I've been into anime since I was very young, however unknowingly. I used to watch tons of cartoons and only later found out that they were produced in Japan. It wasn't until a friend of mine showed me Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2 and explained what anime itself was that I became a knowing fan.
The story about how I got completely hooked is kind of funny. Since I spent the majority of my k-12 years in a small town in Kentucky we didn't have a lot channels like many in the major cities did that showed anime. So my first real chance to watch it on a regular basis was on USA when they got Sailor Moon. The day the first episode aired I recorded it while I watched it that morning. I didn't really like it, a fact I now attribute to the horrible dub. However I watched it a few more times after Bible School including bringing my brother and my sister in to watch it with me. Neither of them really cared for it, but as I continued to watch it I grew a liking to it and by the time I went to bed that night I was hooked.
Of course later on companies like Cartoon Network and other groups would pick up other series and start actually touting themselves as showing anime. However despite that there never really was a true following among many in the town. As one of the few I began to shape the anime and manga sections at our local stores such as FYE (was still Disk Jockey at the time) and Barnes & Nobles. In fact, visiting my parents to this day the majority of what either store carries is what I used to special order. The same could be said about the DDR craze back there. While I myself didn't exactly start it (it took getting my brother into it and then him getting everyone else into it) I was the initial spark.
Now how does this all play into AMVs? I'm getting to that. You see, being from a small town and being raised Southern Baptist/Missionary my family saw anime as most anyone who saw those adds in the nineties, as a very bad thing. So naturally my only real connection to the community was from TV and the internet. Now despite having been on the internet since it's conception, our town was slow to adapt to high speed connection types and my father was rather hesitant to provide top quality computers. So as you might guess, I was left mostly in that dark when it came to things.
It wasn't until I graduated High School in '02 that I was able to get my first capture card. Until that point I had been downloading AMVs using the more conventional methods, Kazaa and direct links that I found on the internet. Yeah, I've been around since the days when Real Media and Quicktime were the leading formats for online distribution of video. However I was only an observer until I got my capture card.
That summer I made my first video, By Myself was a Kenshin video put to Linkin Park. Yeah, I made one of those. In fact, I made it just before the mass of Linkin Ball Z videos started pouring onto the net. As many in those days before the .org I used Kazaa and other file sharing programs to get my videos out. It wasn't until a friend of mine in College gave me the link to animemusicvideos.org that I was introduced to the joys that was the .org. By then I had 2 more videos, Wonder and I Stand Alone.
I spent the next few years making videos and downloading, however I didn't really participate in the community beyond that. I lurked on the forums and sent my videos to the few conventions that I knew of. I also went on to work on preview videos for the different series that we showed at our club, in doing so I think I improved upon my familiarity with Premiere and with editing itself.
Sugoi-con 2003 was my first convention. I went up for Saturday only, caught the AMV contest and met up with the coordinator, who informed me that Apocalyptic Silence was almost so long that it got cut. At 6:30 I don't blame him, that was rather long. At that convention I now think that I actually met quite a few different editors, however nothing really came of it.
Anime Central 2004 was my second convention, and where I sent my next creation, She Has the Touch. A Mood in Bossa was a small test work that I did before that point but never did anything else with. At ACEN I experienced my first Iron Chef (later went on to be Iron Editor) and saw a lot of really good videos. My video lost to Suberunker's entry that year A Different Side of Me. I must admit, his video was really good. One of these days I will go back and redo She Has the Touch, I was still using the capture card back then.
In December of 2004 I moved back to Detroit, Mi to live with my grandparents. I was sick of Kentucky and needed a change of pace. Around that time I started work on Love and Hate, laying down half of the video before I even moved. I hoped on ACEN staff in 2005 in their AMV section. That year I met a lot more editors, including working with Sailor Death and Outlawed and enjoyed it a lot.
It was at ACEN that year that I ran into the guys putting on Youmacon. They noticed that I was on staff and after talking with them they offered to put me in charge of their AMV Contest. You can say the rest was really history from there. I started staffing multiple conventions as their AMV coordinator and created my own group who ran our own Iron Chef competition now known as The AMV Wars.
From that point on I started to hang out on the .org's forums and in the AMV chat room. I got to know a lot of different editors and well, the rest is more recent than I need to go into.
I currently rock 2 computers for the sake of AMVs and anything else I am into.
Natsume is the name of the oldest of the two. I built her in 2005 as an editing PC mostly. She has since been retired as my main editing PC but I still keep her around as a backup and as a display PC used at conventions. Her specs:
| AMD Athalon 64 3000+ 2304 MB DDR Ram 256 MB ATI Radeon (DVI, VGA, S-video) 1 250 GB Hard Drive Generic DVD Drive Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus MPEG decoder card |
Honoka took her place. I built her in 2008 as an editing PC designed to stand up to the increasing demands I was putting on my PC with regards to both editing and storage space. While a great machine giving me little problems it is apparent that I was not fully informed when I built her and as such her parts have quickly grown obsolete for my needs. I will sadly be replacing her soon. Her specs:
| AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual-Core 5400+ (2.81GHz) 4 GB Dual Channel DDR2 Ram Nvidia GeForce 6800 XT (Dual DVI, S-video) 1 250 GB Hard Drive System Disk - XP 64bit, Programs, FTP Server 3 500 GB Hard Drives Usagi - Editing Drive Mamoru - Documents, Music, Non-AMV Projects AMVs - AMV Archive Dedicated 1 1 TB Hard Drive Huge - DVD Rips, Anime, Videos LiteOn Dual Layer DVD Burner |
On top of these two PCs I do also rock a few external hard drives as back up drives holding data I don't want to loose. These hold the project files for every video I have worked on since 2006, when it became apparent that I needed a solution after I lost a whole project, 10 years of music collecting, a video game I had been working on, and countless other things, to the click of death.
And finally I suppose I should talk about my studios. In the beginning I listed all of my videos under a studio that included only myself. It was called N.G.Silver & Friends Productions. I have been using the NGSilver & Friends name for a very long time on the internet as a name I associated with for any endeavors I took on. This would include making video games, website design, and many other projects. It was only natural that when I started making AMVs that I would use that name for it as well.
The name N.G.Silver & Friends was created as a name that would encompass myself and any one else who collaborated with me on a project. As the name suggests, it includes myself and any friend of mine who assisted me on a project. However despite the name for the most part it was only myself who did anything.
Many have asked me where I came up with the name ngsilver, well, ngsilver is just an easier way to say N.G.Silver which is my original online name. If you look at the original name you should be able to correlate that it is in fact an abbreviation of my actual name. If you have done that, good job, you're correct. If you really want to know my real name, beyond Nate of course, you will need to ask me in person.
Now, I have been making videos under this studio for a while. It wasn't until I started making videos of an adult nature that I started to get leery of my studio's good name, and as such I didn't release those videos under that name. It was about that time that CB-R (Chaotic Bad-Raptor) came back into being as a studio. I entered their annual adult video contest and won with my 'Singing Parts' video (if you want to see it go to my adult video archive.) It was after this win that I started talking with the guys in CB-R and eventually I was asked to join the studio.
At first I simply joined the studio and only released my adult videos under the CB-R studio. However as time went on I realized that my studio wasn't going anywhere, no matter how many members I tried to get to join. So in the end I gave up on my studio and decided to fully join CB-R. After all, other then the adult video portion, my views on video editing matched up very well with the majority of CB-R's members.
I've been a part of CB-R ever since.
Well, now that I've gotten all of that off my chest, go run along and download my videos. It's what you really came here for. And if you are really that interested in knowing about me that you read all the way down here and want more, you're just going to have to ask me in person. After all, once I get to know you, I'm generally an open book.