Live Action Naruto and Other Anime in Real Life

I've always been interested in computers and since I got my first PC I knew that this is what I wanted to do as a job. I got into the field of academic computer science and yea, I am quite satisfied! Sometimes I envy people working outside when I see the nice weather, being locked up in the office or at home in front of the screen, but I guess that there is always somewhere else we'd love to go, no matter where we are. Being totally happy is quite an art! Anyway, I have watched Pokemon, Digimon, and Beyblade as a kid, not knowing that these shows are so called anime, coming from Japan. Then I met a good friend in our karate dojo who introduced me into the world of anime. I have watched Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion (one of my first and still my favorite one) and started watching Naruto.

Beginnings with VFX

Later I got an old camcorder Panasonic NV-DS25 with some small mini DV tapes from my uncle. I was wondering How do they do these cool stuff in movies like lightsabers?. I have asked some people, nobody knew, and then again, this friend of mine who taught me what anime was appeared again! He knew! He showed me this strange editing program called Adobe After Effects! We tried to record a video with me sitting on the bed and standing next to it, split the footage by a mask and created a clone effect! I was so freaking amazed!!! Little did I know that this principle will follow me in most of my future one-man-show videos!

When looking for some special effects I first got quite amazed by the Ryan VS Dorkman fan-made lightsaber fight. I knew that this was something I need to learn too! They are not professionals (actually, they are now), so I can do this too, right? I also tried to search for some anime-related effects like Naruto and found these legendary videos like the shadow clone justu or Naruto live action fights. After experimenting a bit I realized that I would love to share the results with the world, just like these other people did so I made my first YouTube channel.

When I start something, I usually just keep going. My channel is still here and it's been a lot of time spent recording and even more editing the videos. I have bought three new cameras since the old Panasonic one to upgrade the quality of my videos and I have tried many software including Adobe After Effects, Particle Illusion, Pinnacle, Sony Vegas, and eventually ended up using solely Blender for both 3D and 2D video editing.

What the hell? More views on my channel?

Most of my videos are real life Naruto ones. Even though I don't like where Naruto went later, the original show is still something precious in my heart. The real life anime eyes, especially the sharingan edition, got most of the subscribers to my channel. I never expected to get millions of views on my videos, nor did I expect to reach 100k subscribers and get the solver YouTube button award. I mean, yeah, I thought like What if I ever get there? but didn't really believe it. It would take like 50 years according to my calculations back then. But some videos became really popular and just got the people here to my channel. Oh I almost forgot, you know who gave me the idea to create the live action anime eyes? That one friend again! He saw one of my videos and told me Wow, how do you do those eye effects? They look so nice! which gave me the idea of focusing more on the eye effects and create videos consisting only of them.

I also started making other anime in real life videos and even other topics like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. Some people have asked me how to gain more fans to their channels etc. To be honest, I have no idea! I just do what I enjoy! I will not lie, I am glad that people like my work but it is not the main reason why I started this channel and VFX editing. I just like to transform my imagination into reality.

Again, there are moments like Grrr, why did I think of creating such scene! The editing is endless! Sometimes vidoe editing can be really time-consuming. VFX artists all know how, e.g., rotoscoping is sometimes so terribly boring! Often, a scene a few seconds long takes days to create! But I always enjoy the moment the video is finished and I just sit down, relax, and watch the result. ...Oh yea, I usually find many mistakes during the first watching, have to fix them, render again... It is still worth it!

Fan service or being original?

Sometimes I upload a video that was made in a few minutes, not expecting much, and then it becomes much more popular than videos I've been working on for days or months. That's life I guess. Sometimes the amount of work does not really equal the final gain. I even started my own original series, knowing that it will not get as popular as anime-related videos, but I can truly express myself here:

It is sometimes hard to decide if I should be original or producing more content for anime fans. Luckily I enjoy both so I just do this or that, whetever. I believe that the most important thing in life is doing what one enjoys! Be it choice of school, job or hobbies.

Tutorials

I have made also tutorials regarding VFX and Blender. They are available here on my website. I also made tutorials on my channel in a form of videos:

The main thing is to experiment, keep trying and learning some basics with the tools we chose to use. Then it is all about creativity and passion!

Keywords: manga, Japanese, TV show, special effects, video editing
#anime #liveactionanime #liveaction #vfx #visualeffects #videoediting #filmmaking