Thanks to Michel Gondry’s whifty-keen piece of cinematic fluff Be Kind, Rewind, the term “Sweding” entered the lexicon. For those not familiar, Jack Black and Mos Def are minding a friends video shop and they accidentally erase all the videos. In order to keep the shop running, they get a camcorder and remake all the films with whatever they have laying around. They explain this away to customers as Swedish versions of the movies, from whence “sweding” came into being.
In Japan, 実写版 (jisshaban) or “On The Spot Filming” has been around for a lot longer, and the effort that goes into some of these projects is insane. A bit of searching on YouTube turned up the following selection of anime-inspired 実写版.
This clip has been going around for a number of years – I think I first saw it as a RealVideo file off an FTP server when I was still in high school, which should give you some idea of it’s age. It possibly stands as one of the best jisshaban videos of all time, primarily because of the reedy karaoke version of the title song they included.
Cardcaptor Sakura Opening
With the awesome crash editing and in-camera effects, how can you not love it? Next is a more recent remake with slightly higher production value.
Lucky Star Opening
Now everyone can appreciate the effort it takes to done a costume and do a shot-by-shot recreation of an animated title, but what if there’s a lot of special animation effects and compositing in the opening montage? Then you need to get down to a little bit of post-production and flex your After Effects muscles.
Neon Genesis Evangelion Opening
He should win prizes for donning a plugsuit and putting it out on the internet. Of course, if you’re going to do stuff with post, why not go all out? My only complaint about the next one is with the string-pulling-the-pigtails to emulate a blowing-in-the-wind look instead of using a fan or animating them – when you see the amount of effort they went to, surely it wouldn’t have taken much longer to do it properly
Pretty Guardian Soldier Sailor Moon Opening