to make a video a month, I managed to clear 12 AMVs in as many months.

Combining Dan Da Dan with Moldiver was a concept that stuck with me for the longest time and I’m glad I finally managed to put it out there. I was listening to the dubbed version of the Moldiver theme song and it just kinda clicked that it would be the kind of thing Aira actually believed about herself. I banged the first draft out in record time but I let it sit on the backburner for quite a while since there were stretches that just kinda bothered me as being incomplete. In the end I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the final product, mostly due to a lack of skill. I mostly resorted to using transitions and other random effects to put in some “activity” in parts that seemed kinda lacking or drawn out.

Honestly this is probably the one AMV of the year that I thought was perfectly realized. Looking back, the cuts used are kinda samey. It’s not a very dynamic video. But the concept is straightforward and I honestly don’t think there’s anything I left undone with it.

When I first started working on it I thought it would be a showcase of Yanami eating, but that alone wouldn’t have filled up the time I needed, and it turned out all the other girls had plenty of eating scenes as well.

Now this one was a learning experience. This was a serious attempt to make a dynamic video, and I had to learn and get creative with transitions and lighting effects in my toolbox. I also had to tell a story without using lyrics as a crutch, and I hope that managed to come through. I feel like this is my best work of the year, but it definitely had room to be improved with experience I would gain from my later AMVs. I honestly believed I had hit my ceiling with this one, but I think the pressure I put on myself to meet a submission deadline prevented me from being willing to take the time and effort to raise that ceiling earlier.

I was really surprised that there weren’t quite as many Nezuko action scenes to draw from as I thought. I thought there would plenty to use from the Rui fight, for instance, but she spent 95% of the time just getting strung up and tortured and only had that one iconic attack in at the end.

I used what I first played around with in my Vinland Males video and came up with the custom transition at the end of this video. Tried my best to mimic the CvS2 match transition, and I think I did a good job of it. With more time I probably could have mocked up a more convincing, animated, victory screen.

To be honest, when I started work on this, I didn’t have a strong image of how it would go. I just knew how it should end, and I had faith there would be enough fitting scenes to fill up the video. Just barely.

When I realized Dan Da Dan had all the scenes I needed to reconstruct the Sexy Commando Gaiden OP, I just knew I had to go for it. I almost settled for less, but to get the last few effects I wanted to make it absolutely perfect, I went and took a final step that I never thought I would seriously attempt: custom animations by painstakingly masking individual frames. It was worth it.

I had actually finished the first draft of this before the Sexy Commando Gaiden video, but I wasn’t perfectly satisfied and left it on the backburner while working on that video. I’m glad I did, because the lessons I learned from working on that video I immediately went back and applied to this one.

It got a lot easier to plan this one out once I ditched the idea of making 1:1 character swaps and just used whichever character fit the current composition. The biggest question I had early on was, who should Jinshi be – Hotohori, or Nuriko? The answer is yes.

If I had the combined experience from the AMVs I worked on throughout the year and put as much effort as I put in this video into all my earlier videos, would I have gotten more videos selected for the AMV contests I tried to enter? Hard to say. Don’t want to dwell too much on that. At the very least, I would have less regrets.

So, that’s my 2025 resolution done and dusted. What am I doing for 2026? I dunno. I kinda want to clear up my gaming backlog, but that’s probably not happening. At the very least, not at a one game per month pace. Pokemon and FFXIV are the twin threats that completely nuke anysuch attempts.