Alright, this is the big one. The six-month beast I’m still actually genuinely proud of making.

So here it is, after months of solid panic. After Narutrix I got challenged a lot to try an actual action AMV rather than the ‘soft option’ of a trailer, and well, I had one planned anyway..

One Piece is an epic series, long running and always fresh, but it hasn’t got the best recognition this side of the pond, barely anyone here had heard of it a year or two ago. Its art style takes more than a little getting used to, and betrays its underlying awesomeness. So here I’m trying to expose a little of that! Do note this is from the original One Piece, not the hacked up American dub version with water pistols, cork guns and no blood. or plot.

This video follows the song largely. as a whole it’s a bit of a rollercoaster ride: you sit back, and let it take you.. or something. Hopefully if you haven’t seen the series it shouldn’t be too confusing, that’s the aim anyway. For those who have seen it, it’s a small slice of profiling the characters, and showing the general pace, action and style of the series, leading to their entry to the Grand Line. That said, I’ve taken footage from all over the shop, even from some of the bleeding-edge raws out at the time.

Fans will be happy to note: This video contains no spoilers, no desert walking, no gratuitous food eating, no annoying filler kids who hate pirates, and above all, no Apis and no sennenryu. Oddly enough it also has no Vivi, huh.. That wasn’t intentional o.O It also lacks Crocodile, I just couldn’t fit him in without spoiling or it not really fitting the video. I also apologise for lack of Jango and Crocus, one day they shall feature in a video of mine, I swear it!

Anything spoilerous in this vid I’ve made sure is completely stripped of context ;) It shouldn’t ruin anything, except possibly *that thing* that the third opening spoils for everyone anyway -_-;;

Sadly Chopper and Robin do feature reasonably little, neither get particularly good action sequences for the most part.. Chopper always ends up looking pretty silly when he’s not going absolutely ballistic, and Robin mostly.. stands there. Great when you’re watching the series, but out of context? looks weak. Apologies to their fans.

The song itself is cool, though makes a lot of references to “the line”, which is damned useful to match to the Grand Line, a large plot point of the series. How handy.

Random facts! For this video I prepared and cut 3,598 clips from 171 separate episodes (not all in sequence), 6 movies and 2 specials. Along with the 5 openings, 15 endings, and 3 game openings I have lying around. There’s also a few chunks of scanned manga and artbook material there too. Along with a random Chopper plushie image thieved from a google image search, because dammit I can’t find a nice Oda coloured picture of the little guy.

That was a clip harvesting run aimed at any future vids I may make though, fret not.. I’m not that mad. This video used approximately 120 clips, from 66 episodes and three of the movies. Plus stills and other bits.

I’ve gone with the vobs -> avisynth script -> segmented avisynth scripts -> mediastudio approach here, so I can turn ivtc and video cleaning filters on and off with a text file, and keep filesizes to a minimum. I had to write a small java program to convert the full VirtualDub jobs list into all the separate avs files, and compile those into fake AVIs for mediastudio.. Ick. It worked in the end though. MediaStudio was not a happy bunny at all, mind. Occasionally it would just decide that all AVS files were, in fact, blank. Restarts were required. Often.

This project was also set back by a hard drive death, due to overheating in the summer, and I’ve had to recompile all the source files three times now -_- (note: make that four. new raws o/) It wasn’t even my hard drive, dammit..

Special thanks to Dythim and the K-F crew for helping me track down those elusive creditless openings, and other bits of help offered, you guys rock.

Thanks to istiv studios too, for inspiring me to track down Masterplan’s album after watching Shounen Bushido :P

Also thanks to those who actually stayed throughout the entire AyaCon AMV exhibition since this was the last one shown :) Damn that room was a lot less full than when it started..

Edit: This is not a freakin’ “all lip-sync video”, in total, counting even the most obtuse of scenes, there’s maybe 20 seconds of what could concievably be called lipsynced footage, 20 out of 285. Smooth, people.

Answers to most common questions:

Yes the song is actually called Sail On, as is the video. I sucked at coming up with an original name, and yes the Masterplan album it’s on is also called Masterplan. Originality all around, people.

If there’s a clip you don’t recognise, chances are it’s either from the Water 7 arc, or it’s from movie 6. What little I could use of movie 6.

Easter egg: see if you can spot why I had to add sweatdrops to Going Merry as they fly off the top of Reverse Mountain ;)

And an easier one: Guess whose hand is grabbing the Gold Roger scroll near the beginning? It’s not Luffy’s, I had to recolour it to look like it was.

Later awarded Best Action / Horror at AnimeDestiny 2005, for which I got the shinest trophy ever: