#AND HE POINTED OUT THE H AND SAID ITS HIS INITIAL THATS EXACTLY WHY I BOUGHT IT FOR HIM 😭😭😭 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

asscandles · 4 years ago

Note

Hey thanks for clarifying before now can I have some friendship(maybe secret crush)headcanons for Fuyuhiko, Peko, and Toko with a friend(reader) thats llike your generic dumbass but they are just like a soft dumbass, they are just too cute to get mad at no matter how stupid they are. So basically a giant cuddly dumbass that just radiate baby energy. Like they(reader)just run up to them saying they want to show them something cool and its just a pretty rock but they look so happy. gender neutral.

ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ᴋɪɴᴅ ᴏꜰ ʟᴏɴɢ, ꜱᴏ ɪ ᴅᴇᴄɪᴅᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴘᴜᴛ ɪᴛ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴜᴛ. ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴡᴀꜱ ᴀ ʟᴏᴛ ᴏꜰ ꜰᴜɴ ᴛᴏ ᴡʀɪᴛᴇ, ꜱᴏ ɪ ʀᴇᴀʟʟʏ ʜᴏᴘᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴇɴᴊᴏʏ ɪᴛ! ʙᴜᴛ, ɪꜰ ɪᴛ ɪꜱɴ’ᴛ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ, ɪ’ᴍ ꜱᴏʀʀʏ!

ɪ ᴀʟꜱᴏ ꜰɪɴɪꜱʜᴇᴅ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴀᴛ 3:26 ᴀᴍ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛᴡᴏ ᴡᴇᴇᴋꜱ ʟᴀᴛᴇ, ɪ’ᴍ ᴀʟꜱᴏ ꜱᴏʀʀʏ ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ ᴛʜɪꜱ ꜱᴋᴀʟꜰꜰᴅᴊᴋꜰᴀʟ

ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢꜱ: ʟᴀɴɢᴜᴀɢᴇ

Peko Pekoyama

��I--What are you doing?”

You stand on the counter, arms extended straight out at your sides. You continue staring ahead with an expressionless face. “I see no god up here… other than me!”

Peko sighs, and you immediately look down at her with round eyes. “Oh, but you’ll always be my queen, Peko! I want you by my side forever!”

Since Peko is always wielding/cleaning her sword, you carry around pastel-colored bandaids and a small first-aid kit in your backpack.

You’re usually by her side, so your absence is always noticed quickly, if not immediately.

You once fell asleep somewhere you shouldn’t have, leaving Peko to ravage the island, searching every nook and cranny until she finally found you curled up in a corner of the airport. All she could do was sigh and crack a tiny, relieved smile. She transfers her sword to her hands before easing you onto her back. Her heart swells when you mumble something and wrap your arms around her neck. All the way back to your cottage, she chides you quietly.

“It’s not safe to be so vulnerable out here. If you’re going to fall asleep out here, do it while I’m with you. Then, you can sleep as soundly as you want.”

M A T C H I N G B R A C E L E T S

You excitedly gave Peko a card to celebrate the anniversary of your friendship. Peko snorted upon seeing that all of the drawings inside were either stick figures or poorly colored. But you just looked so happy… she couldn’t even bring herself to tease you about it.

You both refuse to speak of this, but one night, Peko woke up to the flickering of a faint light and feverish whispering. She had switched into attack mode in a fraction of a second, only to stop dead in her tracks. You had been standing in the middle of the room, doing the renegade by the light of your phone. You froze upon her reaction. Both of you sat there, staring at each other for a solid twelve seconds. You then proceeded to finish the dance, looking her dead in the eye. Peko may have be tired, but she’d be damned if she let you do it alone. So, she does it while standing on her bed, but clearly lacking energy and motivation.

Ambushing Peko with affection is not uncommon for you. It happens rather often, you clinging to her waist and pleading with her, “Hey, tell me that story again! You know, the one where Fuyuhiko was being held captive and you swooped in with your sword and saved the day!”

When you found out that Peko loved fluffy things, you were ecstatic. You bundled her into your cottage immediately, showing off a small collection of stuffed animals that you had managed to cram into your backpack before your arrival at the island.

Peko selects a white cat plushie as her favorite. From that point on, it is your child. No arguments.

You tend to get lost, so Peko sarcastically suggested tying a balloon to your wrist so that you would be easier to find. But, you totally caught her off guard when your eyes began to sparkle and you shouted, “Can I pick the color?” When she doesn’t answer immediately, you grab her hands and hold them close to your own chest endearingly. “Pretty please? With marshmallows and cookie crumble and whipped cream and sprinkles on top?” Peko obliges. When the balloon is finally secured around your wrist, you are absolutely fascinated by it.

You often fawn over Peko’s skills; but when you do, you use interjections and sound effects because you aren’t able to convey your excitement with just words.

Okay, but she’s actually worried about you lmao

“You have… a lot of mosquito bites. What happened?”

“What? They’re not bites! They were giving me kisses, silly!”

You’ve tried multiple times to surprise her with tickle attacks, but they never work. The only time it went according to plan, you managed to get your hands on her for exactly 0.7 seconds before she turned the tables on you.

Platonic dates? Platonic dates.

You’ve 100% made her flower crowns whose petals match the color of her eyes.

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu

“So… I saw some sour candy in the supermarket. If you lend me the money, I’ll give you half of the rocks I found.” :)

“Considering the fact that you get an adrenaline rush from successfully flipping a pancake, a single piece would kill you immediately.”

Everyone who discovers you two are friends is immediately suspicious. When I say suspicious, I mean, “(Reader), whatever blackmail he’s holding over your head, you don’t have to be scared. We can take care of this together.”

But after witnessing a few of your interactions, they learn of one irrefutable fact.

The embodiment of rage and vulgarity bottled up in human skin does indeed have a weakness.

And that weakness is you.

It didn’t take long for Fuyuhiko to become aware of your appreciation for stickers and your tender heart. That being said, when you’re upset, he won’t object too severely when you request to smooth stickers all over him. He would prefer to keep this interaction private, but if someone does happen to catch him with giraffe stickers on his cheeks and rainbows on his jacket, then he’s going to wear them proudly, goddamnit.

And if anyone has anything rude to say about it, then I hope they can speak sign language, because all they’ll be seeing is hands.

You’re aware of his insecurities, and you can understand why he feels the way that he does. But that’s where you come in. You always seem to approach him at the right moments.

By now, you’ve figured out that he doesn’t always need words to reassure him. It’s enough if you’re just there, ready with open arms and a glass of water. Fuyuhiko doesn’t cry often. But when he does, he ends up dehydrated more often than not.

Let’s be honest. After Fuyuhiko lost his eye, his depth perception was most likely shit. You were always at his side, one hand on his arm as you gently guided him from room to room. You watched over him.

Accidentally knocking over a drink? You were ready to wipe it up. Searching for something he lost? You were there, helping him look. Tripping or bumping into things? You were there with a first aid kit to patch him up.

You try to match his level of sass, but you’re highkey too nervous to swear and you usually stutter the last word of whatever witty comeback you manage to come up with. Fuyuhiko secretly thinks it’s adorable, and he doesn’t want you to lose that part of yourself. That’s why he always defends you when it comes to verbal beatdowns.

You once drew a face on an egg, and when Fuyuhiko questioned you about it, the only thing you could offer was a deadpan “our son.”

“What the hell--that’s an egg.”

“No! His name is Linguini and he’s our child!”

Fuyuhiko is exhausted bro.

You’ve approached him countless times, eyes glowing with awe and insisting that you need to show him something really cool. It’s usually just a rock or a piece of glass, though. He always has the urge to poke fun at you for it, but it fizzles away when he sees how utterly bewitched you are with your find.

One time, he had walked into the room to see you standing on the arms of an office swivel chair, knees bent and arms extended as you fought to maintain your balance. You seemed to be fairly steady.

Still, that didn’t prevent him from nearly falling into cardiac arrest on the spot.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

It had startled you, and the chair rolled out from underneath you. Fuyuhiko rushed to catch you. You both tumbled to the floor in a knot of limbs, lying there in varying degrees of pain. You were laughing. Fuyuhiko was absolutely most fucking not.

“Thanks for breaking my fall!” You had chirped, gesturing to the arm lodged under the small of your back to protect it.

“You little--” Fuyuhiko’s voice had been strained, but his tight-lipped grimace dissolved into a sigh at the sight of your smile. He disentangled himself from you and pressed the pad of his index finger into your forehead. Your lips formed a small “o” shape, your eyes crossing to try to keep track of his finger. “You need to be more careful from now on. I won’t always be here to catch you.”

“But, you’ll still patch me up afterward, right?” You poked his forehead back.

He huffed and pulled away from you. “To the best of my ability. But don’t push it.”

Toko Fukawa

Initially, the only reason that Toko set aside her natural distrust and suspicion of people in order to befriend you was because she thought that you were simply too innocent and simple-minded to ever think badly of a friend.

She thought that having such a sweetheart glued to her side would disperse her dubious reputation and make her seem less suspicious during class trials.

Yep… That’s the only reason she keeps you around...

Not because of the way her heart feels all fuzzy when you embrace her… Or because of how your eyes sparkle whenever she offers to let you read one of her new works… Or because of how relaxed she feels when you weave her hair into intricate braids…

Not at all…

Hahahashutuphahaha…

She often scolds you for being such a pushover when people disrespect you, but she means well. You insist that it doesn’t bother you, but she’s an expert on human emotion. She is a writer, after all. She knows that it haunts your thoughts for a while afterward, and she hates seeing you like that.

You’ve noticed that Toko bites her nails when she’s stressed, so you’ve decided to combat her habit by applying nail polish to her nails. That way, you figure, the taste of the nail polish will deter her from tearing at them with her teeth. She also has the option of picking off the nail polish, which is probably less harmful than chewing on them.

You also kinda sorta... believe that video game cheat codes work in real life, so you’re often moving around and jumping, shouting the combinations as you go.

“Right! Right! Left! Up! Left! Down! Right! X! Y! Now, confess your sins!” You command during a class trial, pointing vaguely toward the accused. Toko just quietly shushes you, dark circles rimming her eyes as she pats your head.

You’ve adopted the habit of narrating the things you do, like whispering “wiggle, wiggle, wiggle” when sliding your feet into your shoes and “shimmy, shimmy, shimmy” when slipping your charm bracelet past your hand onto your wrist. Coincidentally, Toko has also subconsciously started doing the same thing, and she cannot think of anything more irritating.

She once jokingly told you to stop being so dependent on her. You promptly flushed scarlet and snatched the box she had been carrying out of her hands, insisting that you were more than capable of taking it to storage yourself. You had marched indignantly out of the room and headed left, only for Toko to call out, “Uh, storage is the other way.”

You reappeared a moment later, now stomping in the opposite direction. “I knew that!” You huffed.

You’re aware of Genocide Jack, but you aren’t afraid. You whole-heartedly trust that your friendship is enough to outmatch Genocide Jack’s bloodlust, as naive as it may be. Your only response to Toko’s confession of having a split personality is to gift her a cherry-flavored lip balm with a bright smile. At first, Toko is confused. You explain that whenever Genocide Jack makes an appearance, their tongue is always lolling out of their mouth. You’re concerned that their lips will get dried out, and you want to do your best to prevent it.

Did Toko’s heart just burst? Maybe.

Toko shares her romance novels with you, but only the ones without sexual interactions. She believes that you’re far too pure for those. Plus, she would really not rather answer your questions about anything of that nature.

Toko is determined to preserve your purity. She’s very protective whenever someone shows the slightest bit of sexual or romantic interest in you, and has even referred to you as her baby before.

Whenever Toko gets insecure or anxious and covers her face with her hands, you gently remove them from her face with a soft giggle of “Peekaboo!” Toko doesn’t fight you as you carefully pull her into your arms and rest her head against your chest. In fact, she finds herself surprisingly close to tears when you inquire, “Hey, you want to hear a lullaby? I can’t remember who sang it to me first, but it always helps me calm down. So, I want to share it with you!”

There will be times when Toko is too busy writing stories to pay you any attention. But no matter! After a moment of consideration, you have an idea. You gather blankets and pillows and settle onto the floor beside Toko’s seat. Your arms loop themselves around her leg, and your head finds its way onto her thigh. It isn’t long before you doze off, Toko watching you in silent shock, face rosy with bashfulness and eyes wide.

Toko is very adamant about covering up her legs due to both the tally marks scored across her skin and the quote-on-quote “sturdiness” of her thighs. You, however, have an entirely different outlook. You reason, “the bigger your thighs, the more snacks you can hide under them!”

#danganronpa #danganronpa headcanons #danganronpa imagines #danganronpa scenarios #toko fukawa #danganronpa toko #trigger happy havoc #danganronpa fuyuhiko #danganronpa fukawa #danganronpa peko #peko pekoyama #toko fuwaka #fuyuhiko x reader #fuyuhiko headcanons #fuyuhiko kuzuryu x reader

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the-scooby-gang · 5 years ago

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The school body of Coolsville High valorised their lives. That’s why any thought they had on the Heathers was said outside the school grounds. Far away from The Red Heathers ears and listeners . Not that helps any. They somehow still know of your slight agains them, there being one or not.

One of the topics whispered between the walls of the malt shop was a highly debated one: The Red Heathers didn't deserve a friend like Norville Heather Rogers

Fiercely loyal and surprisingly friendly, seen who his best friends were, Norville “Like, call me Shaggy” Rogers didn't have any of the characteristics of someone everyone assumed would mingle with Fred and Daphne. In fact, when he had first arrived on the school, freshly transferred from some place in California, with a historic of anxiety and panic attacks, many pitied him.

“Poor Kid” they said “The Heathers will ate him alive”

“How long do you think it will take for him to cry?”

“I give him a week”

“You are being optimistic. By lunch time, one of the traps will traumatise him beyond words. I give two days before he asks for a new transference”

But it never came to be.

No one is quite sure what Fred Jones saw in the new kid, but the attack on the easy target never came. Instead, both Daphne and Fred sat down with him at lunch. Made conversation, asked to show him around. Becoming... friends.

For many weeks, everyone held their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the lanky kid to appear glued to the flagpole, without his pants, in tears.

But the days passed and no nefarious deeds were committed against one Shaggy Rogers.

Many were confused.

Why?

The Heathers never made, what Daphne use to call, ‘Bad investments’ in regards of who they hang around with. What, exactly, tall, lanky Shaggy Rogers could offer to them, outside having the middle name Heather?

Some theorised it was because his family was loaded, they sell engagement rings after all.

Some said that they wanted to capitalise on the fact that, anxiety aside, he was the lead in the track team and was one one the best gymnast of Coolsville (with was a terrifying notion: someone with such physical prowess under Daphne and Fred’s command would have no problem climbing walls and roofs and planting god knows what kind of trap in there. Out of sight, out of reach)

Some thought it was because of the Giant Great Dane that followed the boy around. A service dog, Scooby Doo was as fiercely loyal as Shaggy himself and when, rarely, he wasn't with his owner, you could see the dog casually trotting side by side with the King or the Queen.

Having a dog the size of a small pony just added to their image of “Don't fuck with us.”

But the truth appeared one month later.

Already stablished as “A Heather”, Shaggy had developed a new found confidence. With his posture straight and a new fondness for yellow.

(”Like, Daph, you and Freddie have, like, your color. And since green is already taken I was thinking, I don't know, yellow?? What do you think?”

“That’s a marvellous idea, Shaggy! You know what? We should go shopping after class, so I can help you”

“Thanks, Daph”

“Don't sweat over it, sweetie. That’s is what friends are for”)

Shaggy Rogers and Scooby were just walking down the hallway. Radiating friendliness as per usual. Until they weren't.

No one remember their names. The only thing everyone remembers about them was that they were both new transfer students. A tall blond cheerleader wannabe and a small jock.

They were new, poor things. They didn't know about the status quo. They didn't know to bend the knee to the King and Queen. For any new arrivals, the way how the school worked was shoved down their throats by the ever looming presence of the Heathers power, but during Shaggy “initiation” as one of them they had been quiet. Non-threatening. Normal teens even.

With had put the school in a state of unease.

But the fools, unimaginably tremendous fools, didn't see it. The warning on the faces of their fellow students that something was not right. They were new, and as such didn't know the rule they were about to break.

They insulted Daphne.

A comment on her blazer. The way she made her hair. How all the red mixed with her hair makes her look like a giant tomato. How that shade of lipstick made she look like a slut....

The Red Heathers had not yet arrived, but the students on the hearing radium on the conversation freeze. They may not be here, but they will know.

They always know.

The foolish idiots keep on laughing, not noticing that the entire hallway is now deadly quiet. Picturing their coffins most likely. No one notices Shaggy smile disappear or see the boy approach the laughing duo.

Shaggy’s first against the locker, barely missing the jock, wreaked that spell.

“You will watch that dirty. whore. mouth of yours when talking about my friend, or I will personally sew it shut”

He had barely whispered, but on the silence corridor it sound like a shout. They did a double take. Some gave a triple take just to be sure. The Shaggy they have come to know barely swore, much less threaten someone.

But this was not Shaggy. The man in yellow is now unrecognisable from Shaggy and his cheerful eyes.

His eyes were now cold and piercing. He stood tall, smirking gleefully when noticing that his 6,7f frame loomed over his targets. Even the energy around him seemed to change. Friendliness stepped aside to be replaced by Fear.

This was also a common topic in the relative safety of the malt shop: How reality seemed slightly distorted depending how Shaggy was felling that day. Some kids went as far as say that maybe that's was why Fred and Daphne became his friends. His reality bending powers must have made it so, they say, thats why when he is being friendly, we feel joyful in his presence, they say. That when he is mad, you are bombarded by fear.

The cheerleader was paralysed. She was plastered against her locker, trying to look as small and as unthreatening as possible. Her jock friend, however, in a moment of panic maybe, tried to punch his way out of the situation. Just for Shaggy to dodge the first like it was nothing. In a fraction of a second he grabbed the wrist of his smaller target and twisted his arm behind his back, shoving him face first against the locker.

“When I talk to you, I want a verbal answer. Or are you too stupid to figure that out?” Shaggy now demanded, his voice level, but not less frigid. “Now, where was I... Oh, yes. You and Misses failed abortion face here were laughing about my friend, wasn't it?” he asked, turning his face to look at the cowering girl, who was doing her damnedest to fuse herself with the metal, but still keeping her friend pined against the lockers like a misbehaving portrait.

“You,” Shaggy said, glaring at the girl so intensely they expected her to die by its force alone “Daphne warned me about people like you.” He turned his face back to the jock with a look of disgust before effortlessly throwing him over her lake a sad sack of potatoes “She told me about the slander. About the jokes behind her and Fred’s back. How pathetic little sacks like you two have your life mission to make them miserable” with each word Rogers was getting more frigid, if that's was even possible, while everyone else looked in disbelieve when the pieces of the plan laid right in front of them, finally clear.

“You. absolute. pieces. of. jealous. shit can't see someone that seems slightly better than you that you want to drag them all over the mud isn't it?” he was shaking right now. Scoob, that had been by his side the entire ordeal, got closer to his owner. A silent support. “Just because they are rich, you think their life is a barrel of rainbows, that they don't suffer at all. That you can say your mean words all you want that Perfect and Rich Daphne and Fred will be unaffected”

His voice was breaking, he was clearly on the verge of tears. But if you looked at his face alone, you would think it was made of stone. Scooby at that point, cleaver boy that he was, accessed the situation and started to growl at the two dumbfound pair on the ground, clearly deducing that they were the cause of his friends distress. Both pressed themselves harder against the wall, now with a pissed Great Dane looming over them

“So guess what? They may be more forgiving than any of you disgusting toads deserve, but while I'm still fucking breathing no one, AND I MEAN NO ONE IS GOING TO SPEAK ANY SORT OF BULLSHIT ABOUT MY FRIENDS! IS. THAT. CLEAR?”

“What is happening here?”

The sea of spectators of the passionate declaration of loyalty parted to show Daphne, her hands on her hips, with Fred right behind.

Her face, however, didn't have her normal mythic bitchness, but a look of, what appeared to be, concern.

That was when Coolsville High remembered a crucial fact about the Heathers, one they should have not so easily forgot: They were liars. Really.Good. LIARS.

Shaggy’s posture immediately relaxed and he went in long strides in her direction, engulfing her in a hug.

“I’m sorry I doubted you.” he was now crying on her shoulder, his sobs heart breaking “I'm so sorry. I... I thought that they count possibly be so... so cruel to you guys without... without motive” He looked up from his place in Daphne shoulder to look at Fred, them let go of her and went in his direction, now taking him in his embrace. While Fred soothed Shaggy with one hand in his hair, pressing his crying friends face to his red ascot, blocking his view from his surroundings, Daphne put her hand on his back and started slow circular motions.

What, in any other circumstance, would have being quite a sweet moment between friends was broken by the fact that, the moment Shaggy’s face was out of sight, Daphne and Fred’s concerned looks melted away to looks of devilish delight, and the student body now felt a new dread in their souls.

“Don’t worry, Shag.” Fred’s voice was way too soft for the look on his face “We are used to it. It hurts... yes, yes it does, but me and Daph are strong. We can deal with it”

“But you shouldn't have to” Shaggy removed his tear stained face, once again hardened to stone, from Fred’s neck “Sorry for the ascot” he looked miserably to the tear spots on the fabric. Fred’s face once again melted away in a new expressions never seen in his face: A soft smile the recked of compassion.

“It is just an ascot, Shaggy”

That was the confirmation that it was all a very elaborate lie. It was not just an ascot. It was a symbol. The unofficial crown of the King of Coolsville High, together with Daphne’s Red Scrunchie.

Shaggy remove himself from the embrace with Fred and side glanced at the forgotten targets, silently trying to scape since the focus was no longer on them. Shaggy squinted his eyes. That won't do.

Shaggy gave a sharp whistle. Scooby, who had calmed down when the Heathers arrived, decide to lie down, close his eyes and relax a little from his exertion but keep his ears ready for any commotion, was up again in a second. Looking at his owner once again distressed face, Scooby was confused. Didn’t the Red ones arrived already? Looking in question to their faces, once again, in seconds, Daphne and Fred’s faces melted away to new expressions. This ones there were fairly used to. After all they saw it every day in their victims faces: despair.

His humans were in despair. Looking around for the reason, he saw the two threats from before moving away. With a growl of anger, Scooby advanced after them.

It was fascinating, seeing the large dog run, jump and pin down two grow teenagers with relative ease. It was terrifying seeing said teenagers being dragged by their ankles in on only, painful looking, bite. They were throwed like rag-dolls at the Heathers feet, all three of them now truly looking like a complete set. The yellow just seemed to fit in in middle of the red.

“Like, you think I'm done with you? No. You idiots are my example. SO THIS IS FOR EVERYONE TO KNOW. DON’T. FUCKING. MESS. WITH. MY FRIENDS” He glared at the crowd, like he suspected that all of them were guilty of the crime of bulling “poor Fred and Daphne”. Knowing Daphne, that was probably what she told him. With that remark, he grabbed the duo by their bloody ankles, making them both let out a whimper that was immediately silenced by one glare. And he dragged them like they weighted nothing thru the corridor, with the crowd opening up once again, going without stop to the back doors.

The Red Heathers simply smiled like Cheshire cats, and, arm in arm, followed their loyal yellow friend.

They were never seen again, that duo. Some think that they were killed. Buried in unmarked graves just outside of town. Others think that the so much theorised cryptid abilities must have scared them into a new country.

Never the less, the message was clear. Even if Shaggy had gone back to exude joy by his presence alone, with Scooby being a cute pup right beside him. There was always going to be there, just under the surface, that fear. The knowledge that Shaggy was fiercely protective to the point of ruthlessness. That the joy in his eyes could so easily turn into ice.

So Coolsville High learned to fear once again.

Now they feared Daphne’s crocodile tears. Fred’s well crafted defeated looks.

For Daphne and Fred had seen in Shaggy what others didn't. In he’s first day, many have seen an easy target. Someone easy to break.

The King and Queen, however, had seen a Knight and his Dog. Stronger than what first appearances told. Honour bound and loyal. And so, so easy to train.

#scooby gang #scooby doo #scooby!heathersAU #fred jones #daphne blake #shaggy rogers #yellow lantern shaggy #wizard shaggy #a little bit of both #mixed together #Shaggy is always friend shape no matter with universe we are talking about #and that can be exploited #Daphne and Fred are turning into royal bastards the more I write this au #now I will stop tipping because my wrist is starting to hurt

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jareththegoblinpeasant · 4 years ago

Text

Alone in Stark Tower

Another day in Stark Tower. Boring. And lonely. Loki wasn't too hopeful; he was upset because while everyone else was out doing cool things for approximately a week, you had the great honor of babysitting duty.

You had hope for this boring day, however. Loki seemed to be in an alright mood, so you decided you would ask him a question.

Loki sat on his bed, reading a book contently. He heard a faint and almost timid knock on his door. "Come in." He responded gently.

His voice is deceiving, you reminded yourself. As you opened the door, your once found confidence faded away. Loki had to refrain from laughing at you; you looked so scared by a man just reading.

"Can I help you?" Loki asked as you closed his door.

You opened your mouth but no sound came out.

Loki looked at you over the pages of his book. "Y/N?"

You eventually found your words. "I- is it good? Y- your book?"

Loki hid a smile behind his book. "Yes, its quite entertaining."

You nodded, your gaze shifting to your miss matched socks. "Loki?" You voiced after a moment.

"Yes?"

You couldn't back down now. Loki wasn't trying to kill anyone and he wasn't enraged. "Ha- have you ever, um, you know what, nevermind. Sorry for bothering you." You turned to leave, but Loki blocked your path, giving you a start.

You gasped and he smirked. "You had a question for me?"

You loved his way of saying normal things but somehow turning them into a tease. It gave you butterflies but not in a romantic way, more so a playful way.

"Have I ever..." He started you off.

You sighed. "Had a play fight... Before?" You bit the inside of your cheek, suddenly overly-timid, your cheeks flushing red. You didn't know why this happened whenever you asked someone about themselves.

Loki stared down at you. "Have I ever had a play fight? Y/N, I have a brother." He chuckled.

"Right, just wondered." You nodded, showing you were ready to leave.

Loki ignored this. "Is it a war you're wanting, Y/N?" He knew how easily you turned pink and was relentless using this power against you. Loki smirked with a playful glint in his blue eyes. "Because if that's what you are wanting," He stepped away from the door, "You shall receive."

Loki knew how you liked play fights to go. He observed you and Peter almost everyday fighting each other and the banter between you.

Why is he always using that teasing tone with me, you wondered. He knows how it makes me feel...

While you were lost in your thoughts, Loki had placed a marker in his book and set it aside. He snuck up behind you and lifted you in the air and away from the black hole that was your mind.

You shrieked, not expecting him to initiate the battle, or that quickly. Loki laughed and tossed you on the bed, straddling you. "The least you could do is fight back, Y/N. Shy today, aren't we?" His voice dripping with playfulness.

You looked up into his eyes and, unwillingly, a smile accompanied your stare.

"Leaving it to me then, hm? I suppose I'll start." Loki's eyes shone with some devious plan no amount of staring could decode.

You felt yourself being flipped over swiftly and your hands held behind your back. "I've got you stuck now, Y/N. You best fight back." Loki sang.

You quickly tried to steal one of your hands away, but Loki was too strong. He just laughed again. "I suppose you can have your hands returned."

You took this as him giving up. As soon as you were back in control of your hands, you rolled over underneath Loki and grabbed his hands. You held them above your head. "Sounded like you were giving up for a moment." You said.

"Y/N, Y/N, I never surrender. I thought you knew that." Loki's eyebrow lifted slightly, causing you to blush again.

You saw Loki was only properly kneeling on one knee, so you grabbed his ankle that was planted by you and yanked it, causing him to fall on top of you. You pushed him off the bed using your legs, one of which he grabbed onto, forcing you on the floor with him.

You both landed in a position to form a cross, Loki underneath. He did not like being forced into submission. Loki planted his hand on your back and rolled you off of him. He was now on top.

"As it should be, me in control." Loki teased.

You wrapped yourself around one of his long legs and snaked your other leg around his other leg, immobilizing him.

"What do you say, Y/N? Im not so bad, now am I?" He rested his hand on the floor next to your side. "Now, to become the Soldier."

Your eyes widened in fear. Loki did not seem like the type of person to ever play like Steve.

Steve liked making you laugh when you warred. Countless times he had brought you to tears.

"Don't think I don't see your little fights, Y/N, I know exactly what you like." Loki hissed in your ear. Without warning, the hand a laid on the floor was placed on your side. You tensed immediately.

"Thats right, Y/N. Loki knows all." He smirked at your reaction. He suddenly picked you up again, flinging you onto his bed once more.

Loki quickly grabbed your wrists in one hand and held them above your head. Some spell suddenly held then together and weighed them down.

"You used magic, not fair!" You whined. Loki brought his hand onto your chest and hushed you.

"Its too late to establish rules, Y/N." Loki said. "Now, I do remember countless times when Captain poked your tummy," He half-whispered, "and other time he dragged his finger down your foot." He was relentless with the teasing. You began to turn red again.

"Why are you red? Afraid I'll know your secret? Or is it because you love the playful banter?" Loki smirked again.

Without warning, Loki drove his hand behind your ears, stroking ever so slightly. You giggled. "You can do better than that, Y/N." He teased.

"What happens if I tickle you here?" Loki asked, dropping his hands gently onto your armpit. He began to stroke the sensitive skin with his sharp nails, causing you to erupt into a small flood of laughter. "Good, Y/N, don't fight it and I may go easy on you." Loki said.

You thought for a moment. What if I don't want him to go easy on me? You clammed your mouth shut, revealing your decision.

"Alright then." Loki poked your tummy, earning a snrk from you. He liked this. He kept poking you all over untill you were howling. "Thats what I like to see." He said, hopping off of you and kneeling by the bedside.

Your eyes widened again. "Plehease Loki, nohoho!" You were still laughing from the tingly feeling that remained.

"Oh I think yes, Y/N. You love when the man of steel and the archer give these to you, why not me?" Loki slowly lifted your shirt, skittering his cold fingers across your exposed stomach, making you laugh loudly.

Loki blew gently on what he knew as your weak point and his fingers didn't stop either. You would not admit it to anyone, especially not the God of Mischief, but you didn't want it to stop. But eventually, all good things must come to an end.

Loki halted his fingers and breathe, and let you catch your breath. "Are you ready, Y/N?" He asked devilishly. You violently shook your head no. "Aw, too bad." Loki blew little baby raspberries all over your stomach and sides.

"I never knew it would come down to this, Y/N. I knew you were ticklish, but my goodness." Loki teased, planting a tiny raspberry on your usually immune neck. You screeched with laughter, and even Loki chuckled a little.

"You've had just about enough, Y/N. Ready?" Loki steadied his lips right above your belly button.

You screamed with laughter, alerting the Avengers as they stepped through the front door.

Loki stood up swiftly and removed the weight spell, teleporting onto his bed and continued his book. "You're all back early."

"What did you to Y/N?" Peter asked, slowly approaching you as you curled into a ball on Loki's bed.

"I'm not sure. Why don't you ask her?" Loki suggested.

"H-he tihihickled mehehe!" You exclaimed, reaching for Peter. "He tried to be like Steve when we fight!"

"Loki, explain what she means." Steve demanded.

"With pleasure." Loki transformed the room to how it was about 45 minutes ago, when you asked for a play fight. The group watched as Loki and Y/N played together. Tony smiled as he heard your laugh. Thor looked kindly at his brother.

"We'll have to include in wars more often." Clint commented as he watched Y/N getting red and fighting Loki back.

"Nohohoho!" You cried. Loki spidered your ribs while the others weren't looking. He smirked to himself.

Maybe Loki wasn't so bad with others after all.

#loki x reader

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relationshipadviser-blog · 5 years ago

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Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

New Post has been published on https://relationshipqia.com/must-see/is-sex-the-answer-to-your-relationship-woes/

Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

Michele Weiner-Davis, the marriage-guidance counsellor, explains why she thinks having sex even if you dont feel like it is the foundation of a happy relationship

Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

Sex

Inner life

Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

Michele Weiner-Davis, the marriage-guidance counsellor, explains why she thinks having sex even if you dont feel like it is the foundation of a happy relationship

Amelia Hill

@byameliahill

Sun 21 Jan 2018 01.00EST Last modified on Sun 21 Jan 2018 09.52EST

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Just Do It. Your partner will be grateful, happier and therefore nicer, too, says Michele Weiner-Davis. Illustration: Andrea De Santis/Observer

How does it make you feel when your partner is cold and distant? Or when theyre critical and prickly? Does it make you want to rip their clothes off, order in a vat of whipped cream and install a chandelier to swing from?

No? Well theres your problem according, at least, to Michele Weiner-Davis, the marriage-guidance counsellor whose Ted talk explaining her unconventional advice to warring couples has been viewed almost 3.5 million times online.

Her advice couldnt be simpler: shag. Do it even if you dont want to, do it especially if you dont want to and, most important of all, do it frequently whether you want to or not. To make it even clearer, shes borrowed one of the most famous advertising slogans of recent times: Just Do It. Your partner will be grateful, happier and therefore nicer, too, she explains from her clinic in Colorado. Its a win-win situation for both of you!

Weiner-Daviss self-confessed zealotry for marriage has its roots in the moment her mother blew her teenage world apart by announcing that her seemingly perfect marriage had been a sham for its 23-year duration. She was 16 at the time, and says she wasnt the only one who didnt recover from the bombshell: her mother never remarried and her two sons rarely speak to her.

The experience, says Weiner-Davis who states that her greatest achievement is her own 40-year marriage was transformative. She became a staunch believer in the fact that most divorces can be prevented; that the relief of a post-divorce life is temporary but the pain of divorce is permanent; and that if couples put enough work into staying together, they can fall back in love and live happily ever after.

Over the years, Weiner-Davis has honed her message. Shes now stripped it back to what she believes is the essence of a successful marriage. Gone is any therapeutic consideration of a couples history; of their emotional travails; of cause and consequence. Now she is entirely one-track minded: no matter how appalling the state of a marriage, she believes that kind, generous and frequent sex can bring it back from the teetering edge of collapse.

Her realisation was hard-won. For decades, I was in the trenches with warring couples, she says. But there were times when I was not too effective. I realised that there was a pattern to the times Id failed. There was always one spouse desperately hoping for more touch and because that was not happening, they were not investing themselves in the relationship in other ways.

Weiner-Davis stopped focussing on the couples difficulties from an emotional angle and addressed them exclusively as sexual problems. that when the so-called low-desire partner who is, she is at pains to emphasise, just as likely to be a man or a woman was encouraged to have sex they didnt particularly want, not only did they end up enjoying themselves but the high-desire partner became a much nicer person to be around.

I heard the same story from my clients so often that I did some research, she said, and found several different sex researchers who confirmed what I was finding: that for millions of people, they have to be physically stimulated before they feel desire.

Armed with this new theory, Weiner-Davis began encouraging her low-desire clients to be receptive to the sexual advances of their high-desire spouse, even if they werent feeling up for it. I found that unless there was something a lot more complicated going on, she insists, there were usually substantial relationship benefits to making love with your high-desire partner.

She rejects any suggestion that shes advocating a sexually subservient, anti-feminist, lie back and think of England approach. In fact, she says this is the embodiment of female empowerment.

Its not just telling women to spread their legs, she insists. This is not just about sex. For a high-desire spouse, sex isnt usually about the orgasm: its about someone wanting to feel that their partner desires and wants them. Im hoping that women will feel empowered that they are getting their own needs met through understanding their partner.

No still means no, she says. But it helps to not just say no. Instead, explain why you dont want to make love, suggest a later date and ask whether theres something you can do for your spouse right now instead. But heres the deal, she adds: There had better be a whole more Yess or Laters than Nos because if the Nos win, it leads to the problems I have been talking about.

Weiner-Davis points out that while its commonly accepted that couples should make all their important family decisions together, when it comes to sex, who ever has the lower sex drive makes a unilateral choice for them both. And, just to rub salt in the wound, she adds, the disenfranchised, high-desire one is expected to stay monogamous. No wonder, she says, they get cross.

I mention Weiner-Daviss theory to some female friends of mine. The overriding response is: Oh God, not another thing for my To Do list! Weiner-Davis is quick to condemn this response. Imagine if, when a woman said she wanted to have more intimate conversations or a date night, her husband said: Its just one more thing on my To Do list! For a high-desire spouse who experiences love through touch instead of quality time, its exactly the same impact. Ive had grown men crying in my office, crying about the sense of rejection they feel from their low-desire wives.

I then regale her with the experience of a friend whose husband had started his own business which quickly went catastrophically wrong. The family finances were in peril and he couldnt cope. His wife stepped in. Alongside her own job and while juggling the childcare, she worked late into the night for weeks to stabilise their security. During this time, she was scrupulous in not blaming her husband, either explicitly or implicitly.

With crisis narrowly averted, the stressed and sleep-deprived wife realised her husband was being snippy and sulky. When she asked what was wrong, he exclaimed: We havent had sex for weeks! Surely, I ask Weiner-Davis, this shows that not all demands for sex should be met with her Just Do It ethos.

Not at all, she says. This woman knew his ego needed to be protected and tried to do that by not blaming him for his mistakes. But it sounds like the bigger statement for him was: Am I still a man and do you still desire me?

But its the selfish, uncontrolled behaviour of a spoilt child, I insist. Weiner-Davis doesnt disagree. Women often say that they feel they have three children instead of two children and a husband, she admits. But the fact that this husband was telling his wife what he was feeling sad about is a really good sign: some people throw in the towel.

Is the deal explicit, I ask, does the low-desire one say: OK, well make love more often, but then you have to turn your iPhone off every once in a while so we can actually talk?

Yes and no, Weiner-Davis says. This isnt about keeping score. Relationships are not 50:50. Theyre 100:100. We have to take responsibility for doing everything that it takes to put the relationship on track even if youre not getting the response you want initially. Thats really hard.

Its about asking yourself, she says, when he or she speaks and acts badly, whether its because you have not had sex for four weeks. Is their anger actually about feeling hurt and rejected? If it is, the low-desire spouse needs to be more sexy even though they will not want to do this. And the other one needs to ask themselves when the last time the couple spent quality time together.

On the other hand, Weiner-Davis admits there is a limit. Id say that after several weeks, if nothing has changed in terms of reciprocity, then the couple do need to sit down and identify whats missing in their relationship for each of them and what they would like to have.

Michele Weiner-Daviss cure for a sex-starved marriage

If you have a low sex drive try to adopt the Nike philosophy and Just Do It!, even if you feel neutral towards having sex at that moment.

If youre the one with a high sex drive, try to discover the way your partner wants to receive love. Its typically through quality time, words of affirmation, thoughtful, practical acts of caring and material gifts.

If you dont want sex at a particular moment, explain why and suggest another specific time – and ask whether you can do something else physical at that moment for your partner instead.

If you have a higher sex drive than your partner, try to empathise with them and accept they might never want wild or creative sex, but see the increased level of intercourse as a gift showing their love.

Remember theres no daily or weekly minimum to ensure a healthy sex life. As a couple you need to work out together what works for you.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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mysteriouslyzealouspandalov-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

New Post has been published on https://relationshipguideto.com/must-see/is-sex-the-answer-to-your-relationship-woes/

Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

Michele Weiner-Davis, the marriage-guidance counsellor, explains why she thinks having sex even if you dont feel like it is the foundation of a happy relationship

Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

Sex

Inner life

Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

Michele Weiner-Davis, the marriage-guidance counsellor, explains why she thinks having sex even if you dont feel like it is the foundation of a happy relationship

Amelia Hill

@byameliahill

Sun 21 Jan 2018 01.00EST Last modified on Sun 21 Jan 2018 09.52EST

Share on Facebook

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View more sharing options

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Just Do It. Your partner will be grateful, happier and therefore nicer, too, says Michele Weiner-Davis. Illustration: Andrea De Santis/Observer

She rejects any suggestion that shes advocating a sexually subservient, anti-feminist, lie back and think of England approach. In fact, she says this is the embodiment of female empowerment.

Is the deal explicit, I ask, does the low-desire one say: OK, well make love more often, but then you have to turn your iPhone off every once in a while so we can actually talk?

Michele Weiner-Daviss cure for a sex-starved marriage

If you have a low sex drive try to adopt the Nike philosophy and Just Do It!, even if you feel neutral towards having sex at that moment.

If you dont want sex at a particular moment, explain why and suggest another specific time – and ask whether you can do something else physical at that moment for your partner instead.

Remember theres no daily or weekly minimum to ensure a healthy sex life. As a couple you need to work out together what works for you.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

0 notes

lorrainecparker · 7 years ago

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ART OF THE CUT with the assistant editors and VFX editors of Kingsman: Golden Circle

Occasionally, Art of the Cut features the assistant editors and others in the post-production team. These are some of the most popular interviews in Art of the Cut history – including Cheryl Potter, assistant to Pietro Scalia on The Martian, and John Lee on assisting Lee Smith on Dunkirk. As a follow up to our interview with Eddie Hamilton on cutting Kingsman: Golden Circle, this installment of Art of the Cut features Riccardo Bacigalupo (first assistant editor), Tom Coope (first assistant editor), Chris Frith (assistant editor), Ben Mills (VFX editor), Robbie Gibbon (assistant VFX editor), and Ryan Axe (trainee assistant editor) on their roles in the post-production of the film. Most of this team has worked with Eddie Hamilton on his other films including the previous Kingsman and Mission: Impossible film and on the next Mission: Impossible which most of them are working on now. This is probably the most in-depth description of preparing and executing the post on a movie that you’ve ever read.

You can also read Eddie’s interview on cutting Kingsman: Golden Circle here.

(This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber. The entire interview was transcribed within 15 minutes of completing the Skype call. Thanks to Martin Baker at Digital Heaven)

HULLFISH: Let’s go through with the workflow a little bit if you would. Tell me about the system set up and what you guys had to get ready before the production started.

MILLS: The first person on board was Eddie and he started in October / November of 2015, working on previs and looking at hair and makeup and costume tests. We were both finishing off Eddie the Eagle and I was around, so I prepped a few bits for him on a 12TB G-Raid as we didn’t have an ISIS at that time. It was just to get him going. He’s quite self-sufficient so he was able to import whatever he needed and get started. We gave him a template project based on how the first Kingsman movie was laid out.

COOPE: Myself, Riccardo and Ben have all worked together previously, so we were talking about workflow over group iMessage chats and Skype conference calls for a couple of months beforehand, along with Josh Callis-Smith our DIT and Simon Chubbock our Lab Supervisor, both of whom also worked on the first Kingsman with us.

BACIGALUPO: Each of us were working on other projects prior to The Golden Circle, so we all had to finish those, and then stagger our way back onto TGC as we became available. So we made sure to lock down the workflow before we started and get it ironed out ahead of time.

I think the actual order was that Ryan came on to assist Eddie first in the trainee position and then Ben came in after that and even though he’s the VFX editor, he really was the 1st assistant at that point. I worked with Ben on Kick-Ass 2 and we firsted together, so we’re all very good at doing each other’s jobs and helping to cover for each other. Then once Tom became available to step in and First properly, Ben moved back into his VFX Editor role.

MILLS: It was quite useful because we had Simon and his team in the Lab just down the corridor from us. They transcoded, synced and archived all of our dailies for us, then we would prepare the bins how Eddie likes them laid out, including dailies viewing sequences and line strings. If anything was wrong we could just shout down to them and they’d be able to re-transcode, re-colour, update metadata or whatever the issue might be and send it through to us immediately.

Line string markers (any image in this article can be viewed in full resolution by right-clicking to open the image in its own browser window.)

COOPE: We’d worked with them before on the first Kingsman and they were also the Lab on Eddie the Eagle. They’d done quite a few Matthew Vaughn films before. We all had a really good working shorthand with each other as a cutting room, but also the cutting room to the Lab, because we’d worked on so many projects together.

HULLFISH: Was the lab on the ISIS system?

COOPE: Yes they were. They had access to a limited section of it.

BACIGALUPO: They had their own partition on the ISIS so they would dump all the media in there. That was their workspace and then they would copy everything over to us.

COOPE: It was great. We could rely on them doing that side of it for us and we’d get a message saying, “Guys, the shoot day is ready” and we’d jump straight on it.

HULLFISH: So tell me exactly what they would put on the ISIS and what did you guys have to do to get that media to Eddie?

COOPE: They would generate the MXF files (Avid media) onto their partition on the ISIS, separated in folders by camera roll, and they would make bins per camera roll as well. We would copy all those bins across into our project and copy the MXF media onto the Audio and Video partitions into shoot day folders.

Avid Workspace screenshot (right-click on any image in this article to expand it to full resolution in a new browser window)

We’d trigger a scan to refresh the Avid media databases for that shoot day, then rename the folders back to the date of the shoot day in order to organise the ISIS at Finder level. Then we’d grab all of the separate sets of bins for Master Clips, Sync Clips and the Sound Roll and combine all of those into a shoot day Master clips bin, shoot day Sub-clips bin, and a Soundroll bin.

BACIGALUPO: And at the same time the Lab also made all of our PIX H.264 files (PIX is an on-line dailies distribution service) as well. That meant the dailies for the producers and studio executives were prepped and ready to go. Then the cutting room would be responsible for uploading them to the PIX service and putting together the “selects” playlist and the “all takes” playlist each day to send to Production and the Studio.

MILLS: All of the generation of the playlists is created from a Filemaker script thats part of our cutting room database. The guys at PIX created the script and helped to build it into my database, so it made it quite easy for us to just hit go and have the script use the metadata to build the playlists, add selects etc. It would create two play lists per shooting unit, one containing just the selects from that day and then another one with every take in from that shoot day.

COOPE: It’s a very automated system and so removed a lot of manual data entry and fiddling around in the PIX app.

MILLS: We’d get quite a bit of metadata from the Lab but then we’d have to add a few extra things ourselves like descriptions of shots, selected takes and anything that’s relates to the creative choice process rather than the technical side.

HULLFISH: So after uploading the PIX media, the playlists generated by your Filemaker program were organised and filtered so that the producers and execs didn’t have to watch everything if they didn’t want to — just selects or just alternate takes?

COOPE: Yes exactly right.

HULLFISH: What does Eddie like you to do to prep for him? How are the files named? And then scene bin organization and naming?

BACIGALUPO: It’s changed on every project. It’s one of the things that is really interesting about working with him in that he continually evolves his system. I was with him on X-Men:First Class and that was nearly eight years ago and it’s continually changed since then.

COOPE: The very first thing for Eddie is a viewing sequence. Once we’ve got the days subclips, we drag them all into a sequence for that shoot day, so he can see everything shot from the previous day’s dailies and can skim through, and if he gets a call from the director, he knows what’s been shot and can answer questions about it.

HULLFISH: And is that sequence just from action to cut, or is it literally every single frame that went through a camera for the day?

BACIGALUPO: The viewing sequence is every frame from every subclip.

COOPE: False starts, NGs (no good/bad takes), everything.

BACIGALUPO: We do chop it down later for him, but that’s in the scene bin specific daily sequence. That first viewing sequence has no marks, no nothing. It’s really just so he can quickly review everything that was shot the previous day and be confident if Production were asking him whether they could strike a set then he could say “yes do that, or no don’t.”

HULLFISH: Eddie has talked to me about his evolving sense of how he likes to do things. I love that idea because obviously you want to be open to new ideas. What are some of those things that you guys have sensed over the last two projects or more, that have changed in the process? Why did they change and how did that make things better?

BACIGALUPO: Firstly, just something small but effective, we didn’t use to put double spaces in our naming of scene bins, clips or cuts, but we do now because it’s easier for him to read. When we make a bin at the top of the project we start every bin with a date in reverse order. So if it was the 9th of October 2017 it would be military date (year, month, day) 171009 in order to get the bins to sort in date order. We used to just do one space after the date, before leading into the description of the bin. But he specifically asked for double spacing so it’s easier to read. That’s one little example of how it has evolved.

FRITH: Eddie was making these dialogue selects reels and sort of organising it all by himself. Then one day on Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation, the cutting room said “we can do this for you”, and then it became a much bigger project which we call Line strings.

Basically the finished line string is: every camera setup has its own named track, so on a finished line string we’d have markers that transcribe line 1, the character’s initials, and the line. Then later down the sequence lines 2, 3, 4 etc… Then after the first marker on V1 would be all of the takes of the wide shot of line one and then on V2 would be all the mediums of line 1 and V3 would be all the close-ups of line one.

Then, dialogue line 2 again, with V1 always being the same camera and V2 will be the next camera setup. So it’s really easy for him to go to the line 3 closeup, and then watch all of the close-ups for that line, from that angle. That whole system has evolved a bit, including the part of moving each camera to a different track.

COOPE: Essentially like using ScriptSync by breaking down your footage into chunks of dialogue and the coverage for that piece of dialogue.

BACIGALUPO: Eddie tried ScriptSync before and didn’t roll with it. When you spend all your time as an editor just manipulating footage in a timeline, It kind of makes sense to have your line strings in the same format that you’re used to working with every day, rather than having a PDF in your software and navigating that. Everyone works differently, but his system makes sense to me.

FRITH: and the line strings are cut very tight. They’re not action to cut. It’s literally just the line itself with maybe a second or two on either side. If the line is just a standalone response like “Yes.” that’s all you’ll get for 4 or 5 takes in a CU, then a mid, then a wide.

COOPE: So since we have a Lab that now does a lot of what we used to do such as syncing and even transcoding, now we’re freed up to get to know the rushes. I think that’s what the line string really helps with. It helps the whole editorial team really get to know the footage. So that if Eddie says, “I’m sure there’s a shot of this somewhere” everyone can help find it quickly.

BACIGALUPO: That’s another one of the things that’s evolved. On X-Men Eddie was very, very specific about having us sync in the cutting room rather than the Lab do it, and the same with Kick-Ass 2 if I remember right. We did that all in the cutting room — and for the first Kingsman as well.

As the projects have gone on, the scope and scale of the Production has changed, and the work requirements of the cutting room team have also changed. When you find a really good Lab team who look at it the same way you do and get it right the first time then it’s great because we can trust them to do that so we now become available to do tasks that help his creative process such as the line strings.

HULLFISH: How do you label clips in a bin and how are the clips organized within the bin?

Screen shot from the Kingsman codebook describing a VFX shot for turnover to the VFX house

COOPE: We go off the continuity paperwork from the Script Supervisor as well as watching everything and we would add notes in the subclip name such as MOS. NS as “Not Shot.” And also the false starts. If it was something VFX related such as a plate, you’d add “PLATE” or “BALLS” if it was a VFX Ball pass. If they ran the scene a number of times in one take, we would put a marker on each call of “action” and when we got to the end, we would add those up and put x2 or x3 at the end of the subclip name depending on the number of re-starts within a take.

BACIGALUPO: We also use “+” at the end of the clip name in order to denote a selected (circled) take.

COOPE: That’s one of the great things about working with Eddie is that he is willing to adjust his system to help us with our workflow, its all a part of that evolving work environment ethos.

HULLFISH: Let’s talk a little more about the code book and what it does for you.

MILLS: We track a lot of data through the code book and it’s also the VFX Editorial database, so it pulls a lot of the metadata into plate turnovers and lineup sheets as well as helping assign VFX vendors and allowing us to dump raw complete data denoting the line up information so the vendor can just pull all this information in at their end. It’s even got a QuickTime log in it so we can track who we’ve sent files to. It’s got drive logs to see who we’ve sent drives to. Sorts out the PIX uploads and creates playlists, generates Studio Screening continuity documentation, creates scene cards and much much more. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in it I just built from the ground up since the first Kingsman. The guys just put in little feature requests and I update it as the requirements change and as the movie changes actually. I think the code book we’ve got for Mission 6 is probably the best one we’ve ever had.

BACIGALUPO: It’s really cool to have things completely automated that you were doing by hand just two films ago.

MILLS: It’s one that I built myself and it’s got a lot of useful stuff in it. I kind of built it out of the needs of becoming a VFX editor and needing to track the cut. I’ve had a multitude of different collaborators over the years who’ve helped suggest new features and help me build tricky scripts and workarounds, Barrie Hemsley (VFX Producer) was instrumental to this as is Robin Saxen (VFX Producer on Mission 6) who has helped no end.

Eddie lets us work quite happily in his reels, so when he is not working, we can go in and add shots, cut new submissions in and make sure that everything’s in line in order to track changes. What I try to do weekly is output an EDL of all the VFX titles that we have on the top couple of tracks, this is effectively our weekly audit. The shot titles have embedded timecode that corresponds to the submissions that come in, so it gives us a frame-range, and myself and Robbie Gibbon can track what was input previously and assess what’s changed, what’s extended, what’s been cut, what’s been reinstated – anything like that.

It’s basically like a change list, but more customized.

HULLFISH: Are you guys using the British slating system?

COOPE: No. Eddie insists on American and we all prefer that.

BACIGALUPO: Increasing your slate numerically so it has no link to the scene doesn’t make any sense.

HULLFISH: That’s my opinion, but I wasn’t going to question it to my British guests. I’ve talked to crews that are half British half American, and I think a lot of them switch to the American style. Anything else you want to say about the code book? Because those code books are like the beating heart of the editorial department.

Screen shot from the code book for a VFX shot.

BACIGALUPO: I think it’s the difference between a 10 hour shift and a 12 plus hour shift, because we’ve automated so much of it. When you’ve got a good team working together you can work a reasonable shift on a shoot day. They can be crazy long days because the amount of footage that they shoot nowadays… it can have a massive impact on your daily life.

COOPE: The code book generates screening notes as well for the studio. So when they receive their playlists for that day then we send an accompanying document which shows everything that’s been shot, but it’s really nicely laid out. Beautifully formatted. Each shot has a thumbnail and a description that was filled out in the Avid.

MILLS: It has everything the studio should need: In-point, out-point, clip name (slate, take, camera, select), start timecode, runtime. You can customize it however you want. Eddie would always have a few tweaks on it – mostly about how it actually looks – so it’s more aesthetically pleasing. I set it up so that as soon as you have created the screening notes it will generate a cover page, then it would export as a PDF.

BACIGALUPO: It was really a great evolution. We used to just put an Avid bin into Script view and export that as a PDF. We used to have to mess with print margins forever due to some of the limitations in AVID. It sounds trivial, but those are things that make a huge difference at the end of the day so that you’re not sitting there exporting a PDF eight times. You just hit export in the code book and in two seconds it’s done.

HULLFISH: And is there automation between the Avid and the code book? Are you using ALE? Or how do you get data from Avid to the code book?

COOPE: We do a tab delimited file. So it’s just a text file that comes out of the Avid and we have a specific bin view called “Code Book Export” and we save all of those TDL exports because they’re really tiny files.

FRITH: Ben’s code book also builds the PIX playlist. You just press “Make Playlist” and it pops up in PIX completely built.

MILLS: Back on About Time, I spoke to the guys, Lisa DiSanto at PIX and asked, “If I built the code book, can you give me the tools I need on this end?” And they figured out from the code book how to script the whole thing to talk to PIX and take out some of the heavy lifting for us.

FRITH: It makes a playlist of everything and also a playlist of just the selects which it gets from the Avid bin, so it’s pretty hands-off.

HULLFISH: OK, we’ve got the code book… what about prepping bins?

COOPE: Eddie’s very specific on how he wants those laid out, and they’ve changed quite a bit over the last few movies. On the first Kingsman, we would line up takes in a single row in Frame view. We’d auto-align those using the Avid function, which puts a gap between clips. But on this film, Eddie wanted us to butt the Frames up to each other, so they would create a kind of filmstrip. That’s not an automated thing and it has to be pixel perfect because if you line it up slightly wonky it can look very messy.

COOPE: Also, the image that is represented by the thumbnail in the bin, we would change those by marking an IN point on each clip and hitting “Go To In” and then setting the thumbnail to that image. On the first Kingsman we would set up the thumbnail on a common image for each set-up. But now, let’s say there are ten takes in a set up — he wants to see a progression of the shot through those thumbnails.

BACIGALUPO: So you can see the camera move if it’s tracking in on someone. So if it starts wide and moves in to a tight close-up, those 10 thumbnail actually show in still images the moving camera going from wide to close.

HULLFISH: One of the things that’s revealed across the breadth of these interviews is the different techniques that people prefer, like this film-strip approach versus every set-up represented by an identical frame. There are some in each camp and I think people learn the technique from working with each other.

BACIGALUPO: Something else that shows how he thinks, because he’s so technically adept – is that he is fine moving from one environment to the next, and from one computer set-up to the next and adapting how he works to cater for it. So he’ll move from his main 5.1 cutting room with dual 30” monitors and 65” OLED to editing the movie on just his laptop on the stage or in the director’s hotel room, or wherever is needed if they’re on location.

When he moves to a smaller screen, the spacing of the clips in the bin changes slightly because he’ll shrink the size of the thumbnails so he can still see them all because he doesn’t like to have to scroll in his bin to see all of the setups.

HULLFISH: Lots of people are like that. So if there are too many shots in a bin to allow that, you go to a second part bin on that scene?

COOPE: Yeah. We label those bins by the letters in the set-up.

FRITH: That’s another evolution that happened on Rogue Nation.

BACIGALUPO: When we were doing Kick-Ass 2 and the first Kingsman, the bins were broken into parts but they used to be labelled: “081 Harry talks to Eggsy pt1”, “pt2” and so on, but then the Rogue Nation team suggested changing the naming to reflect the actual set-ups in the bin name so you could see at a glance what a bin contained.

HULLFISH: So in the bin did you lay out the set-ups in a row? Did you go strictly numerically top to bottom, or by shot size?

COOPE: Ascending numerical order.

BACIGALUPO: And if you’ve got five takes and all five are shot with multiple cameras then take one would have the single A cam and B cam subs sitting one on top of each other, and then the group clip would be on the right next to them, with no gap, so that take one looks like a triangle on it’s side.

But then we don’t keep the A and B cam individual subclips for takes two through five in the scene bin. He only has the group clips for takes two to five in there and they sit next to each other in a line.

If it was a four camera group for example, take 1 would be a block of four cameras as a square with the groups sitting next to it in a line as well.

FRITH: We’ll also create a dailies sequence in each scene bin. And if there were multicam group clips, we’d cut them into the dailies sequence however many times there were cameras in the group, and then in the timeline, we’d swap each multicam clip so each one showed a different camera.

BACIGALUPO: And he wants to have all of the audio tracks available on that dailies sequence, but we’d solo the mix track. And then we’d top and tail, so on that sequence, it would just be “action” to “cut”.

We all use a Razer Naga gaming mouse and that’s something we’d use a macro for where we need to chop the start and end off each sub-clip. So we have a macro which automatically jumps the playhead to the next marker which would be the call of action on the next sub-clip, then the playhead would automatically move back 12 frames and then top the sub-clip. So you’d just hit one button and it would just rip through the whole sequence, and then we repeat for the tail-ing.

COOPE: It’s just the things that we do to try to make our work easier with the mouse and keyboard. There’s no point pressing the same buttons 200 times.

FRITH: We also have macros for renaming clips to get rid of Avid auto-naming things, like the “copy.01” or “.new” suffixes. We also have macros for over-cutting audio. If Eddie has cut something mute and we need to restore the sound to it for an export or something. We’ve each got loads of macros. I wouldn’t want to do a job without them.

HULLFISH: Are those macros in a macro program? Or are they macros that are tied to the Razer mouse?

MILLS: The macros are tied to the mouse. Both myself and Riccardo also have the Razer gaming keyboard, so there are macros on both the mouse and the keyboard. The mice have 17 or 19 buttons depending on the model. So you can add macros to all of those. Even for getting into effects mode, you just have it as one click on your mouse.

BACIGALUPO: They are tied to the Razer hardware though. You can’t export them and use them with a different company’s product. We can share them between ourselves though. So if someone comes up with a cool way to do something you can just pop the macro on the ISIS in our shared work zone and people can import at their leisure. The Windows version of the macro program is super-stable because most gamers are Windows based and it’s really a gaming mouse, but the Mac version is lagging behind a bit in stability.

HULLFISH: What computers are you guys all working on?

MILLS: We are a mix of the older Mac Pro (5,1 model) and the newer Trashcan Mac Pros. (6,1 model) all varying specs with minimum being a 6 core.

HULLFISH: What happens after Eddie cuts a scene? What do you guys have to do at that point?

BACIGALUPO: Matthew wants to be up to date on the latest cut where ever he is, so the production hired Useful Companies, who are one of the big industry IT providers, and they set up a secure VPN-encrypted tunnel between the cutting room and an iMac that Matthew had in his office at his house. We used some software called File Sync to synchronize the ISIS media and all its partitions and files to a G-Speed Q (http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-speed-q) which had a capacity of thirty-two terabytes (Raided down to 24 for protection). That became an exact mirror of our ISIS and every day we automatically synced the day’s files to his secure workstation. Eddie requested the Lab transcode our drama dailies to DNxHD 36 for this purpose, so that we had less data to sync overnight. This way we could be confident the sync would always be complete by the morning.

HULLFISH: So Matthew had a full Avid at his house and you guys never had to export viewing sequences, because the stuff was just syncing from the cutting room.

BACIGALUPO: Yes the ISIS was considered “Master Source 1” and was never connected to the internet or any other networks at all, and we used the sync software to clone it to the internal RAID of a stand alone computer which in turn, only had a direct connection through the encrypted VPN to Matthew’s iMac.

When we needed to sync to Matthew, we would disconnect it from the ISIS and the Master Source then temporarily became the internal RAID. The sync software looks at the Destination (Matthew’s iMac) and whatever files the Destination doesn’t have, it just copies straight over from the Source, and it’s smart enough to look at a metadata in terms of modified date, creation date etc… and just update what is needed.

COOPE: So if Eddie wanted to show Matthew the first cut of a scene, and we’d already synced the media over, we wouldn’t need to export a QuickTime. We would just put the scene in a bin for Matthew to view and he could see the cut in minutes via 2 stages of sync protocols.

BACIGALUPO: We could also control the sync, so if we just wanted to sync a few bins, but there were also 20GB of additional media, we could temporarily ignore that and just send the bins over immediately, then overnight send the media in the background.

It wasn’t just file movement, it was screen-sharing as well. There was a particularly cool moment where Eddie was in front of the stand alone system and he was screen sharing onto the Avid that Matthew was looking at and in real time doing edits and changes based on the phone call he was having. So he could show Matthew the changes that he was envisioning in his head at that moment.

HULLFISH: That’s awesome.

COOPE: Also, during the latter part of the shoot, Matthew wanted Eddie to be working on set. So in a collaboration between TransLux and Vivid Rental – who were providing the Avid equipment – they built a trailer which basically followed the main unit around and had a full Avid and 5.1 surround speakers. Eddie would be on location and we would have two high capacity Raided hard-drives that we would shuttle back and forth which were also exact mirrors of the ISIS. The drives were named after characters in the film.

BACIGALUPO: Whiskey, Ginger, Tequila and Merlin.

COOPE: The Lab was generating gigabytes of data, so during that period there were some early starts because we needed to get that media copying onto the drive that we had in the cutting room, and then that was driven by a unit driver to the set, which could be an hour away. Meanwhile, Eddie would be in the trailer working on the drive he had from the previous day. Then when the driver got there, they’d swap the drive out and he’d start working with the new material. And the old drive would be brought back to us so that we could update it for the next morning.

BACIGALUPO: And while that’s going on, we’re also working on scene bins for Eddie and using a secure file transfer, like Aspera, so once a scene bin is finished, each of us has an Aspera account and we’d Aspera it to Eddie.

HULLFISH: What was happening with turnovers and audio and anything else that you guys had to do as Eddie finished a scene?

MILLS: We’d have regular conversations with Eddie and the VFX supervisor, Angus Bickerton, and VFX producer, Barrie Hemsley, just to determine where we were with certain sequences creatively and which scenes were to be prioritized in terms of difficulty and complexity. We would also discuss what was being done in terms of concept design and what we should be presenting to Matthew. It was an ongoing conversation that happened most days.

So, when Eddie was happy with a sequence, we could start to turn it over. We had sixteen tracks of video on the timeline in total, and six would be for visual effects editorial. There were two tracks for visual effects titles because some VFX shots have to transition from an A side to a B side, so we needed two title tracks to be able to track the full duration of each shot, and then the next two tracks above that are for plates.

So once we’ve created plates within the Avid, which we do by decomposing timelines and creating new sub clips in order to automatically add handles of varying length dependent on if they have a re-speed applied. We’ll cut those back into the time line, and we do this because it’s a good way to flag if a shot is being extended beyond its handles.

If Eddie can’t extend a cut beyond the handles, as he has the VFX Plates track locked to his video tracks when cutting, then he knows that this is what we turned over to VFX, and if he wants to extend the shot further, it will mean re-sending it to VFX and having them revise the work. That way he can assess it and make a call on the fly. All in all its incredibly collaborative and Eddie is so incredibly conscious of all the moving parts going on outside of the cutting room and this helps the post production process ten fold. If that’s a high priority shot, then we can quickly flag to VFX and then we can start pursuing sending the changes to the vendor.

Now on this show (Mission 6) one of the additional tracks we’re using is VFX Version, which is a collapsed clip of all the previous versions. We only keep the latest temp comps and the latest 2 or 3 versions from the vendors in the timeline itself, and all previous versions are now in a collapsed track at the top of the project.

Once we’re into reels that’s when we’d start auditing the cut and that would be based off of the VFX titles. I wrote a script in Filemaker in order to compare what the original in/out point, duration, reel or order of a shot was with the current cut. If any of this criteria has changed then it’ll flag it immediately. It helps us massively to be able to check what’s changed in a cut in only a matter of minutes, instead of manually going through shot by shot.

HULLFISH: For those who haven’t seen a timeline with these kinds of VFX in them, the VFX Titles you’re talking about is basically a layer — or two — which I’m assuming you’re creating in the Title Tool, that identifies, “Here’s the number and name of the VFX shot, so that when you’re having communications with the VFX vendors, you’re all communicating using the same names and reference frames.

Screen shot of the Avid timeline for Kingsman: Golden Circle, Reel 1

MILLS: Spot on Steve, it actually also delivers the comp frame range, so it’s the frame number for the entire shot itself as it will come back finished to us. So if there’s an error in frame 1032 of an effect that they send back to us, that’s synced to our sequence. For each of these clips we have a bit of media which I created which is just a frame counter that counts from 0 up to 3,000, (more than 2 minutes) so that’s in there as well in addition to using the Title tool. So it’s really a collapsed clip that contains a bit of media — the counter with the frame numbers — and the title.

HULLFISH: So all of those VFX need to also be rolled into your Filemaker Pro codebook. And that needs to get fed to the vendors as well?

MILLS: Yes, everything is logged there before turnover and constantly as the cut evolves. The things that we issue for VFX shots varies from vendor to vendor. On Kingsman there were eight vendors. On Mission, we have one or two. It’s all vendor-specific as to what sort of media they want to receive. Some vendors use Avid, so they’ll happily receive a bin and a mixdown, which obviously contain watermarks for security and everything else and makes it easier to pass re-speeds and other shot information back and forth.

Screenshot of the Avid bin for Scene 33 (all images in this article can be viewed at full resolution by right-clicking the image and opening it into its own browser)

Other vendors would only receive a QuickTime of an edit and wouldn’t have an avid bin as they were using a different NLE. The bin is actually very useful with Eddie because he does a lot of frame-cutting and a lot of re-speeds so we generally think that if the vendor is on the same wavelength and uses Avid, then it’s easy for them to see what he’s doing and avoids them having to come back to us with any questions as all the information is there, not only logged in paperwork but also visible in a timeline for them.

We also turn over to them PDF lineup sheets that outlines how the individual scans or plates stack up in the comp. We basically type out what the re-speed information would be and what points need to be in sync at certain moments throughout the shot.

GIBBON: Which plates are being used and how they’re being used essentially. That’s a paper document version for every single shot that the vendor will get along with either a QuickTime or an Avid bin and media. Then they get the plates as DPX / EXR or whatever workflow has been agreed. We send our requests for the plates through the Lab, ask them to pull certain shots and send them directly to the vendor. So the Lab is responsible for sending out the full rez media.

HULLFISH: On top of turnovers and getting the work back from the vendors into the timeline again, are you doing comping or temp VFX or pre-viz?

MILLS: Initially yes, Eddie’ll throw us a sequence to work on. That does come up quite a lot. And if it’s an entire sequence, we’ll break it down between all of us. We’ll kind of share the workload with whoever’s free. And we try to stay ahead of the game, so if we see an entire scene with green-screens, we’ll just go ahead and start keying in Avid, just doing temp comps. Eddie usually does a fair few himself too and if it becomes too complex will throw to us to refine.

If we want to do something a bit more complex, then we’ll jump into After Effects. We did do some pre-viz stuff, but the pre-viz was really happening when it was only Eddie on the show, so he cut a lot of pre-viz and we didn’t get much more of it after we came on the show full time.

GIBBON: A few sequences came in, but they just went straight to Eddie to re-work.

MILLS: Right, and Third Floor, the people doing our pre-viz, or Argon, nine times out of ten have an editor in house already. So their editor would cut it and if Eddie or Matthew thought it needed adjustment then Eddie would ask for the individual shots and tweak it himself.

HULLFISH: What about sound effects? Is Eddie pretty hands on with wanting to put those in himself, or does that often come back to you guys?

FRITH: He does a lot of that himself. It’s really only when the sound effects become too repetitive that he turns it over to us — like footsteps. Some sequences, like the taxi-cab sequence, he’d go to town with sound effects on that. For other sequences, if the workload was getting too much, he’d hand those off to a few of us, then when we were done, he’d rework them himself.

COOPE: Also, often he’d mock something up and then Matt Collinge (Supervising Sound Designer) and Danny Sheehan (Dialogue Supervisor) from Phaze UK, were involved very early on in the shoot in terms of sound design and dialogue. So because we had them on board Eddie had us turn that work over to them and then they were able finesse it and do a really nice first pass, send it back to us and we’d cut it in line with the turnover we sent them.

Eddie would bring that into the reels and it would live there and if it was good enough, then he muted his own work in the timeline but kept it in there. But what we’re listening to is really the first or second pass or what Matt or Danny had done.

HULLFISH: And with all this stuff that’s returning from sound and VFX, you guys are the ones returning this material to the timeline? What’s the process of making sure stuff goes in the right spot and telling Eddie that new stuff is in place?

MILLS: So the process of getting VFX back from the vendors is that they would first go to VFX production. They sit down with Angus and he approves each shot and says what can come through to the cutting room because he knows that as soon as it comes into the cutting room, it basically goes in front of the director.

So once they’re approved, myself and Robbie would bring them in and we would organize everything by the submission date and the vendor it had come from. Then we would cut them in to the top track we have called “New VFX”, so Eddie can see those as soon as they come in. For any reel that we add new VFX to, we would have a tag that we put on to the end of the bin name with double space and “VFX”, so Eddie knows which reels have new VFX. We also double check them after the VFX approvals because obviously they’re not able to approve them in context. So we’ll look at them contextually just to make sure they’re OK. And then we’ll close the bins.

We’ll tell Eddie the VFX are ready. He’ll do a quick pass to make sure everything is ready then he’ll drop down our new VFX from the top track into the lower tracks in the sequence, and then when he plays back the sequence for the director, the new VFX will be in. There’s also a very specific color coding for all the different types of clips, so any temp shots that we’ve made, or any from an in-house artist, are colored salmon, any work-in-progress shots are grape, any finals are sea foam. Sky blue means pending.

HULLFISH: So, to understand Eddie’s final move of the VFX: You guys place the VFX in the VFX track at the top, which is above anything that’s actually being monitored, and only Eddie can put the VFX shot onto the monitored track where it can be seen?

MILLS: Yes. It’s three stages of approval before the director sees it. First the VFX supervisor approves it creatively and contextually, then we’ve approved that it’s technically correct in terms of colour space, re-speeds and resizes, and then Eddie approves from a story telling aspect. That way, nothing untoward gets in front of the director.

HULLFISH: Do you guys bother to name the tracks themselves or are they just numbered?

Screenshot of the Avid timeline for Kingsman: Golden Circle, Reel 2 (all images in this article can be viewed at full resolution by right-clicking and opening the image in its own browser window)

BACIGALUPO: Yes all tracks are named:

V1 and V2 are drama plates.

V3 and V4 are Avid FX or temp effects.

V5 is VFX shots from outside vendors.

V6 was also VFX, because sometimes there’d be overlap.

V7 is color.

V8 is subtitles.

V9 is edit notes because Eddie has this little text preset, so if a shot has to be re-shot or we’re missing something, then that’s the track for text overlays that you see on-screen so that the viewer’s aware.

HULLFISH: Created with Title Tool?

BACIGALUPO: No. Subcap tool because it’s quicker and easier to modify and you don’t have to generate new media every time you make a change.

V10 and V11 are VFX titles.

V12 and V13 are the VFX plates.

V14 and V15 are for new VFX, where we put new shots that come in.

V16 was color graded and finished material from the DI that we cut back over the top of everything

L-r, Pedro Pascal, Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore and Elton John, star in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

HULLFISH: So I’m a bit confused. If the VFX plates are above the VFX titles, then is Eddie muting or not viewing the tracks below a certain track?

COOPE: Typically, Eddie only views from V9 downwards, so from the Editing notes and below. VFX titles and VFX plates are not viewed.

MILLS: V10 and above are really only for us and for Eddie if he’s meeting with Angus. Then he’ll display the other tracks to discuss those VFX shots. In the AVID now, you can have a mask (letterboxing) generated automatically on output, so he doesn’t need that as a track anymore.

HULLFISH: Interesting. Wow that’s a lot of stuff.

MILLS: On the current show we have 18 tracks just for video and 19 for audio.

HULLFISH: Obviously, that’s a HUGE amount of work to try to manage as part of your day. Does Eddie let you cut a scene occasionally? What kind of creative input do you get to have with the actual editing? Does he ask for your feedback on scenes?

COOPE: Eddie is an absolute machine. He cuts everything. But he’s happy — if you have any free time — to have us sit down and cut a scene and he’ll look at how we cut it. It rarely happens, but he’s really receptive to anything that someone puts in front of him. And he’ll occasionally call us in and say, “What do you think of this scene?” and ask for notes. And if something’s particularly tricky, he’ll say, “I want you all to have a go at it.”

BACIGALUPO: He’s really enthusiastic about people trying to do it. The hardest part is just having the time to do it. Chris, you had a scene that was in the film for a while, didn’t you?

Reel 3

FRITH: Yeah. I had a scene that Eddie pretty much dropped into the reel. He made a few tweaks and dropped it in. But that whole scene got cut. But there’s a scene where Roxy, Merlin, Arthur and Eggsy are all talking the first time they go and see Arthur, that I cut that never changed.

GIBBON: Most of our creative input comes from doing the temp VFX, being the first person to kind of design a shot. The VFX supervisor has the final say, but we’re there mocking up the initial draft and initial ideas. The management of the cutting room is just such a huge amount of work that we don’t get a lot of opportunity to cut, but Eddie’s intention is always there. The media management is just so huge that there’s literally no time to get involved with that.

COOPE: I think he did say at the beginning of The Golden Circle that he’d love for us all to cut a scene a week. But that didn’t happen, unfortunately.

GIBBON: We all had a bash at the Elton performance scene.

MILLS: Quite a few of us, outside of our normal day job, cut shorts and music videos, so we try to keep our creative editing skills sharp. We’re quite an honest cutting room, so we always bring our own work to the table and show bits and we’ll always try to share work where we can. We all work with and for each other on outside projects. It’s a really nice, collaborative environment that we work in.

HULLFISH: It sounds like, from listening to you chat, that the politics are kept to a minimum and that you all get along nicely.

MILLS: It depends on if we’re playing poker or not. (group laughs)

Reel 4

BACIGALUPO: It’s true. Eddie’s always tried to instill an approach in the cutting room that in principle, everybody should be able to do everybody else’s job. So we have to get along. We have to share the workload. The system would just break down if we didn’t communicate with each other properly, and like each other. We all eat lunch together. We all go for a walk around the studio together. We’re all friends out of work. We go for drinks. It’s a good team. We wouldn’t come back for the next show if it wasn’t, because it’s too long a period of time to spend in the same environment. We just wouldn’t be working together if we didn’t want to.

COOPE: A few thoughts about sound and music. A few weeks before we go into reels Eddie would create some sequences which would just be called “First Assemblies” so the guys could have a first pass. So for the music department we would make a copy of Eddie’s reels and commit the multi-cam edits in that sequence, because we found that the multi-cam plays havoc with the AAF exports.

BACIGALUPO: Eddie has a very specific archiving and versioning system as well. Every time we would turnover, we would archive the reels and version up by dot one (.1) and then every time we did a screening, we’d version up by a whole number.

So if we were on version 3.2 and we turned something over, we’d version up to 3.3 and then if we did a screening we’d version up to 4. And every time we do that the reels get duplicated and archived into their own set of bins. They live in an archived cuts folder which is a subfolder of the reels folder, so Eddie can very quickly access those. And every set of reels goes into its own subfolder within the Archive cuts subfolder. It may sound confusing, but it’s just a logical folder hierarchy because Matthew will ask, “Where’s that scene with this and that change that we did three weeks ago?” And nine times out of ten, Eddie knows what he’s talking about and because of the archiving system can find it in about four clicks.

Reel 5

COOPE: Music Dept like their Quicktimes with the dialogue and effects hard panned left and music hard panned right. So we first do a mono audio mixdown of dialogue and effects and then a mono mixdown of all of the music so that we can have those on the bottom of the timeline and just export those audio tracks with the picture. Then we’d add a whole load of watermarks and burn-in information onto the picture. We’d have the recipient’s name across the middle and we also number ident every Quicktime that leaves the Avid. This is stored in the codebook in a QuickTime Log section.

For burn-ins for the sound FX guys, we would burn in the first four dialogue tracks with their clip name and their source timecode as well, so that the dialogue editors could see what Eddie’s been using. So we export that as a DNxHD36 QuickTime with stereo sound. And then we’d export some WAV files: a mono dialogue .wav of each reel, a stereo SFX .wav, and a stereo music .wav.

Then we export AAFs. We would export dialogue as a linking AAF because Danny would have an entire copy of all the production sound at his end so we didn’t need to generate any new media for him. He would just have a linking AAF which is really quick to export and doesn’t bring any media with it.

Matt would have a consolidated FX tracks AAF. (And then we’d also have a consolidated music AAF for music dept).

We also would create an EDL of V1 track from the AVID which would go to both sound and music.

BACIGALUPO: We basically made one turnover package for both sound and music. The good thing about working with the same teams of people from previous movies was that we were able to talk to them ahead of time and say “can we do it this way?”

So it just saves us time because then we only had to export each of the reels once as opposed to doing a set of reels with watermarks for the composer and a set of reels with watermarks for the sound and FX departments.

Reel 6

They all agreed to have their own requirements on the one QuickTime. And they all use the EDL for their automated Conformalizer. And then we also did change notes for those who needed them.

HULLFISH: I just used Conformalizer on my last project to get change notes to the sound mixer.

COOPE: Jack (Music Editor) was espousing how great it was as well.

HULLFISH: Tell me a little about the screening process. Obviously, those are a big deal and you talked about how you’d version up a full number after a screening.

BACIGALUPO: I think we had somewhere between 7 and 10 screenings, total. Three of those were actually focus-group screenings with members of the public, and the rest were friends and family screenings. And depending on how we screened, it would dictate the workflow. We were working with a mix of DNxHD36 and DNxHD115, so once we got the go-ahead from Eddie to start prepping the reels, (which he would do by adding the word MIXDOWN to the end of the reel name) that would be our trigger to archive it, duplicate it and prep it for screening.

This meant doing a video mixdown of the appropriate video tracks to DNxHD115. And then doing a 5.1 or 7.1 mixdown of all of the audio tracks depending on what stage of Production we were at. At the beginning, music we were sending 5.1 tracks, but then later we started getting 7.1 stuff as well.

Screenshot of the Avid timeline of Kingsman: Golden Circle, Reel 7.

So we prepped on a reel-by-reel basis and we had a staggered run at the reels. As Eddie finished reel 1 and moved into reel 2, we’d be prepping reel 1 for screening. Once it was mixed down then I would have somebody do a visual QC in real time. Eddie will do a pass through the reel himself to make sure it’s in screenable format, but as you can imagine he’s usually editing right down to the wire.

It was often nail-biting because we would get one chance to do the prep and Eddie and Matthew would edit right until the screening. The tightest one had me running to the screening room with the encrypted SSD in my hand, four minutes before we were going to start and the audience had already sat down and I was sprinting across Soho.

There were a couple of times where we had DCPs made for the focus groups but for most screenings we would just take a laptop with Avid running on it and use Eddie’s AJA T-Tap to output to HD-SDI or HDMI (with embedded 5.1 audio) straight into the projection room gear. Some screening rooms actually have a MacPro with Avid installed on them hooked up to the hardware, so all you have to do is plug in a drive and load the screening sequence.

BACIGALUPO: And if a screening was taking place at FOX in LA, then we would Aspera the MXF files and screening bin to them. We would build the packages for speed and efficiency with everything built into AVID MediaFiles organised folders, make the databases for them and have a bin with the screening sequence ready. So in three steps, they could plug in and be ready to go.

Often, while we’re prepping for a screening in the UK, we’d be shuttling the media over Aspera to the US, and they’re prepping for the screening that they’re going to be doing as well. So both sides of the Atlantic are working in tandem. Sometimes, we’d stagger the Aspera delivery as well rather than do one big package, because then they could be downloading at the same time as us uploading the next reel mixdown. It’s just about using the technology to make it happen as quickly as possible because you usually only get one shot.

HULLFISH: You mentioned that some footage was DNxHD36 and some was 115. What was the difference between that media, other than the resolution?

COOPE: As mentioned by Riccardo earlier, the initial decision was to keep the drama dailies at DNxHD 36 to streamline the data syncing from the ISIS to the five cloned copies. However, when we first went into Post the amount of data we were syncing reduced substantially because we weren’t shooting anymore. Eddie reviewed some of his cuts — in particular everything that was filmed at Poppyland and felt the DNxHD36 wasn’t holding up in the big wide shots. He requested the Lab re-transcode a number of drama shots to DNxHD115. We archived the DNxHD36 version and replaced them with the DNxHD115 copy. The updated files were also synchronised onto our clones so everything was kept up to date.

GIBBON: We did the same for a lot of the VFX shots. It was just too difficult to comp with the DNxHD36. We used to get VFX submissions back at DNxHD36, but we started requesting them to come in at 115.

MILLS: So a large chunk of the film ended up as DNxHD115 due to the number of VFX Shots. But the formats played together nicely as you’d expect them to, but sometimes when a DNxHD36 shot would come on screen, you’d just cringe a little bit, because compared to the 115 the compression would just stand out. That’s why we’re working at DNxHR LB on Mission 6.

HULLFISH: Guys, it was so informative and interesting hearing about the process. Thanks for taking the time to chat.

GROUP: Thank you so much.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish

The first 50 interviews in the series provided the material for the book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors.” This is a unique book that breaks down interviews with many of the world’s best editors and organizes it into a virtual roundtable discussion centering on the topics editors care about. It is a powerful tool for experienced and aspiring editors alike. Cinemontage and CinemaEditor magazine both gave it rave reviews. No other book provides the breadth of opinion and experience. Combined, the editors featured in the book have edited for over 1,000 years on many of the most iconic, critically acclaimed and biggest box office hits in the history of cinema.

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apsbicepstraining · 7 years ago

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Old flames Mario Balotelli and Milan start to regret reviving the occasion | Paolo Bandini

Injury may have impeded Mario Balotellis return to Milan, but his attitude on the tar – rather than off it – has led to more the issue of his wasted talent

He is to say situations would be different. He told us he had changed his courses. Mario Balotelli told us all the words he thought we might want to hear as he rejoined Milanon loan this summer. Ive learned from my misunderstandings, he did. Ill grant everything. At one point, he even informed Gazzetta dello Sport that: I used to be a boy named Mario, but now Im Mario the man.

If he clanged like a spurned love trying to win back a lost spouses acceptance, then perhaps thats exactly what he was. Balotelli had adored Milan since he was a child, and was not the first to frame the relations between the two countries in romantic expressions. Adriano Galliani announced the strikers imminent return last-place August by telling reporters: Some affections never end.

The Rossoneris chief executive is notorious for his willingness to arouse old-time liaisons. Such players as Andriy Shevchenko, Ruud Gullit, Kak and Roberto Donadoni have varied the golf-club under his stewardship, only to proceed afterwards in their careers. None had already been recaptured anything like their best organize during their second stints with the team.

So why fus with Balotelli? He had never sparkled as brightly as the aforementioned wizards in the first instance. His ten-strike charge for Milan was robust with 26 goals tallied in 43 tournament images and hitherto he had faded following a bright initial six-month trance. It was Balotelli who salvaged a third-place finish for Milan after joining in January 2013, but he too who obtained 10 yellow placards and one red-faced while cutting a tetchy and isolated illustration during the following campaign.

Since then, he had weathered a dreadful time at Liverpool tallying only a single Premier League goal and falling behind Rickie Lambert in the pecking order. Milan fans were not exactly stirring for his recall. In information, there used to be whistlings at San Siro when Balotellis name was announced amongst the equivalents for the home opener against Empoli.

But there was some technique to Gallianis madness. Balotelli, unlike those previous high-profile returnees, was still in his mid-2 0s. Besides, this was only a loan with no cost fixed. In gist, Milan were going a risk-free experiment of a participate they had sold for 16 m a year earlier, and whose better seasons could still lie ahead.

The golf-clubs new administrator, additionally, had an existing relationship with Balotelli. Sinisa Mihajlovic had been an deputy at Inter back when the player was emerging from the Nerazzurris youth team. A private find was arranged between them before Milan signed off on the deal.

You will need to be the first to arrive and the last to leave, Mihajlovic was reported to have told Balotelli. You must ever give your all, otherwise I will make sure you find your suitcases waiting outside the gates of Milanello.

Balotelli seemed to have taken that word on board. He put in a swashbuckling cameo off the bench during a derby demolish to Inter before commemorating his first start with a fine free-kick destination to open the scoring in a 3-2 win over Udinese.

Just when his stellar was in the dominance, though, he was sidelined by a athletics hernia. The harm, which turned out to require an operation, took Balotelli out of action from September right through to mid-January.

When Balotelli reverted, he discovered that he was no longer needed. After a difficult firstly half to the season, Mihajlovic has at last received an attacking partnership that worked, MBaye Niangs range and readiness to float out and serve intersections from either side reaching him the perfect foil to Carlos Baccas penalty-box prowling.

Milan went nine recreations without defeat, surging back into the hasten for European regions. Where formerly Balotelli asked Why ever me? now he was instead turn left meditate Why never me? He averaged fewer than 13 times on the pitch in his first eight league games back from trauma, and failed to record a single aim or assist.

Mihajlovic was unsympathetic to propositions that Balotelli necessitated more substantial opportunities to make an impact. The number of minutes you have on the pitching do not thing, said the manager. You can be decisive even in five. He needs to show me that he has feeling and desire.

That final feeling was its most important one. Innovated for the succumbing instants of a 2-1 win over Genoa, Balotelli had been asked to lead the defensive endeavor from the figurehead but never broke out of a move. Merely a late intervention from Milans athletic manager, Antonio Bovenzi, deterred a frenzied Mihajlovic from storming over to make an example of his striker at full-time.

Sinisa Mihajlovic alleged Mario Balotelli is not yet amply fit. Photograph: Elisabetta Baracchi/ EPA

And yet, after Niang marred his ankle in a car accident last week, it was Balotelli to whom the manager grew. He may or may not be the most obvious selection. Jrmy Mnez, Milans preceding scorer in 2014 -1 5, has invested most of this season recuperating from a hernia of his own but started alongside Balotelli in the Coppa Italia semi-final second leg against Alessandria on Tuesday. The Frenchman touched a pair of goals during what became a 5-0 rout.

Balotelli grabbed one just as he had be done in order to the reverse fixture but his rendition again shortage dynamism or verve. Various newspapers determined him as the most difficult participate in a red-and-black shirt.

Mihajlovic persisted, selecting Balotelli to start alongside Bacca in Sundays match away to Sassuolo. Unlike third-tier Alessandria, these rivals were strong enough to give Milan real concerns. Just six points behind the Rossoneri at kick-off, Sassuolo had won both home editions of this fixture since their promotion to the top-flight in 2013.

They would soon make it three out of three. After taking the extend through a beautifully taken destination from Alfred Duncan in the 27 th instant, Sassuolo never looked at risk of going pegged back. Nicola Sansone shaped the score 2-0 under contentious situations late on, his team-mate Davide Biondini fortunate not to have been penalise for a pollute on Andrea Bertolacci in the buildup, but Milans legitimate grievances over that incident could not mask their own drawbacks in attack.

Balotelli and Bacca never appeared in sync as partnership agreements, the former is inadequate to fill wide cavities and give junctions as Niang might. If the lack of cohesion was comprehensible, given the two players scant ordeal of playing together, then Balotellis indifferent body language and failure to impose himself on his own terms were harder to justify. He did not touch the dance once in Sassuolos penalty country, and was subbed off in the 55 th minute.

His replacement, Mnez, did not fare much better. Mihajlovic claimed subsequentlies that neither player is hitherto at full fitness, but that disagreement is becoming harder to immerse. Almost two months have gone by since Balotelli moved his first post-injury illusion, against Fiorentina. This was the first tournament pair he had started since then, and likewise the first one Milan have lost.

We cannot accuse his conflicts on extra-curricular distractions. With the exception of one crude gesture made towards Napoli supporters who collected outside Milans hotel to abuse him last-place month, Balotellis behaviour has been beyond reproach. He has saved his head down, bided out of the gossip line and adhered diligently to riders Milan be incorporated in his contract governing conduct, social media use and even personal grooming.

But the cold reality is that he has achieved little on the tone so far to reassure Milan that this relationship was worth revitalizing. He had recently 10 competitions left in which to do so, and is unlikely to play in all of those unless his actions sharpen up swiftly.

Balotelli may experience annoyed by the timing of his hernia, which cost him force at a time when the picture was beginning to look a little more positive. He would not be the first lonely soul, though, has found that the success or flop of any love affair can come down to a matter of timing.

Talking points

No change at the top, with Juventus maintaining their three-point produce over Napoli after both teams won. The Partenopei will be happy to have Gonzalo Higuan back among the goals after recent overblown reactions to the striker leading four recreations without one. None was more liable on that figurehead, of course, than Napolis owner, Aurelio De Laurentiis, who were of the view that Higuan needed to lose a kilo and a half in order to get back to his early season formation. Was there more to such a comment than a clumsy attempt to motivate a stellar participate? Knowing De Laurentiis, you surely would not bet against it. He has been at loggerheads with Higuan for some time over the players refusal to extend a contract which ranges to 2018, and there was a smell here of the public reviews he levelled against Ezequiel Lavezzi and Edinson Cavani before the latter are each sell off Paris Saint-Germain.

Gianluigi Buffon has not let in a Serie A destination for 836 instants. Image: Giorgio Perottino/ Reuters

Another clean sheet for Gigi Buffon, who has now disappeared 836 instants without admitting a goal in Serie A, establishing his the third-longest such streak in its own history of the Italian top flight. The only actors left to overtake are Dino Zoff, who lasted 903 hours in 1972 -7 3, and Sebastiano Rossi, who exited 929 hours for Milan in 1993 -9 4. It is no foregone conclusion that Buffon will catch them; next up for Juventus are Sassuolo, who have won three directly. The Old Lady wobbled for a spell against Atalanta on Sunday, and there was a period – before Mario Lemina gave the game beyond doubt with this excellent goal – when even the succes was searching far away from secure at 1-0.

Could Roma hitherto have a say in the claim race? An eight part spread to commanders Juventus will not be easily bridged, but Luciano Spallettis side have at least demonstrated themselves as the next challenger in line behind Napoli after blowing away Fiorentina on Friday. The Giallorossi have now won seven straight-from-the-shoulder in the conference and the tempo of Mohamed Salah and Stephan El Shaarawy exclusively examined more devastating this week with Diego Perotti drawing the fibres in a No10 role.

The relegation scrap just got a whole lot tighter, with only one point dispersing Palermo and Frosinone after the Sicilians lost to Inter and the Canarini acquired at home to Udinese. Where Palermo are without a triumph in seven coincides, Frosinone have won half of their last-place six.

Verona, though, might be finished when he was threshed 3-0 at home to Sampdoria – who are finally putting some distance( or, at the least, some more squads) between themselves and the relegation zone.

Results: Atalanta 0-2 Juventus, Bologna 0-0 Carpi, Frosinone 2-0 Udinese, Genoa 1-0 Empoli, Inter 3-1 Palermo, Napoli 3-1 Chievo, Roma 4-1 Fiorentina, Sassuolo 2-0 Milan, Torino 1-1 Lazio, Verona 0-3 Sampdoria

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apsbicepstraining · 7 years ago

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Old flames Mario Balotelli and Milan start to regret reviving the occasion | Paolo Bandini

Injury may have impeded Mario Balotellis return to Milan, but his attitude on the tar – rather than off it – has led to more the issue of his wasted talent

Sinisa Mihajlovic alleged Mario Balotelli is not yet amply fit. Photograph: Elisabetta Baracchi/ EPA

Talking points

Gianluigi Buffon has not let in a Serie A destination for 836 instants. Image: Giorgio Perottino/ Reuters

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apsbicepstraining · 7 years ago

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Old flames Mario Balotelli and Milan start to regret reviving the occasion | Paolo Bandini

Injury may have impeded Mario Balotellis return to Milan, but his attitude on the tar – rather than off it – has led to more the issue of his wasted talent

Sinisa Mihajlovic alleged Mario Balotelli is not yet amply fit. Photograph: Elisabetta Baracchi/ EPA

Talking points

Gianluigi Buffon has not let in a Serie A destination for 836 instants. Image: Giorgio Perottino/ Reuters

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