How to Make an Awesome Anime Music Video (AMV)

Anime music videos, or AMVs, are fan-made music videos that put anime video clips to musical audio tracks. AMVs can be fun to make, but putting together a great AMV requires a significant amount of planning, patience and time.

Things You'll Need

• Video Editing software
• Anime footage (preferably unsubtitled)
• An audio track

Instructions

1. Start with a strong concept and a good song. AMVs are all about using music to bring out a theme shown in the anime video clips. Your first task in making an AMV are to pick a concept or theme, and find a song that can bring out that theme.

2. Choose an anime series that you know very well. If you are not very familiar with a particular anime series, then you will probably not be able to create a good AMV. The series should have similar themes to the song and concept you chose.

3. Use a video editing program to import all the media files necessary and edit them together. Your editing should reflect the feeling you wish to convey; a fast paced battle themed video with a hard rock theme, should consist of fairly rapid clips, perhaps timed to the beat of the song, humorous videos often work well by selecting clips that go along with the lyrics of the song; sentimental songs are often better with longer clips and less action.

4. Take the time to find the best clips for video. It can be a grueling task to sift through hundreds of episodes of amine to look for specific clips, but finding the best clips for every part of your track is the key to making a great video. Using mediocre clips when fans would readily be aware of better scenes will result in a video that is not awesome.

5. Show the video to a friend before you finish. When you get in the zone, it is easy to overlook mistakes or possible places to make an AMV better. Showing the video to a friend, preferably one familiar with the anime series can give you some ideas for final improvements before exporting the video.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't try to take on a big AMV project all at once. Work on it for a few hours here and there until it is finished.

• You don't need to use fancy visual effects to make a great AMV. Concept, clip choice, song choice, theme, and timing, are more important than effects.

Resources

• An Awesome AMV