Engram of Gravel Road

In a night’s passing, exploring a facet of Reki’s relationship with Kuramori.

a past painful event not normally accessible to the conscious mind

Anime: Haibane Renmei
Song: Ghost Story by Sting
Completed: April 2007

You can find a nice high-resolution version on the ORG, but here’s a youtube video.

Background: I started working on this video in November of 2006. I knew I wanted to do something emotional with Reki, and I didn’t want a lot of other characters around distracting things, leaving primarily the interaction of Kuramori and Reki. This significantly cut back the quantity of footage available, or forced me to photoshop out a character.

Concept: Reki is confronting and dealing with her loneliness tonight, thinking about Kuramori. There are three distinct phases to the video. I tried to fit several themes into this format.

Phase 1: Despair
Evening strikes. Reki is making her way through the town, back to OldHome. She’s beginning to call up memories. Reki is facing one of the little feathers, watching him Abandon her. Her heart is hardened.

Phase 2: Confrontation
Little death comes in the form of night. Reki is indulging herself, and slipping into the memories. She draws forth the hurt, the anger, the loneliness. The same old issues of abandonment she’s always suffered, and never dealt with.

Phase 3: Peace
She finds closure, children no longer hate her, and everything looks better in the morning. Knowing smile on her face, I can almost touch her as she fades away…

I added a fuzzy border to visually delineate memories over many of the clips.

In each of the three phases Reki is confronted with some external representation of her self-accusation: The young feather running away, Nemu behind her in the hallway, and the kids returning at the end. In each case I used photoshop to prepare a version of the frame to fade with.

Things Not Done
Initially I also wanted to play with the moon phase throughout the video, to give another progression of time, but the footage didn’t lend itself well. Also, in the ending shot facing the painting of Kuramori, Reki still has spots on her wings; removing those spots, proved to be too time consuming.

Tools Used:
AVISynth
VirtualDubMod
Sony Vegas
Photoshop

I spent the better part the last few months working on this video. Thanks to all the people who let me rant about the little story I wanted to tell.