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The History page
Everything you need to know about how it all began
(which, really, is nothing at all, but...)


Paragraph version for those who want the gory details


Summer 2001 Scintilla reads his first manga (Inu-Yasha) and sees his first animé (Rurouni Kenshin), the latter of which is primarily Inuki42's fault. No, it's NOT Deagle's fault this time. To this day, he still hasn't finished the series.
August 2002 Scintilla's younger brother, MTWStudios, attends Shoujocon 2002. He comes home with empty boxes of pocky, a "STAFF" sash, and a VCD of "This Is Otakudom", which he does not hesitate to spring on Scintilla. Even being the relative un-otaku he is at the time, Scintilla laughs way too hard.

Scintilla enters college at The College of New Jersey. Surprisingly enough, he has never yet run into someone who thought TCNJ was just another name for Rutgers.

October 2002 From LA Style's "James Brown Is Dead" and various sound clips from "This Is Otakudom", Scintilla mixes up a little something called This Is Otakudom: The Song (I'm Not Gay!). Lukas, webmaster for Otakudom, gives him the name DJ PJ. Unfortunately, no one else knows who the hell "DJ PJ" is, even today.

Following in close succession is "This Is Otakudom: The Music Video", Scintilla's first video.

December 2002 / January 2003 Scintilla gets his hands on Adobe Premiere 5.1 (legally!) and starts experimenting. Fortunately for the greater good of mankind, none of these initial experiments ever see the light of day.
March 2003 Scintilla completes and uploads his first Premiere video, after joining AnimeMusicVideos.org and adopting the Aquiline Studios name. After a month or two, he comes to his senses and deletes the video from his webspace. Since then, he has refused to acknowledge the video's existence.

Scintilla introduces Cyanna to Fushigi Yuugi and FLCL. The corruption begins.

April 2003 Scintilla completes "The NERV Evening News with Dan Rather", his first REAL Premiere video. Unfortunately, he hasn't read Ermac and Absolute Destiny's A/V Guide all the way through yet. This becomes apparent and comes back to haunt him in August when he finally discovers the Golden Donut.
May 2003 "NERV Evening News" is uploaded and submitted to the AMV contests at PortConMaine 2003 and Otakon 2003. By submitting his video for the PortConMaine contest, Scintilla finally gets to meet Scott A. Melzer in person. Scott is the first really famous AMV creator he ever met.
June 2003 The corruption continues, as Scintilla begins to introduce Cyanna to more and various animé, including the rest of Fushigi Yuugi.
August 8-10, 2003 Otakon 2003. Scintilla's whole family, minus his mother and plus Cyanna, attends. With the exception of MTWStudios, it's everyone's first con. "NERV Evening News" is a finalist in the AMV contest.
August 10-17, 2003 Scintilla spends a lot of time whining about how bad the audio balance in Video Room 1, where they had the second AMV contest screening, was.
August 22-29, 2003 "Haruko the Superfreak" is completed and submitted to the AMV contests at Nan Desu Kan 7, Anime Weekend Atlanta 9, and AnimeNEXT 2003. Still whining about the audio problems in Video Room 1, Scintilla also decides to send "NERV Evening News" to NDK and AWA.

Scintilla finally discovers AMVs.org's Golden Donut server and uploads "NERV Evening News" to it, thus ensuring that the piece-of-crap DivX encoding job he did will forever be available for download and ridicule.

September 2003 Scintilla becomes a regular on the AMVs.org forum. Mass hysteria and total chaos ensue. (Well, to be fair, this was nothing new, as the forums were already hysterical and chaotic.)

To Scintilla's utter confusion, "NERV Evening News" wins Best Comedy in the AWA 9 Expo contest. He concludes that the judges must have actually been able to hear the lyrics this time around. Also, he develops the resolve to actually attend AWA someday, after hearing lots of big-name AMV creators go on and on and on about how freaking great it was in their LiveJournals.

October 2003 Cyanna completes "Us Against the World" (her first official video), uploads it to the Donut, and lists it in the AMVs.org database under Aquiline Studios. Later on, she "officially" joins the studio. Opinion is currently divided as to whether or not this was an intelligent move.

In the AnimeNEXT AMV contest, "Haruko the Superfreak" is in the same category (Comedy) as videos by such creators as Doki Doki, Absolute Destiny, Tom the Fish, and Kusoyaro. Somehow, it still wins an award.

November 14, 2003 Cyanna completes "These Angel Hearts", her second video.
Shortly thereafter Cyanna's copy of Windows Movie Maker 2 decides it doesn't want to let her export nice, big, high-quality AVI files anymore. Bad WMM2. No biscuit.
December 3, 2003 Cyanna finally springs "These Angel Hearts" on the world. 9 out of 10 surveyed don't understand why Gendo's glasses keep appearing in the video. 10 out of 10 don't grasp the significance of the date chosen for the premiere.
December 23, 2003 Scintilla's fourth (real) video, "Dueling Videos: Under Ice", is completed (after a few beta-views by others and some final tweaks), uploaded to the Org's Golden Donut, and submitted to Katsucon 10. It generates an unexpectedly enthusiastic response in its thread on the Announcements board on the Org forums, but it gets off to a slow start download-wise, as Scintilla ran out of room on this site in which to host an MPEG copy and didn't want to yank "Haruko the Superfreak".
1985 Austrian rock singer Falco records "Rock Me Amadeus"!


Last updated on 1/7/04
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