May 2025 – The Life and Times of Paul Geromini

The years march on (12 years and counting as a professional) and so do the annual blog posts.

Each year I feel like I have less and less interesting news to reports. It becomes a struggle to type up anything remotely interesting from the last year. Nevertheless, we must persevere.

I have gone fully remote this year, only spending two days in an office. The change has been mostly smooth. I certainly enjoy the extra time I can sleep each day and this has undoubtedly extended the life of my car along with some nice gas savings. Now if only that remote stipend could become a thing. It has not all been smooth sailing though. It has become markedly more difficult to access people. I do miss the ease of finding someone to talk to. It can be a lot harder to get someone when all you have is email and chat. Still, my experience is nothing new.

Like I thought, the number of videos I made last year was an aberration. Final count for 2024 was 15 AMVs and eight small non-AMVs. I doubt I will ever make so many videos in a year again, but I find myself still full of ideas. It is early in the year, but I have already notched a nice win for myself in the awards category, which has certainly given me a bit more impetus. I hope to release five or so new videos this year.

Late last year, the first big fansub editing project I was involved in came out. This was a ton of work, but I was happy to contribute my small part. I thought that would be it, but through the label [Blasphemboys] and through Orphan Fansubs, I have continued editing and quality checking. I do about 30-60 minutes a week. It is not that hard and it is very cool to see some very old/obscure work for maybe the first time in English. I look forward to keeping at this.

Gun collecting wise, the miracle gunsmith I found last year has all but retired, so the search for a new one must begin. I still need brass for my Bodeo and now for a Roth Krinka. That said, it was a fairly light year of collecting.

I completed a Gundam model kit for the first time this year. It was certainly fun, but much more fiddly compared to Legos. Too much work involved snipping things out and cleaning up the pieces. Much nicer with Lego to just have everything ready to go. Still, I have acquired some nicer tools and would like to do some more kits.

Not much more to say. Another year closer to death.

You can watch it here. Submitted to Anime Boston 2025 under the Fun/Comedy category where it was a finalist winning “Best Fun/Humor” and “Made In New England.”

For awhile after doing my green screen project I was stumped on what my followup would be. I kept turning over a number of live action/AMV ideas, but none of them ever really materialized until I struck on the miscommunication/joke that led to this video. It is not quite a continuation of what I have done in the past, but it does fuse live action/anime in a fun way so it counts in my book. I am again joined by the inimitable Patrick Skehill of Quixotic United Productions who is always available for my flights of fancy.

The challenges behind this work are two fold. One, film reasonably decent live action portions. Two, find as many instances of corn in anime as possible. I would say I was moderately successful on the first account and very successful on the second.

I do think my skill and knowledge filming live action has been improving, but I still have a number of deficiencies. Most notably the audio quality is lacking, especially in the first skit. I did intend to dub over my portion, but the way my lines and Mr. Skehill’s lines overlap helps the comedy so I could not pull it off. The film quality is ok, but I still struggle with noise in the picture despite tweaking a lot of options and adding in a bunch of extra light. The learning process continues. Regardless, I find these skits nicely break things up and add a lot of flair to this fairly ordinarily composed AMV. The day we filmed I had horrendous poison ivy on both my arms so I ended up re-filming my portion several times, both to have clean arms and because I was never satisfied. Mr. Skehill of course, being the consummate professional, nailed his lines on the first take.

Finding corn clips was time consuming, but not terribly difficult. I knew a few off the top of my head and the rest I found by asking around and doing a bunch of Google image searches. There are a couple anime food blogs that had corn clips I Was able to source. I also made a couple of intelligent guesses based on the names and plots of shows and got lucky scrubbing through their episodes at 10x speed. I would have liked a few more clips, but what I got works. I did use just about all of what I found though.

Director’s Commentary

00:00 – 00:10: This is the end of a previous AMV of mine.

00:11 – 00:17: The audio for me here is not great. I had planned to dub it in later, but Mr. Skehill talks over it so was going to be tricky to manage. I tried a bunch of things in Vegas to clean it up and an AI tool, but nothing helped so I left it. The kitchen timer sound effect was inspired by this scene.

00:27: Funny enough I cannot use the view count from the “Many Faces…” AMV as it has 11 thousand views (as of May 2025) and is one of my most successful videos. Eagle eyed viewers will see my Best of Show trophy in the background.

01:00 – 01:05: For reasons unknown this scene would constantly fail to render correctly with strange purple frames appearing. No clue why. I would just rerender and it would fix itself.

01:33: Ideally it would be nice to not know this song is from a musical about corn, thus preserving the joke as long as possible, but what can you do.

01:55 – 02:02: I tried to AI upscale this anime, but it never looked right. It is not unusable, but I have had better luck with upscalers in the past.

02:18: I cut the song here because there is a non-musical interlude. It is mostly seamless.

02:22: The first time I have used light leaks in an AMV! I was whelmed. I think it adds a little, so it was worth doing, but I am not sure how much I will use them going forward.

02:26 – 02:27: For some reason I spent a ton of time on this because Senku turns at a different time from when the corn becomes alcohol and I wanted both to happen at the same time so the scene would not be so static.

02:30 : Contribution by Zarxrax.

02:36 – 02:50: I knew I had to split the song here as well which I could have done more seamlessly, but I wanted a little interlude. I happened to be able to get this DVD so it made sense to play up the joke here.

03:02 – 03:06: Really great joke here as suggested by SilkAMV. I knew I wanted to have a joke describing what a “bris” was and so I added what was essentially a translators note, but Silk had the idea of splitting it into its own thing, which works really well. Great idea.

03:13 – 03:15: Some nice motion tracking here to get that arrow bobbing up and down. I think it would be hard to notice the corn otherwise and the moving text is amusing.

04:01 – 04:02: I spent a lot of time masking shut the lips on this guy.

04:55-05:00: I do quite like the final joke and it was worth the $60. It was very hard to find that instrument sound effect though. The final shot is AI cleaned up to remove all the noise I had in the shot.