One of my favorite genres is anime. One of my favorite anime is Seven Deadly Sins, Nanatsu no Taizai in Japanese. When thinking of what I wanted to remix, the visuals were the first thing that came to mind, and my idea for the audio came later. I wanted to pay homage to a certain battle in the series between two characters, Escanor and Estarossa, which had a lot of great moments. As we learned in class from Meg Shields’ in Imitation Game: The Difference Between Homage and Plagiarism, “Bluntly put, the determining factor between homage and plagiarism is one of intention: either a filmmaker transparently deploys a reference as a reference, or a filmmaker knowingly passes off someone else’s work as their own.”
I then began to think of what audio could go along with this battle. Soon, I thought of Kanye West’s I Am a God. This came to mind because these two characters were the strongest in the series up to this point. Both could be considered overpowered, exactly what a god would seem like. These two characters also have an intertwined history that I don’t want to spoil, but they are connected (they just don’t know it yet). This battle was the perfect example of how to overpower an overpowered character. Estarossa, part of the demon group known as the Ten Commandments, was bestowed with the commandment of love. This means that anyone who harbors any hatred in his vicinity will be rendered completely powerless. Estarossa himself is also subject to his own commandment, which leads to him looking at the world through emotionless eyes. He was finally able to feel something when fighting Escanor. Considering Estarossa killed somebody that the main cast cared about, they all held hatred and were unable to fight, hence the first part of the video. This part of the video really emphasized his power and made him seem godlike.
Escanor, on the other hand, is part of the Seven Deadly Sins, with his sin being pride. He was not affected by the commandment of love because in his words, “Why would I hate someone who is weaker than me? I only feel pity.” Yes, he is that prideful, and that pride comes from his enormous power. Estarossa’s other two abilities include a physical full counter (he can reflect any physical attack with double the power) and darkness (a standard demon ability strong enough to blot out the sun). Escanor’s own power stems from the Sun, so these two characters were great foil. An emotionless darkness against a prideful sun. Delving deeper into Escanor’s power, he is sort of like Bruce Banner and the Hulk. Escanor gets increasingly powerful (and muscular) as the day goes on, peaking at 12 noon. From that point on he gets weaker and scrawnier until he hits his lowest point at 12 midnight. Unfortunately for Estarossa, Escanor hit his peak power while they were fighting and sent him flying with a powerful fireball, claiming victory in the process.
In Revisiting Digital Sampling Rhetorics with an Ethics of Care, author Jared Sterling Colton states, “An additional concern is that I should be able to explain how my practices of sampling and remixing are acts of caring or wounding, or perhaps both. As Cavarero (2011) argued, an act of caring for one person may be an act of wounding for that same person in another context—or for someone else in a similar context.” My use of Kanye’s song does not wound the original, and if anything, cares for it. It helps emphasize the lyrics by showing the back and forth of two “gods” fighting each other.
I used iMovie to create my remix. I used some obscure website to covert YouTube videos to an mp4 file. I used “Esterossa ve Escanor!English Dub. Epic battle NNT!!” from a user called Toonime as the basis for my clip. However, my work is still original. As talked about in the NPR podcast “What Is Original?” Guy Raz discusses how many people used the Slick Rick and Doug. E Fresh track La Di Da Di to create original work. A standout example is Biggie Small’s hit song Hypnotize. Miley Cyrus’ We Can’t Stop also uses a melody from La Di Da Di. Just like they both remixed something and made it original, I’ve also done the same thing. The YouTube video I used still pulled from a different source, the original anime itself, Season 3 Episode 22, which I do credit in the description. Anyways I already owned Kanye West’s I Am a God on iTunes, so iMovie allowed me to drag the audio onto the editing roll. I then dragged the almost 8 minute clip of Escanor versus Estarossa onto the editing roll and began the tedious process of clipping things I didn’t need. I made sure whenever the beat dropped to show an important transition or specific blow in the fight. I slowed down certain clips to help match the pace of the 3:55 runtime of the song. I added the x-ray effect on certain beat drops for emphasis. I also made sure that it looked as if the characters were saying the lyrics to the song (as often as I could at least). This was especially true whenever the phrase, “I am a god” showed up. This gave the effect that the characters were arguing with each other over who was really a god. When I was finished I posted the video on YouTube and properly credited the sources in the description. I also made sure to state that the remix was protected under the idea of fair use from the US Copyright Act of 1976. This was to avoid any copyright strikes, but also to prove the originality of the project itself.
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