NEW: Honour In Amends (2026)
Theme: Tin Man (2007) (Azkadellia/Zero)
Storytelling tie-in with related fanwork Reparations

My Rating:
Five stars. I’m very happy with this one.

Background:
Like Rubik’s Cube, this video is a tie in with a fanfic novel, Reparations (on AO3 or my fic site). However, where Rubik’s Cube is a teaser trailer, Honour In Amends is a literal re-telling with my own lyrics set to generated music (in that sense, it is more like What We Left Alive). This story has a very rich physical environment – a rebuilt post-war Finaqua, now a military base of rehabilitated Longcoats, led by Azkadellia, Zero, and her four Majors – and an intimate healing storyline that is difficult to convey in a general-audience music video. I originally meant for Rubik’s Cube to be the only video for the story, but after making it I started to think I could represent the intimate recovery storyline after all, and I wanted to play with a custom song and the more complex lens that storyline put on the universe in visuals.

Geeky Things To Note:
As with Rubik’s Cube, this entire video is made with generated footage, both the Rubik’s Cube portfolio and a further portfolio on top. As with Rubik’s Cube, I deliberately designed Azkadellia and Zero to be a bit more removed from their onscreen portrayals, mostly because onscreen Azkadellia has a fragile broken-doll edge that I really didn’t want to emphasise for this story, which consciously resists making Azkadellia a victim even though she has been victimised and left badly hurt. Another aspect of this was a decision to saturate and colour-degrade the footage. This is because the footage as generated for Rubik’s Cube is intensely bright and optimistic, reflecting the fresh new world/rebuildiung Finaqua side of the story, but that seemed excessively bright for this more complicated subject matter coverage.

The other geeky point is probably the song itself, which was a real labour of love taking several days and rounds of edits to write, and took an enormous number of generations in Suno to get a musical accompaniment I could embrace. I was looking for a very specific masculine voice for Zero’s side of the story. He has a very personal pitch of guilt-turned-accountability in this story for his accidental harm to Azkadellia that does not translate to a remorseful or angsty sensibility in the broad. Communicating it without turning him into a more generally remorseful or angst-ridden character was a very fine balance.

Programs Used:
Kdenlive.

Sources:
Tin Man (2007) (inspiration) and generated footage, mostly in Kling 3.0, with voiceovers by ElevenLabs and music accompaniment to my lyrics by Suno.