Ha...you didn't think I could do any videos that weren't for Gundam or Power Rangers/sentai, did you? :P

But yes...this is my first video that isn't one of those, and it's also the first video that's primarily sourced from my own DVD rips! Samurai Troopers/Ronin Warriors has long been a favorite anime of mine, going back to when the dubbed version first aired here in the US in the mid-'90s, and I've long wanted to do AMV projects for it alongside my Gundam and non-anime stuff.

But the origins of this short video are kind of unique. Like a lot of people, I've been watching the current (as of this posting) Shingeki no Kyojin/Attack on Titan anime series, and when you go on YouTube, there's kind of an ongoing meme there that the (first) opening goes with pretty much everything, from other action anime to movies to silly things because of its grandiose, epic nature. So because I've been kind of on a YST kick for a while, I began to wonder if the same could apply to this. On a lark, I took an audio clip of the theme and put it with the YST openings, and I liked what I saw with that. It didn't fit perfectly, but it really got the wheels turning to make my own version (since it's something I hadn't seen yet of this particular meme).

Of course, putting this video wasn't without some issues. Originally, I was going to be lazy and just use some existing DVD rips I'd downloaded as my source files, but when I couldn't get those to fully cooperate with Studio, I really had no choice but to rip my own DVDs, and fortunately, that did the trick. (Doing things the "right" way pays off!) I also had to spend many hours in Photoshop creating some still images just for this video, and then there's the part I call the "frustrating kanji scenes," where Studio's title editor and the Japanese text just would not cooperate, and I spent maybe an hour and half in all fighting to get it all aligned the way I wanted it to look. (And I won't even get into how many times I made the program crash either!) Aside from all of these issues, it took about three days to put together after about two or three days of planning and fighting to get workable source footage.

Anyway, while I wouldn't call this a shot-for-shot remake of the original Snk/AoT opening, this was intended to replicate as much of it as possible with both the footage available to me and the limits of what Studio can do as well. It won't have all the flashy effects of the original or some of the other fan-made parody openings (after all, there's only so much one can do with a 25-year-old anime series!), but I've done what I can. Everything is lined up with the original cuts and transitions as much as possible, much like the "Power Rangers Gee-Ex 2.0" video, and I attempted to use similar enough scenes where I could and make some attemtps to try to alter footage to match the original effects as much as possible. Fortunately, there are a lot of very dynamic, epic action scenes in YST that I could use! (And like Gee-Ex 2.0, there are some snippets from the original opening that I used here, although in this case, it's more a "blink and you'll miss it" sort of thing.)

I did take some creative liberties, though; instead of those scenes of the kanji/Japanese text flashing by being connected to the lyrics of the song, I chose to go with actual words/phrases that are in some way related to YST itself. And since I neither have the short-lived YST manga nor does the style really work with this, the quick cuts of manga-style images you see in this are actually scans from one of the YST soundtrack CDs, which had some manga-style artwork of various characters. (In a strange coincidence, that CD had just arrived in the mail just a couple days before I started working on this project--how's that for fortuitous timing?)

Overall, while this isn't a particularly long video, it was fun to do something entirely new and different. While this was my first for YST, it certainly won't be my last.