Automotive Regrets

LantisEscudoMay 7, 2026AMV, Videos

Living on the East Coast of the US, I don’t get to go to West Coast conventions very often, but I had the rare opportunity to attend Anime Los Angeles 2026 in conjunction with a trip I was taking to California for other reasons. I wanted to submit something to their contest, but everything I had handy was either ineligible (length, non-anime, freshness time, etc.) or in my opinion, not strong enough to compete, so I needed to come up with a new idea with not very much time to complete it.

Seeing the Commercial category as the most promising option, I went looking for amusing commercials that I might be able to parody. After a decent amount of digging through YouTube, I stumbled back across the FreeCreditReport.com commercials I remembered from the late 2000s. They were catchy, evocative, funny, and ripe for a quick “get in, do the joke, get out” video. Of the nine options (I was surprised at how many there were, too), the “New Car” one immediately reminded me of the first season of Initial D and Itsuki’s lemon of an AE-85 Levin.

There aren’t a lot of episodes it appeared, so scrubbing the footage and assembling the pieces came together pretty quickly.

It did get selected as a finalist and got some laughs from the audience, so I’m counting that as a win for myself. I should do more silly things like this in the future, this was fun to make.

Video – Initial D First Stage
Audio – FreeCreditReport.com “New Car” commercial audio
Completed November 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Rebuild and Recover

LantisEscudoMay 7, 2026AMV, Videos

I had an ambitious project planned for AWA Accolades 2025, but also had a lot of travelling scheduled in the two months leading up to the deadline, so that project ended up getting shelved and I had to pivot to an idea that I thought I could complete in the remaining amount of time.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is a series that I’d wanted to do something with ever since seeing AdventLostKaichou’s video Time Falls Away in 2014, and I’d had the I Fight Dragons song “Disaster Hearts” in mind for it for almost as long.

I ended up almost completely excising Yuuki from the video, trying to focus on Mirai and Mari dealing with the trauma of the earthquake rather than Yuuki’s tragic storyline. I also had to cut the song down quite a bit, as the bridge didn’t really fit the mood and flow I was trying for.

Overall, I’m not entirely pleased with how it came out due to how much I was rushing to meet the deadline after pivoting, and I may end up revisiting it in the future, but for now, it’s still not a terrible effort.

Video – Tokyo Magnitude 8.0
Audio – I Fight Dragons – Disaster Hearts
Completed October 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Just Text

LantisEscudoMay 7, 2026AMV, Videos

I was doing a lot of travelling in the weeks leading up to the AWA Accolades 2025 deadline, and I was getting very worried that I wasn’t going to be able to have anything done for the contest, so I banged together a very short video in two afternoons just to have an entry to submit.

The audio came from a YouTube short that got linked in Tom Scott’s weekly newsletter sometime in early August that made me laugh quite a bit, so I held onto the link just in case.

I thought for a while about what sources I had handy that included a bunch of scenes with cell phone usage, and landed on My Dress-Up Darling, which my wife and I had just finished watching together.

The video ended up getting a good reaction from the other editors in the Accolades contest, which is about the best I could have hoped for with an 8-second-long rush job. It was too short to send anywhere else, sadly (most contests with Shorts categories still have a 15-second minimum), so that was the only place it ended up playing.

Video – My Dress-Up Darling
Audio – Ben Lapidus – August 5, 2025
Completed October 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Baby Bird (MEP Segment)

LantisEscudoMay 7, 2026AMV, MEP, Videos

I’ve been friends with hamstar138 for many years – her husband BasharOfTheAges is one of my oldest AMV friends, and I was even a groomsman at their wedding. So I was honored to get invited to participate in a Multi-Editor Project for her when she was expecting their first kid. Organized by rivkah94, the original plan was to have it done before the baby was born, but life unfortunately happened for several of us, and we ended up showing it to her at the baby’s first birthday party.

We all chose series that she liked, and decided to go with Kanon, which is also one of my personal favorites. With the theme of “daughters,” I wanted to focus on Akiko and Natsuki. There ended up actually being a lot less footage of the pair together than I remembered, to the point where I almost started using scenes of Akiko and Ayu, too, but I managed to scrape together enough to make a solid segment.

hamstar very much enjoyed our gift, which was exactly what we were hoping for.

Video – Kanon (2006)
Audio – Sleeping At Last – Daughter (section)
Completed September 2025

YouTube Link

Pendant of Power [Shabu Showdown 2025 Week 4]

LantisEscudoMarch 17, 2026AMV, Project Editor, Videos

The theme for the fourth and final week of Shabu Showdown 2025 was “Signature Objects,” where the editors were given a week to create a video showcasing an important object (specifically an object, not a character) and the significance to the character(s) that used it.

I was really very short on editing time during this week, dealing with several real-life priorities, so this one felt more thrown-together than the other weeks in the end.

I didn’t have time to ponder alternate ideas, so I had to run with the first thought I had, which was the pendant from Laputa: Castle in the Sky. My usual crutch of instrumental production music got used again, but with the time crunch, it didn’t annoy me quite as much this week.

One other editor said during the reveal stream that they had considered the same object for their video, but they thankfully had gone with a different idea, so we didn’t end up clashing. In the end, not a great video, but given the time constraints, not a bad one, either.

Video – Laputa: Castle In the Sky
Audio – Epic Score – Destiny and Honor
Completed August 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link

The Pageantry of Ritual [Shabu Showdown 2025 Week 3]

LantisEscudoMarch 17, 2026LAMV, Project Editor, Videos

The theme for the third week of Shabu Showdown 2025 was “Guilds of Ravnica,” where editors were given a week to create a video representing one of the ten Ravnica guilds from the Magic: The Gathering game setting.

I had a really hard time coming up with an idea for this one, as nothing I came up with seemed to fit any of the descriptions of the Guilds. Not being familiar with any of the MTG lore (I had stopped playing the game more than 20 years earlier, between the Tempest and Urza blocks) also didn’t help me.
I eventually settled on using the recently-released movie Conclave, which I’d enjoyed (though I think the book was better), and waffled between presenting the church as Orzhov or Azorius before landing on Orzhov. For the audio, I annoyed myself by going back to my old standby for short timeframe videos of instrumental production music and Two Steps From Hell, which still managed to work in creating a fairly suspenseful thriller-style video.

Not my most successful week, but I still like the resulting video.

Video – Conclave
Audio – Two Steps From Hell – Rapid Eye Movement
Completed July 2025

YouTube Link

What Might Have Been [Shabu Showdown 2025 Week 2]

LantisEscudoMarch 17, 2026AMV, Project Editor, Videos

The theme for week two of Shabu Showdown 2025 was “Flip the Script,” where editors were given a week to create a video that misleads the viewer about the source material.

I was actively watching My Dress-Up Darling at the time, and just recently finished the arc with Shinju wanting to cosplay. So that gave me the idea of making Marin the “losing” girl in the story and setting up a fake Gojo/Shinju pairing. I was reluctant to use the reprise of “I’m Not That Girl” from Wicked, since I’d used the original version for a Toradora video several years before (for an actual “losing” girl character in Ami), but the theming and song length worked out too well not to go with it.

I’ll admit, I was cackling evilly at several points during the making of this one, and several people reacted with “you made Marin cry!” sorts of comments during the reveal stream, which greatly amused me.

Video – My Dress-Up Darling
Audio – Kristin Chenoweth – I’m Not That Girl (reprise) [from Wicked]
Completed July 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Inspector Basil [Shabu Showdown 2025 Week 1]

LantisEscudoMarch 17, 2026FMV, Project Editor, Videos

The theme for the first week of Shabu Showdown 2025 was “Enneagrams,” where the participants were given one week to create a video that was a character profile showcasing one of the nine enneagram personality types.

I didn’t have a solid idea at first, but I knew I wanted to use a short song because of the condensed timeframe. Going through my collection of music, I pulled out a few possibilities, but then stumbled across the Inspector Gadget opening theme. I had had a conversation with someone recently where The Great Mouse Detective had come up, so the immediate association between Basil and Type 5 – Investigator clicked in my head.

I ended up tracking down an instrumental version of the theme because the lyrics felt a bit too literal for the setting, and I think that was the right choice.

It got a good reaction in the reveal stream, and several compliments after the week ended.

Video – The Great Mouse Detective
Audio – Shuki Levy – Inspector Gadget Theme (Instrumental)
Completed July 2025

YouTube Link

Stage Presence

LantisEscudoMarch 17, 2026FMV, Videos

This one was directly inspired by SilkAMV’s excellent video BLOOD 4 THE BLOOD GOD in AWA’s Accolades contest in late 2024. I had vaguely had an idea in the back of my mind about using various 80’s animated movies set to “Rock and Roll Fantasy” for a couple years, but hadn’t actually made any concrete plans for it. Silk’s use of a music-heavy movie I’d never heard of before, combined with the launch of Retro Matsuri, a new retro-focused event with an all-retro-animated-sources content rule, changed that.

One difficulty I ran into is that while I’d seen clips of most of the movies I used, I hadn’t actually watched any of them all the way through, so how much footage from each was actually usable was a surprise. I’m still amazed at how little musical footage was actually in a movie called “Heavy Metal,” and I ended up only using some background/scenery shots from Cats Don’t Dance because of the clash in art and stage animation styles.

I ended up cutting the song down heavily, which worked out pretty well, in my opinion (most of the cut bits were repeats and loops), and the final result came together pretty decently.

It did make the finals at Retro Matsuri, but didn’t win its category.

Video – American Pop, Cats Don’t Dance, A Goofy Movie, Heavy Metal, Rock-a-Doodle, Rock & Rule, Thumbelina
Audio – Bad Company – Rock and Roll Fantasy
Completed June 2025

YouTube Link

Backstop [Class Warfare: Shielder]

LantisEscudoJune 22, 2025AMV, Iron Chef, Videos

After finishing my Assassin video for the Class Warfare event, I had about a day before the deadline, and I knew that there weren’t a lot of Shielder entries yet at that point. I’d considered a sports-themed video for my main idea, but couldn’t find any song that seemed to fit. Searching around on a whim after submitting the Assassin video, I stumbled across “Goalie Goalie” from the 2018 FIFA World Cup and thought I could throw together a garbage video very quickly, just for a laugh.

I think it may have taken longer to rip the BluRays of Pride of Orange than I spent actually editing the video, which was just every shot I could find of a goalie character in the first five episodes slapped together in a ten-second video.

It got a few laughs in the streams, which is all I can ask for out of such a zero-effort project.

Anime – Pride of Orange
Audio – Arash Nyusha Pitbull Blanco – Goalie Goalie
Completed May 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link