The other day I was showing my bff some of the stuff I made with ps and while he was very enthusiastic about it, he also said something that made me think:
“Is this hard to do though? I have no idea how photoshop works, so I don’t know if this takes a lot of time and skills or if it’s something that anyone could do in five minutes.”
I snorted pretty hard at the “five minutes” part, cause I wish, but then it occurred to me that most people are probably like my best friend, and having no idea how we do what we do, take for granted our gifsets (which are indeed not made through witchcraft, though I’m convinced some of us must have sold their soul to the devil).
I’ll forever remember that one person that commented under a colour porn gifset of mine “wow, I didn’t remember this movie was so bright and colourful!”
… That’s cause it wasn’t. I made it that way. Everytime you see a gifset, someone made it that way.Bright, dark, very pink, very red (or in my case very cyan), very colourful.
And it’s not just a matter of choosing all the scenes to gif (and consequently capture all those screencaps, decide where to crop them, resize them and, only after that, beginning the adventure that is colouring).
There’s a huge difference in what a movie/video looks like before we get our hands on it and after, and I think that’s probably one of the things that people who don’t make gifs tend not to realize.
Let me show you!
This is a gif of a scene taken from Iron Man 2. The only thing I did was resize it to 500pixels. This is what the actual movie looks like:
this is the exact same scene after I coloured it and applied my sharpening settings:
Now what you may think is “you just made it bright!”
It took me 12 layers of careful adjustments to just make it bright (which is not all that I did, btw) while trying not to bring out pixels (impossible with a scene as dark as this one) while at the same time trying my best to keep it under the 2mb limit (over which you can’t upload your gif on tumblr or it won’t move), and trying not to whitewash Rhodey as I lighten everything else. Let me tell you, none of this is particularly easy. It’s not impossible, but it’s not something you learn in five minutes.
Here’s another example:
actual movie:
colour porn:
Now the point of this post is that I’m hoping that people will see and understand that there’s a lot of work and effort on our part to make these gifs, so that everyone can appreciate them. And yet we see that effort easily dismissed every day when our works are stolen and reposted and people have no qualms about rebloging them anyway, cause after all they’re just pretty pictures made with a computer, what’s the fuss.
It took me two years of almost daily practice to get where I’m at now (and I still have a lot to learn), and that kind of attitude hurts me as a person before it hurts me as a content maker.
Blocking reposters and spreading the word doesn’t help much if things like this keep happening and no one cares.
This website is mostly made of gifsets and graphics (that’s not to undermine the importance of art and fics, I’m just saying that you see more gifs and graphics and photos than those other kind of wonderful content) and it would be a dream come true to see a bit more respect and appreciation for our category.
Leave nice tags under someone’s gifset you really really liked. Tell them how much you loved how they used that particular song/quote on that particular character. How happy you are they’re making gifs about your favourite ship.
Encourage content makers, you’ll be rewarded with more content.
It’s been a few weeks stranded here in the next century and Mary Winchester can say that the food is better. Not the stuff the boys eat, but when Sam found out she was willing to try things, he started taking her for sushi (scary but great once she tried it) Indian (some things like butter chicken are incredible but some of the food she doesn’t really get) and good Italian (not just spaghetti and meatballs although nothing wrong with that.)
The rest? There is just too much. So there’s Netflix which sounds like heaven on earth but she finally writes down a list of steps because the menu is supposed to be intuitive but isn’t. The kitchen in the bunker is a weird mix of too old and microwave (she’s used a microwave, okay, but how is she supposed to know the weight of the hamburger patties she’s defrosting?) The clothes, which seem gratuitously ugly.
Her boys. She should feel instant love and connection but they’re two men. Sam probably weighs a hundred pounds more than she does. They’re hunters. They walk like hunters, they act like hunters, they drink like hunters. They’re strangers. They making joking references to television shows and movies she’s never seen. Dean’s room looks like a fourteen-year-old with access to way too many weapons lives there and Sam, like John, wouldn’t know a creature comfort if it bit him. They’re rough with each other emotionally. When they bicker, sometimes it’s like an old married couple but sometimes it’s with knives.
Seriously, she tries. She remembers that they think of her as a mother and so she mothers them as best she can. “You boys want lunch?” she calls.
They come into the kitchen, shy as deer. “Lunch?” Sam says, like the word is in Sumerian.
“Awesome,” Dean says. He’s as excited as a puppy, all shining eyes and adoration.
“We had that chicken last night,” Mary says. “I could make chicken salad sandwiches.”
Would it make a difference if she said ‘lobster’ or if she said ‘cardboard’? Let’s have champagne for lunch. Let’s have fried cockroaches.
The first time she swears, Dean looks startled. Sam doesn’t. Sam doesn’t seem to have any expectations which is as bad as all of Dean’s. She feels as if she’s losing herself in these two giant, damaged men’s needs. Part of her just wants to flee this ghastly place with no windows.
But she can’t. It’s her fault. She sold her baby to a demon. She set things in motion so huge. She misses John with a fierceness that makes her sob into her pillow each night. John is dead, John is dead, John is dead. And the photos of him, the memories the boys occasionally let spill–Dean grinning at Sam and saying, ‘Dad would have your hide,’ or Sam saying he likes to run, it was the one thing Dad made them do that he liked best–doesn’t sound like her John at all.
So she makes chicken salad sandwiches and iced tea (the boys will ignore it and drink beer and so will she but they like that she makes iced tea and Sam will drink it.) She puts her hand on Dean’s hair. Carefully touches Sam’s shoulder. The boys startle like combat vets half the time but then they look at her like she’s some sort of celestial being blessing them. So she smiles. She tries to act like their mom.
She is sure that she’ll love them. She loved her boys so much.
kototyph 