Many, many… many years ago, my friends and I would regularly make DBZ AMVs and show them off to each other. This was in the early days of the social internet, just a couple of short years before the rise of social media and community sites like Myspace and Facebook. If you could pirate some editing software, some bootleg anime clips, and some Linkin Park MP3s, you could become moderately famous in what was at the time a very niche online subculture.

It was my introduction to video editing. I always found something therapeutic about it. Arranging clips, and timing the music to tell a story with no dialogue in a short amount of time. The constraints made it a fun challenge.

A few weeks ago I was listening to the album Daft Punk x Justice – TOGETHER by dk darkly, and the song “Ohio x Starboy” caught my ear. The punchy energy of the track lent itself to the frenetic fight between Goku and Cell.

It was fun to flex these editing skills again and get back into that therapeutic space. Finding the right clips, blocking out the “flow” of the sequence, setting up keyframes… my god so many keyframes. And it’s not done until I can watch the video over and over and over again and find nothing else to change. Kind of like slowly chiseling away at a stone until the statue appears.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. If you do, pass it around on some anime forums for old time’s sake.