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.
Detroit-born Photographer Mark Laita explores social and cultural clashes between different social backgrounds by juxtaposing people of United States in his stunning series “Created Equal”.
i hate monopoly it is like some old white guy was sitting around and then thought to himself, what if we could make capitalism fun? well you tried and you failed dipshit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Monopoly it was actually created by a Georgist to illustrate the principle that rent makes landlords richer and tenants poorer. She designed it to be incredibly not fun, to show that if you don’t own property you experience an inevitable foreseeable slow dwindling of your resources until you eventually go bankrupt. She figured that through Monopoly people would be so bored and frustrated that they would understand how terrible the system of rent is
Then Parker Brothers patented it, mass-produced it, people bought it because people have terrible taste in games, and the original creator experienced an inevitable foreseeable slow dwindling of her resources until she died impoverished and obscure
society is a horrific parody of itself
No wonder this game makes me aggressive
Her name was Elizabeth Magie and her game was stolen by Charles Darrow.
Darrow went bankrupt after the 1929 Stock Market Crash, so when he saw his neighbors playing the game, he copied down the instructions, and published his own version of the game.
Then he sold it to the Parker Brothers who popularized the game. Darrow became a millionare within the year. Despite this, Hasboro currently lists him as the sole creator on their website.
Magie was amazing, and not just for her game. She liked to mock societal standards of the time through theater and even made national headlines mocking the institution of marriage. She supported herself until her mid 40s, proving that marriage was not the only option for women, before tying the knot herself.
Elizabeth Magie is attributed with this, “Girls have minds, desires, hopes, and ambitons.” Dont forget her name.
This is the saddest and most representative of the United States thing ever.
ancient roman 1: my dude what would you like to paint on the walls of our awesome house ancient roman 2: i dunno bro i was thinking that maybe we could get a fresco of that boner god weighing his erect dick against a bag of money ancient roman 1: that is exactly what i had in mind too bro let’s do it scholar: clearly this is the greatest civilization to walk the face of this earth
