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viastro · 4 years ago

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made their way home | kim mingyu

ミ�� synopsis: in which you haven’t seen each other in three years and reunite at jeonghan’s birthday party.

ミ★ genre: post breakup!au, angst, fluff, humor

ミ★ warnings: none!

ミ★ word count: 1,794

ミ★ pairings: mingyu x female reader

ミ★ notes: hi guys! i wrote this while listening to kidult so i’m in absolute tears !! i also can’t stop screaming at this gif !!! i’m going crAZY

“Nope. I’m not going.”

“Yn, please! It’s my 26th birthday and you’re not going to come?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I was planning to do.” You chuckle at the sound of Jeonghan slamming his head on the table on the other end of the phone. Sitting up on your couch, you glance out the window, the skyline of the city shining brightly back at you. “You know exactly why I won’t be going Hannie.”

“I’ll keep you guys separated the whole time.”

“You’re going to be too drunk to do that.” Jeonghan scoffs, causing you to giggle and mumble out that you’re kidding. “Please? The group hasn’t been together in years and this is the first time all of our schedules line up.”

You stay silent, watching a person in the building across from you start dancing as they cook pasta. Looking down, you pout when you think of the fact that Jeonghan’s right. You haven’t been with the whole group in a long time, about three years now.

“Hannie…”

“Please? For me?” You let out a sigh, throwing your head back onto the couch and staring at your white ceiling.

“Fine. I’ll go, only because I wanna see booseoksoon get drunk and start doing girl group covers again.” Jeonghan lets out a laugh on the other end at the memory. Once his laughter dies down, he lets out a soft smile, “Thank you yn.”

You feel yourself get choked up, coughing into your elbow and saying, “Yeah, of course Hannie. I’ll see you on Saturday.”

After the two of you say your goodbyes, you end the call, placing your phone beside you. You let out a small sigh, already feeling anxious at the thought of seeing him again after three years. The two of you have successfully avoided each other after the break up, but it slowly broke apart the friend group as well.

It’s not like we had a bad break up, it was mutual. So why am I so anxious? Why does my heart feel like it’s about to break again?

“It’s the least I could do, the group deserves it.” You mutter, staring at the white ceiling until the sun fully sets and the stars take over the sky.

“Seungkwan!” You squeal, wrapping your arms around your old friend. He lets out a laugh into your hair, mentioning how it’s been too damn long. He invites you inside, and you feel giddy at the sound of the group laughing loudly. Slipping off your shoes, you and Seungkwan walk into the living room to see the whole gang laughing at Soonyoung’s story. Your eyes scan the room, and you’re surprised to not see him among them.

“Guess who’s here?” The eleven guys turn around at the sound of Seungkwan’s voice, letting out a loud scream once they realize that it’s you. The girl they haven’t seen in so fucking long!

“YN!” Seokmin screams, jumping over the couch and tackling you in a hug. The rest of the guys follow suit, and you laugh at the impact. Your heart is overwhelmed with happiness at being with your best friends after so long, but there’s still a looming anxiousness at the thought that he should be arriving soon.

“Happy birthday, Hannie.” You greet, giving Jeonghan a big hug and handing him his gift. He wiggles his eyebrows at you, muttering how he didn’t expect you to buy him something.

“I have to buy you a gift, what kind of friend would I be if I showed up to your own birthday party without a present?” Sitting down on the couch beside Joshua, Jeonghan gives you a smile before walking over to the kitchen counter and placing the gift there.

“I’m back with soju and meat!” You freeze at the voice, and the guys beside you also seem to tense up slightly. Joshua pats your knee, getting up and walking over to help with the groceries. Minghao steps over and sits down beside you, giving you a smile in hopes to calm you down.

He chuckles at the quietness in the room, walking over he says, “Why are you guys so quiet? Wait I know. You guys were talking shit right-” The voice pauses when he lays eyes on you, and you slowly look up and lock eyes with him.

Mingyu stares at you, feeling an overwhelming amount of emotions flow through him. The main one somehow, still being pain. Your eyes shine at him, something that once used to make him smile but now makes his heart pang. He lowers his gaze once something reflects in the light, and he squeezes his hand into a fist once he sees you wearing the necklace with the half heart charm. You seem to notice, and your hand reaches up to cover it. His jaw tightens, and he walks out of the living room and into the kitchen.

You let out a small breath, listening to your heart hammer in your chest. Jihoon and Seokmin follow after Mingyu, while Minghao gives your hand a reassuring squeeze. Seungkwan stares helplessly as you space out, and Soonyoung decides to take control of the situation.

“Have I told you guys about the time I almost got hit by a firetruck?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What the fuck?”

“The time you almost got hit by what?”

“You WHAT?!”

“Okay great I haven’t. So basically...”

“Can you pass the sauce?” Seungkwan asks, and Jun hands it to him. You giggle at something Seungcheol whispers to you, and Mingyu glances at you when he hears it. He watches as you tuck your stray hair behind your ear, placing another piece of pork belly in your mouth along with some rice.

Jeonghan stares at his friends from the end of the table, a small smile on his face after having been separated from the group for so long. His eyes catch Mingyu staring at you, and he watches the way he clenches his jaw when you laugh with Chan. Jeonghan stands up from his seat and walks over to Mingyu, placing a hand on his shoulder, effectively startling him. “Hannie, you scared me.”

“How long are you planning to stare at yn until you go up to talk to her?” Mingyu lets out a sigh, wrapping his pork belly in lettuce and pacing it into his mouth instead of responding. Jeonghan chuckles, patting Mingyu’s head. “I know you miss her, and I know you saw that she still wears the necklace you got her. Try and talk to yn by the end of the night, birthday boy’s orders.” And with that, Jeonghan walks back over to his seat while Mingyu lets out a whine.

“That’s not fair!”

“It’s absolutely, 100% fair.” Jeonghan responds, turning to talk to Joshua, ending the conversation with Mingyu. You immediately look down once Mingyu turns and glances at you, choosing to look busy with the food.

i guess i will.

You take in a deep breath of the cold night air, rubbing your arms a bit once the goosebumps appear. You stare at the city, still in awe at the beauty of it during the night. You’ve been outside on Jeonghan’s balcony for a few minutes, needing a break from the loudness of the guys. A blanket gets draped over your shoulders suddenly, and you turn around preparing to thank Jeonghan or Seokmin, only to pause when you lock eyes with Mingyu.

“T-thank you.” You mutter and he nods. He walks up to the railing and leans against it, staring at the skyline of the city. The two of you stand in silence, taking in the view as you hear the faint laughter from inside.

“How have you been?” You finally ask, turning to glance at Mingyu. He shrugs, “I’ve been alright. I started culinary school a month ago.”

Letting out a small smile, you turn to the man you still love once loved. “That’s great Mingyu. I’m really happy for you.”

“Thank you. How about you? Are you still an intern for dazed magazine?” You shake your head, and he turns to glance at you.

“I actually work there now. Got promoted to be one of the editors.” He lets out a chuckle, shaking his head and you cock your head to the side at his reaction. “What?”

“I always knew you’d get that job ya know? When you’re passionate about something, it really shows. You work hard for what you want, and I’m glad they were able to see that.” Your smile falters slightly, and you turn your head to look back at the city. The two of you fall into silence once again, watching the cars down below.

“You’re still in love with me, aren’t you?” You ask, not looking at Mingyu’s reaction. Out of the corner of your eye, you see him let out a sigh and nod his head slightly.

“Yeah, I am.” Mingyu turns so that he’s facing you, and he watches you bite your bottom lip harshly.

“You still love me?” Mingyu asks softly, and you don’t move for a moment.

You thought you were over him, or at least tried to convince yourself of that. In the three years of the two of you being broken up, you dated. You went to bars, opened up online dating accounts, went on blind dates, but there was always that lingering feeling in the back of your heart that you chose to ignore. However, seeing Mingyu after three years of avoiding him made that lingering feeling unescapable.

“Yeah, yeah I do.” You finally answer, and he bites the inside of his cheek to stop the small smile from coming onto his face. He turns back so that he’s facing the railing again, and silence falls upon the two of you once again.

Mingyu reaches out and intertwines your fingers with his, and a shaky breath leaves your lips. You glance down at your connected hands, feeling like you’re finally home after so long of just wandering lost. Your eyes drift up to find him wearing the other half of the heart of your necklace, and a tear finally escapes your eye. Turning back towards the view, you rest your head on his arm, and Mingyu bites his lip to stop his own tears from falling.

The two of you stay like that for a while, comforting each other in silence after a long time of being apart.

Meanwhile, Jeonghan and the eleven other guys smile excitedly at the sight of you and Mingyu staring at the night sky together. Knowing that everything’s going to be okay between the two of you once he intertwines his hand with yours

“Finally, they made their way home.” Jeonghan mutters softly once he sees you rest your head onto Mingyu’s arm.

they made their way home.

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resetpermalik · 4 years ago

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Mass Music Measurements Survey Form

A freeCodeCampChallenge

Gaining Speed

This marks my second freeCodeCamp challenge. As I mentioned in my after action report from the first FCC challenge (tribute page), it took some time to finally gain traction and fully complete that project. That was a problem with (one) unnecessary complexity of design and (two) a lack of planning (before I began to code.) It was my assumption that if I laced the project with many working parts, I would learn much, much faster; also, that by getting right to the code, I could pick up the syntax, semantics and general knack for writing (code) in less time. And wow, I was very incorrect in thinking so.

As a response to my previous poor start (with my tribute page,) this time I was better able to address some lessons which had only occurred to me when halfway through the last project. So this time, I really dialed in the importance of streamlining my initial paperwork designs, learning how to more proficiently use Figma and some of its tools, how to better approach icon design with Photoshop and vastly improve my entire workflow. This provided (not only) an easier build, but also a more efficient angle by which I was empowered to catch more lessons along the way.

In the next few paragraphs, I will detail just which specific advantages I picked up in terms of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript capability. In addition, I will move through some of the tactics I employed to help me finish this challenge with much more confidence than the last.

Planning Stages

When I set out to hand-write the marked goals (set down by FCC’s challenge,) I do find it tedious. The thing is, I am copying (in my own words) precisely what the challenge is demanding of me. Let me elaborate…

With every line, I am telling myself that I really do not need to do this. I mean, I can pretty easily peer over at the other browser window (when necessary) and see exactly what my marching orders are. Though albeit true, there are a couple of key differences in (one) reading from FCC and (two) writing/reading my own notes.

As I write out every expected step of my project, I can build an image immediately for how I would like my creation to take shape. This falls in line with the visual aspects and design, the color scheme, the functionality of each element and the code itself. It is a powerful method to which I will pay better respect going forward. (I already have plenty of ideas on how to implement more potent procedures — like larger drafting paper, (which will allow for a greater landscape on my pages, maybe using a tablet for notation and perhaps a few voice recordings along the way)). Now, I may be getting ahead of myself! Back to the plans..

And so writing out the objectives is terrific for lots of reasons, but moving to the drawn design itself — this may be the most crucial bit yet. Here’s the deal. When I physically drew the (expected) survey form, I may have well completed the whole project. So what does that mean?

I took so much liberty in imagining what the design should resemble. More specifically, I let my mind wander and allowed thoughts to spill out onto the legal pad before me. This (in combination with my understanding of how everything needed be expressed in code) let me structure my rough draft with such a degree that the next step made the actual coding like an exercise in copy and paste. I’ll expound…

I was drawing parts which were effectively elements of HTML. This was followed by some (more precise) markings of pseudo-code (which amounted to about all of the HTML I required to code for the whole challenge.) So, when I say the planning has proved to be useful, this would be an undestatement. This attention to planning has made it possible for me to avoid the ‘nuts and bolts’ in my code editor. Now, this advancement is massive, because the saved time and effort was a testement to why I was then able to better learn more intricate detail when coding. And now let’s get to those lessons and the code at large.

Within Earshot of Paper and Pencil

My goal is not to elaborate on the use of specific technologies, but more-so the process itself. however, I will briefly touch on Figma and Photoshop…

Using Figma helped me focus on each element and understand how they more literally fit together in the puzzle. I was able to name every piece such that it would show me what my HTML element should be in code and how each need be named. Also, I took those separate entities and grouped them such that I could postion everything exactly as I wished. My next goal with Figma will be to utilize the ‘component’ feature and truly unroll some strong functionality of the software.

Regarding Photoshop, I made a logo for my survey and spun it into a favicon with relative ease. In an attempt to create animations and advertisements for my affiliate site, I have better come to understand Photoshop’s effectiveness. Thereby, building my icon was fairly straightforward. I simply pieced it together with a couple of layers and exported the PNG. I still want to be able to employ SVGs for this application; but until now, I haven’t perfected the craft. I will leave that for the coming FCC challenge. Onward!

Coding the Beast

The first topic to address here is quite obvious for me… SUITE TESTING.

When I began coding this project, I wrote my HTML boilerplate and immediately tied in the FCC testing script so I could begin verifying my code at every turn. I’ll elaborate…

I ran into a few issues with debugging throughout my last project; those were problems which resulted in code errors piling up on me simultaneously. And, while an error (for which you don’t know the remedy) is frustrating…several of those errors (all at once) becomes infuriating. Luckily, I ran into a great solution. Unit testing.

By instantiating the FCC test suite before I began coding the bulk of my project, I was then gifted the opportunity of verifying each of the sixteen goal posts.

In more detail, nearly no problems snuck up on me while coding the breadth of this project because I was adamant on addressing them in real time (as they appeared). What a true life-saver...

Input Text (element, attribute)

I found it repetitive and annoying at first, when the 10th goal of this challenge asked me to give both the input and label elements their own respective and corresponding ids. This was because I (very simply) did not understand the request. Along with that, I definitely didn’t understand why it was being asked (to begin with.)

That said, I now realize that the goal was to identify the label for the text field, in addition to the field itself. In understanding this distinction, I have now been able to find value in this very feature.

By giving ids to both my labels and input texts, I was then able to style each distinctly and find them with more ease (while peering though my HTML.) Now here’s real solid tip which I will not soon forget.

Don’t Pick More Than One Option!

So, I was writing the code for my radio buttons and what happened next is certainly a rookie mistake. When I navigated to my browser (in order to test the options,) I found that EVERY one of my buttons was clickable. And this, for obvious reasons, is not ideal.

This solution was super easy. All I needed to do was unify (or make each value the same for) the input-radio buttons. After I placed cloned values for each radio button, only one option could then be chosen. Success!

Nitpick the Name and Ids

This is something which should possibly be glossed over. But, when working with various input fields, I was asked to employ many names and ids for each.

While I’m not entirely certain (even now) whether there is a standard for which comes first, I have come to realize that name attributes should possibly supercede id attributes.

Using Visual Studio Code, it seems to like placing names before ids. And in a real life estimation, using name over id seems to be old-fashioned, but admirable.

More seriously, I understand in code, name will be less subjective (while more actionable) and ids will more far more particular and prone to alteration.

Dropdown

I was in a position to use dropdown boxes twice in this project. The problem I came across was that my options continued to begin with the default option as selectable. While I learned the solution quickly and with ease, I believe it should be recorded as vital.

When inserting a placeholder option in a dropdown box, in order to keep it from being a clickable entity, you have to style it as such.

I called the id of the option in my CSS sheet and set its display as none. That easy.

Pseudo Class and Element Selectors

Very little of my experience with this challenge dealt with pseudo class or pseudo element selectors. But, I will cover (in short) what I did learn (with these topics in mind.)

Using a pseudo element selector is the best (or maybe only) way to call an attribute from an HTML element and style with CSS.

This is how I was able to change the appearance of my placeholder text in each input-text.

I know pseudo class selectors are the way to alter elements (in a certain state) like ‘hover’ or ‘before’, but I haven’t used them enough to expand this monologue. That said, I’ll press on…

Attribute Selectors

In confluence with my previous words, I may have provided a misnomer to exactly what was being modified with pseudo-elements. But, I digress (and hopefully you see what I mean).

Using attribute selectors is quite different from other selectors, because you will be placing true brackets in as your selector which house your attribute, followed by an equal sign and a set of quotations (housing your value.)

Looks like this [attribute=“value”]. And that’s that!

Media Queries

While I employed media queries for this project, I have yet to fully grasp exactly how to use them (in reference to appropriation and context.) Therefore, I will not go into detail; but, only mention that I used them to alter my CTA button across pixel-widths. Also, I realized that setting a new media query works better when starting with the immediate values from your last screen size.

A Bit of JavaScript

The big task I pushed for in this project was this: change the client-side font family for a text area as the user types. And by big, I mean, it took me about as long as the rest of the whole challenge to learn this functionality with JavaScript. That said, I now understand much better how JS semantics are employed. And, that’s pretty priceless…

For this goal, I inserted a script with an event listener. First, I started with DOMContentLoaded, which allows for firing without the images or styling need be loaded.

The next bit lets my document be called by its (element) id.

Then, it states that my id will be triggered by any input (via an eventListener) and will force my later instantiated function.

The function declared will let the charCode number equal a string which will be console.log(ed) out as my target.value (of Nunito, sans-serif) with proper style.fontFamily.

Conclusion

Attempting to wrap this project up in a nice bow is difficult, as I have onboarded a great deal of information (from one simple survey page.) After completing this task, I am left with a split-brain. While I have learned so much from something, seemingly straightforward, now I am thrilled to make it to the next project and take on those new expectations.

I suppose my takeaway is that I should fine-tune my HTML and CSS understanding and seriously crack open all that is JavaScript. All which, can wait until tomorrow. Cheers!

#freecodecamp #html5 #css3 #javascript #design #coding

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craftloading57 · 3 years ago

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Camtasia Loop Video

I’m in the process of creating DVD videos from Camtasia Videos. I ran into a pretty hefty obstacle, though. My converted DVD’s looked blurry and low-quality. Using the software and settings below, I was able to create a sharp and well-focused DVD that played perfectly in my DVD player and allowed me to read rather fine text on my LCD TV.

The Software I Used

Zoom your video Select Animations in the tools panel and switch to the Animations tab. Click and drag the Scale Up animation to the clip you want to zoom. This adds an animation to the clip, with a default zoom already applied. To preview the animation, click and drag the playhead. I have a Camtasia project named aaa.camrec and want to capture an image in the middle of the video. How can I do it with highest possible original recording resolution? In Camtasia 2020, there is a new icon that looks like a camera in the timeline tools. The Loop: Our Community & Public Platform Roadmap for Q2 2021.

The video cutter in Camtasia allows you to trim the video and audio files separately. Cropping, zooming, and splitting are great techniques to have in your video editing tool belt! What is scaling? Scaling an image will change the overall size of that image. It is always best to display media at 100% scale in Camtasia.

Camtasia Studio 6 (for capturing the video and creating easy pan and zooms)

Sony Vegas Pro 8.0c (critical for getting a crisp AVI file)

Sony DVD Architect 4.5 (critical for creating the crisp, DVD ready folder structure)

Believe it or not, I’m using all the above on Windows 7 (64 bit) successfully.

Export Settings for Camtasia Studio

In my case, I’m using an AVI video that was already created. It’s 640×480 in size. If you’re recording your own Camtasia videos, shoot the originals in 1280 x 720 for 16:9 video according to John’s instructions. This will allow you the maximum potential for leveraging your video in various mediums (YouTube, DVD, BluRay, etc).

Go ahead and edit your video in Camtasia to your liking. You’ll need to use Pan ‘n Zoom quite a bit to show detail on the DVD. Once you’re done editing and saving your project, it’s time to export the video.

In Camtasia Studio, go to File > Produce Video As…

Select DVD Ready, then click the drop-down again and select Add/Edit Preset.

Make sure DVD-Ready is selected on the top drop-down and click Edit right below it.

Give the Preset a New Name. I used DVD-Ready AVI (NTSC). In hindsight, I should have named it “Sony DVD Architect Ready“.

Below are the settings I used.

Go ahead and export the file. This could take a while depending on the size of your video. Once it’s done, it’s time to load up Sony Vegas Pro.

How to Create a Crisp, DVD-Ready Video File in Sony Vegas Pro

Ok, we have the AVI file exported out of Camtasia Studio. You’re probably asking, “why don’t I just burn that file”? Firstly, we need to convert the AVI file into a DVD compliant structure.Secondly, most software the converts AVI’s to DVD structures compress the video into blurry, unreadable messes. AVS4You Video Editor, for example, did a terrible job rendering sharp files.

I got the best results using Sony Vegas Pro 8.0c and Sony DVD Architect 4.5. Basically, I’m using Sony Vegas Pro to create a crisp, new AVI file with minor tweaks that will make a huge difference on a DVD. Then I’m creating the DVD folder with Sony DVD Architect.

Here are the steps to Export the Detailed DVD AVI from Sony Vegas Pro:

Open Sony Vegas Pro. Go to File > Import > Media… and locate the AVI that Camtasia exported.

Right click the video in the Project Media window and select Properties.

Change the Pixel Aspect Ratio to 0.9091 (NTSC DV). Click OK.

Drag it into the Main timeline on the bottom.

Go to File > Render As… and use the settings below:

Then click “Custom…”

You’ll notice there are Tabs on the bottom of this window. Use the following settings on the tabs indicated below:

On the Project Tab, select “Best”.

On the Audio Tab, check “Include Audio Stream”.

Optionally, type in a new name for the template and press the “Save” icon. This makes it easy to select later.

Click OK.

Click Save to Render the MP2 (.mpg) file.

How to Create the DVD File in Sony Architect 4.5

Now you have a DVD Architect Compliant MP2 file that’s ready for DVD folder creation. If you didn’t do the step above, DVD Architect would insist on re-compressing the video file again to make it DVD compliant. By using the settings above, DVD architect will simply create the necessary DVD folders and “package everything up” for a Burning program like Nero, AVS Disc Creator, etc.

Camtasia Loop Video Editor

Open Sony DVD Architect.

On the bottom left panel there’s a tab called Explorer. Click it and find the previously created AVI file.

Once you find the file, it will appear in the right window. Right click it and select Insert Media.

It will be added to your DVD Menu.

Now go to File > Make DVD.

Click Prepare and in the next window, find a folder to save the DVD folder to. Click Next.

You should only see 1 Warning message about Audio being compressed. If you see a warning about video being compressed, you messed up somewhere.

Click Next. There should be “No Messages to Display” again.

Click Finish to create the DVD Folder. Warning: this will create an UGLY DVD disc menu. Creating pretty menus is outside the scope of this article.

Burn Your DVD

For the last step, you simply need to burn your DVD folder to a DVD. You can use Nero, AVS4You Disc Creator, CDBurnerXP or whatever else you wish. However, make sure you burn it as slow as possible to be sure it will play on all DVD players. Car DVD’s are especially sensitive and need to be burned at a max of 4x.

That’s it, enjoy your new, crisp DVD on your TV.

P.S. There’s also a really good course on converting Camtasia to DVD by John Rofrano. It goes into much greater detail.

Need to change the focus of your video clip but you don’t want to re-shoot your footage? The crop tool can help!

Cropping is the process of moving or adjusting the edges of an image or video clip.

Often used for photo editing, it is also helpful when editing video. With cropping, you can remove unnecessary or distracting portions of a video clip or change its dimensions to fit within a certain area.

Whether you’re working with footage from a camera or screen video, you will likely run into times when you need to crop these clips. Camera footage is often cropped to change the emphasis of a shot or remove unwanted and distracting portions.

Camtasia Video Editor

How to crop a video

Here are step-by-step instructions to crop a video using Camtasia.

Start cropping your own videos with Camtasia!

Download a free trial and get started today!

Step 1:

With a video clip or image selected on the canvas, you can select the crop tool button.

Step 2:

With the crop button selected, select the video clip or image that you want to crop.

Step 3:

A thin blue line and handles will appear on your media, signifying that crop mode is enabled.

Click and hold the handles to drag the edges of the clip or image until the desired shot is achieved.

Step 4:

When you’re finished, toggle back to the cursor by clicking the pointer option above the canvas.

After a clip is cropped, you can move it wherever you need on the canvas.

How to un-crop a clip

Using Camtasia to crop a clip is particularly convenient because it’s “non-destructive.” This means that when a clip is cropped, the original clip remains intact.

Camtasia Free Download Windows 10

So, if you’re working later on and realize you need to change how the clip has been cropped, you can!

Simply use the steps earlier in this post to toggle crop mode and make the necessary changes by adjusting the edges.

How is cropping different from zooming and trimming?

As we discussed above, cropping is the process of moving or adjusting the edges of an image. Of course, there are other ways to edit your video that don’t involve cropping images or parts of your video. Splitting and trimming are two common techniques.

Zooming is perfect for software tutorials and demonstrations when you need to display a detailed view of a user interface. Camtasia lets you zoom in or out in your videos by changing the size or scale of clips and images.

Trimming usually refers to removing part of the beginning or end of a video clip. Sometimes, this is referred to as trimming the top or tail (beginning or end). Trimming is critical to making sure that your video starts quickly and you don’t lose your audience’s attention. The video cutter in Camtasia allows you to trim the video and audio files separately.

Cropping, zooming, and splitting are great techniques to have in your video editing tool belt!

What is scaling?

Scaling an image will change the overall size of that image. It is always best to display media at 100% scale in Camtasia. Camera footage can sometimes be scaled down without losing as much clarity.

In either case, stretching a video or image larger than its natural size can cause pixelation. The scale of a clip or image in Camtasia can be viewed and edited in the Properties panel.

When you should crop a video

Here are a few ways that cropping can be a helpful technique to have in your toolbox:

Fitting footage in a specific space or frame – like a device frame

Patching a mistake or irregularity in a screen recording

Removing black bars from mobile video

Showing simultaneous actions happening in separate areas of your screen

Displaying multiple clips on screen simultaneously

Isolating part of a user interface

Camtasia Video Editor Download Free

Now that you have learned how to crop a video in Camtasia, get out there and work some video magic!

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dearyams · 5 years ago

Note

wanted to send you a prompt i was gonna do but i am too lazy prompt: mike and will have been dating but havent said i love you, mike is going on some trip for a week where cell phones dont work (obv future fic) and so Byeler is having a phone convo before mike arrives at his destination and they wont be able to talk to each other a week and will says tells mike he loves him but before mike can respond the phone disconnects as Mike arrives at the destinationn

[ crossposted on AO3 ]

“Finished packing yet?”

Mike turns from his suitcase and the clothes piles spread about the floor in his room and grins when he spots Will leaning on the doorframe a few feet away. He’s got two iced coffee cups in hand, indicative of finishing his part-time hours at the local coffee shop a few blocks north from the Byers residence. Mike wonders if Will biked his way over or took a lift with his brother to come visit before the Wheelers make their way on an impromptu trip to upstate New York at a cabin his dad had recently inherited.

The kneeling boy waves his hands at the disorderly state surrounding him and shrugs. “I’m trying and failing at packing the right clothes for this venture, I’ll say that.”

Will chuckles and walks fully into the room. He passes along Mike’s coffee, shoving around haphazardly folded pants to find a seat on the floor beside the other boy. Mike watches him grab a sweater and toss it aside. “It’s summer so you don’t need to pack heavy. Just grab some t-shirts and jeans; that should do. Shorts too if you’d like.”

“Sure,” sighs Mike before sipping from his cup. “I don’t want to make the visit miserable if I’m wearing the wrong clothes. Wrong for the weather and wrong for looking tolerable in the photos I know Mom is gonna force on me.”

Will laughs, a gentle breeze in the summer’s heat. “You’ll look good in whatever you put on.”

“As my boyfriend, you’re kind of obligated to say that.”

“Not really.” the brunette leans in to kiss Mike’s cheek. “I’ll let you know when you look bad if only for the sake of my own eyes.”

“And when you won’t be next to me, how will you judge my outfits properly?”

Will checks his watch and hums. “When’s your departure? If you have time, you can try out some of the outfits and I’ll let you know what works.”

Mike grins as he reaches over Will’s lap and snags a band t-shirt. “Sneaky aren’t you; tryna get me undressed.”

“I’ll cover my eyes.” Will places his unoccupied hand over his eyes but spreads his fingers between his middle and ring fingers to peek through the opening. Mike scoffs, tossing a stray pair of shorts at his face which makes the brunette laugh heartily. Mike already misses Will, the knowledge that they’ll be separated for a week squeezing his heart dry with romantic despair. He wishes Will could come with but the trip was pretty unplanned and though Mike's “job” as a blog writer and editor doesn’t require a remote location, Will’s job doesn’t allow the same ease when taking off work.

(Though Mike thinks he’ll probably still be working offline on an article if his mom doesn’t steal his laptop for “family bonding in the forest” time.)

Mike’s sudden fashion show lasts for about an hour and while Will does offer good input, most of that hour is spent playing around and Mike sneaking in as many kisses as they can get away with whenever Mike peels off a shirt and struggles to get his head through the tight collar of another. Afterwards, Will helps finish packing and when completed, they lounge about on Mike’s bed as Will discusses the customers he met earlier in the day.

Though he knows packing just mere hours before departure isn’t a habit he should develop, especially when the plans for his career require frequent traveling, he spent the night before editing a movie review scheduled for posting during the drive. Mike doesn’t regret his momentary time mismanagement if it means he spends more time with Will before the trip. The article can wait—he’s posting it early anyway—but time spent with his boyfriend is always coveted.

When Mike’s mom knocks on the door, Will pulls away from Mike’s chest where he rested his head as they page through Mike’s hard copy of The Golden Compass which he wanted to review in line with the show’s release. Shaking his head and straightening his hair as best as possible, Mike struts to his door and opens it with raised eyebrows. His mom looks up from checking her phone and offers Mike a tight smile before looking past him to wave at Will.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you two,” she starts warmly, “but Mike, we have to get going soon. The traffic through the city is getting dense thanks to an accident on the 70.”

“Got it,” replies Mike as he turns back to Will, who walks to his side with both their empty cups in hand. “I’ll see you in a few days, Byers.”

“‘Course.” Will grins and leans up to press a gentle kiss to Mike’s cheek. “Call me when you’re getting close to your destination.”

“Sure, worrywart,” he teases but turns his face to kiss Will’s lips one last time before he has to depart. He watches Will nod bashfully at his mom and give her a short goodbye before making his way downstairs. Mike doesn’t look away until he hears the front door closing and then he casts his gaze on his mom. “Are Dad, Nancy, and Holly waiting outside?”

“Yes,” she nods toward the front of the house. “We’ll all just waiting on you now.”

It doesn’t take long for Mike to join his family at the car, and as his dad pulls out the driveway, Mike turns in the direction of the Byers and smiles when he sees Will on his bike a little ways down the road watching. He sticks his hand out the window, his wave only growing more frantic when Will waves back. Holly giggles and Nancy makes a side comment about love sick teenagers as if she wasn’t one herself during her escapades with Steve, Jonathan, and now Robin. The first hour and a half fills with Holly saying “moo” every time they pass a cow on the way to the interstate and Mike feels like smashing his head against his window when they pass a farm and Holly moos until she nearly passes out. Pulling out his phone, Mike shoots Will a selfie of himself despondently looking out the window and groans when his cell service takes its sweet time sending the message along. Mike gets a reply a reply twenty minutes later: Will laughing at his misery with a short additional, “you’ll be there before you know it,” and a bunch of kiss emojis.

The next hour passes with Mike flipping through his ever growing Will gallery, a digital photo album filled with selfies and candid shots of Will, both solo and with Mike. He’s not one for being in photos himself but Will manages to drag him into a few selfies here and there. He doesn’t mind snapping a selfie either by himself or together—cheeks squished as they both attempt to fit in the frame as Mike holds the phone up and out—because Will always asks him to send the photo along and then makes it his lock screen until the next time he convinces Mike it’s photo time.

After settling on a candid shot Mike snapped when he and Will visited Lovers’ Lake and the sun framed Will like a bright halo of fire, Mike settles on playing a mobile game for about another two hours before staring out the window until the trees blend together and his eyes find themselves sliding shut. He wakes up a few times here and there when the family stops at gas stations and picks up snacks—he definitely remembers his mom arguing with his dad about stopping at a hotel which they ultimately don’t do—but he wakes up for the final time to his phone buzzing in his lap, startling him out of a dream he quickly forgets upon waking. Caller ID tags the number as Will and he immediately answers as he scrambles for his headphones in his pocket.

“Hey,” he begins, shoving the headphone plug into the slot at the bottom of the device, “Is everything okay back home?”

“Everything’s great,” Will’s voice crackles on the line and Mike peaks outside in the darkness to notice the forest surrounding him. They must be close to the cabin destination already. He didn’t think he had slept for that long. “Just checking in since it’s about time you’ve arrived if your dad didn’t take a rest.”

Mike laughs. “You’re cute, you know, checking up on me like this.” He hears Nancy snorting and reaches over Holly to pinch her bare arm. She glares at him and covers Holly’s eyes to flip him off. “Nancy says hello by the way.”

“Hello back to her.” Mike can hear Will’s grin and his heart clenches in sorrow at the current distance between them. “Are you doing okay there?”

“Yeah, peachy.” Mike yawns and covers his mouth. “Is it too cheesy to say I already miss you?”

“Maybe, but I miss you, too, so you don’t have to be embarrassed about it.”

A sleepy smile curls itself on Mike’s lips. “One week, Byers; one week and then I’m back.”

“Yeah, but don’t spend your time counting down the days, alright? I’ll do that for us both; you just have a great time at the cabin.”

Mike would kiss him if he could. “I’ll try my best but you know how my brain works.”

“Are you telling me it actually does work?”

“I’m breaking up with you.” Will laughs heartily. “Why are you laughing; I’m serious this time.”

“Sure, Wheeler.” Mike frowns as the last bit of his name gets caught in static. “Hey, I know this is probably something that should wait until you’re back but this separation made me realize I should tell you either way.”

“This sounds pretty important.”

“Yeah. I, uh, you probably already know this though but,” and Will takes a deep breath and releases it, though Mike hears it in short, split crackles. “Mike, I love you.”

The clarity in those four words stuns Mike into speechlessness and his mouth dries as his heart thumps speedily in his chest. Will is right, Mike already knows Will loves him, but this is the first time Will has ever said the fact out loud. I love you echoes in Mike’s head at the reverb levels of a rock guitarist. It takes far too long for his brain to come back online, but by the time it does, the car speeds past a brush of trees and the call suddenly drops. Mike looks down at his phone screen as the loud call dropped tone passes through his headphones. His home screen—a playfully disgruntled selfie as Will kisses his cheek—stares him back in the face as Will’s voice continues to bounce about in his head.

Mike, I love you.

Mike quickly calls back but his phone spits back the message that he has no service. “Nancy,” he hisses even though the entire car heard his part of his conversation with Will anyway, “do you have any service on your phone? I need to call Will back and my phone is being homophobic.”

Nancy raises her eyebrows but checks phone and shakes her head. “Looks like you’re straight out of luck.”

“Ha; you’re quite the comedian, aren’t you.” Mike reaches forward to tap his mom’s arm. “Mom, can I borrow your phone to finish a call?”

“Sorry, sweetie, I’ve lost service, too. I don’t think any of us can use internet on our phones.”

“Does the cabin at least have wifi?”

“Nope,” snorts Mike’s dad as he drives the car down a dirt road further into the forest. “You kids these days need to learn what life is like without cell phones anyway.”

Mike rolls his eyes and mumbles under his breath, “Okay, boomer.”

“What was that, young man?”

“Okay, bummer.” Nancy bites on her bottom lip and Mike sends her a grin before settling in his seat.

Their mom reaches a hand back to rest on Mike’s knee. “It’s only 7 days, Michael. I’m sure both you and Will can last that long without contact.”

He told me he loves me, Mom, he wants to explain but Will’s words are too fresh and far too private to blurt out in front of the whole family. He crosses his arms silently and turns to stare out the window, hoping that Will can wait out these next few days and hoping he doesn’t think Mike hung up on him after such an important conversation. I love you, too, he thinks to himself, smiling as he presses his hand against the chilly window and imagines Will on the other side as if the car window is the window in Will’s room and Will’s inside watching Mike with that ever so lovestruck grin filled with appreciation that Mike came over despite the cold night to comfort Will from the nightmares that occasionally plague him to this day.

I love you, Will, he repeats inwardly, wait for me.

#byler #byeler #mike wheeler #will byers #fluff #drabble #request finished #sidenote: i call the book 'the golden compass' because that's the title in the states!#on ao3

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letterboxd · 4 years ago

Photo

Lockdown Lens.

The filmmakers behind found-footage hits Searching and Host share their best tips for making movies in quarantine. Hint: you’ll need to tape your camera to your laptop, move away from the wall, and plump up the post-production budget.

“There is a really opportunistic moment here that you can take advantage of, if you come up with the right thing.” —Aneesh Chaganty, director of Searching

“You should never wait for the ideal circumstance because it doesn’t exist. Look at what you’ve got right now and use that.” —Rob Savage, director of Host

A low-budget thriller starring John Cho as a desperate dad, Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 debut feature Searching, co-written with Sev Ohanian, shook up the found-footage genre with its seamless blend of content from chat rooms, social platforms, security-camera footage and news coverage. Chaganty and Ohanian’s next film, Run, which also takes place mostly inside one house, will debut on Hulu later this year after its theatrical release was quashed by Covid-19.

Meanwhile, a 56-minute séance horror that appears to take place entirely on a Zoom call became the most popular film on Letterboxd within a week of landing on Shudder in July (our popularity score is based on the amount of activity across our platform for each film, regardless of rating). Host—conceived and completed within just twelve weeks—was written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage and Jed Shepherd, and directed by Savage.

Our editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood asked Chaganty, Hurley, Savage and Shepherd to draw on their expertise in making browser horrors and other limited-setting stories, to inspire other aspiring filmmakers sheltering in place.

Listen to the full interviews on the Lockdown Filmmaking episode of The Letterboxd Show.

Joseph Lee and John Cho in TV news footage from ‘Searching’.

Keep the parameters tight.

“Making a story in a limited setting is a very smart thing to do for an aspiring screenwriter—first and foremost because it’s produceable,” Aneesh Chaganty advises. ”If you’re an unknown entity in the film world, the cheaper your product takes to make is probably a better bet for you to be taking as opposed to writing a kajillion-dollar project. The first project that I wrote was a $90-million movie that Sev and I wrote. ‘Why did we do this?!’”

Chaganty also stresses the need to ensure your project wants to be a limited-setting story. “A lot of times I’ll read a found-footage script and it will often feel like all it wants to be is a not a found-footage script. There’s a lot of times where it feels like the writers don’t want it to be that.”

Explore the whole box.

Chaganty encourages aspiring writers to imagine your limited environment as a box. “You’re writing within this box, all the characters are in this box, I think the best way to examine it is not to ever try leaving the box, but make sure you explore it every which way. The box upside down, the box right side up, the box left, the box right…

“This is an objective that should apply to all films, but it’s easier to objectively analyze whether you’re doing it in a limited setting. With a film like Searching, we have to make sure that every possible iteration of how a narrative can take place on a computer screen is done. Looking at a movie like Buried, they’re doing every possible iteration of how that story can be told underground, in a coffin, before [the location] starts to change.”

(Good news for fans of Searching: with new tech platforms appearing all the time, it turns out there are more parts of the box to explore. A sequel is in the works, but Chaganty won’t be in the director’s chair.)

Give yourselves a deadline.

With no end to the pandemic in sight, it’s easy for one day to melt into the next. Keep your team motivated with a deadline. “I gave us two weeks,” says Rob Savage, Host’s director, who co-wrote the film with Jed Shepherd and Gemma Hurley, after his Twitter prank went viral.

“So we had two weeks, all three of us, to come together,” adds Hurley. “Let’s figure out a structure, let’s figure out these character dynamics, figure out a way to build tension around this idea of a séance and hang a story and a journey for the characters, for where we want the séance to end up. We had a Google doc where we were editing it together. I’d go away and do my pass, Rob would go away and do his pass, and Jed would. And that was it. It was really just like, run and gun, go go go.”

“If things had gone to plan we would have had this out in two months; in the end it took three,” Savage continues. ”It took twelve weeks from when I first called Jed up and said ‘let’s make a feature’, to delivering the movie—roughly breaks up as two weeks of writing, we shot for three weeks, and then a lot of editing and VFX time.”

Know your story inside-out, but don’t labor the script.

“We’ve got some hearts to break, here,” warns Hurley. “There was no official script in the standard way because there just wasn’t time. The whole point was capturing a zeitgeist moment… If we went away and wrote a feature-film script, well, ‘we’ll see you after the pandemic’s over, guys!’. You’d miss that moment. That was the joy of it. You didn’t have time to labor over every syllable.”

Some of Host’s key moments were scripted, Hurley reassures. “We had lines we wanted them to suggest, but more than giving them dialog it was about giving them prompts for every scene.”

Savage adds: “The thing that we did really well, at the end of the two weeks of writing, is every single scene, me, Jed and Gemma, you could quiz us all in separate interrogation rooms, we’d be able to tell you the purpose of every scene and what we wanted to get out of them. We had the movie so clearly in our heads in terms of how we wanted it to feel.”

An advantage of having a treatment rather than a completed script? “A sense of discovery every day,” says Savage. “The actors just brought that amazing spontaneity to it and these incredible performances, because we knew the parameters.”

Aneesh Chaganty and John Cho on the set of ‘Searching’, with a GoPro behind the laptop capturing the webcam view. / Photo by Elizabeth Kitchens

Choosing your camera (spoiler: it’s not your laptop’s).

“John is acting against a black screen,” Chaganty reveals. “There’s nothing on his computer, he’s literally looking at nothing.” To ensure complete control over their footage while preserving authentic eyelines, both sets of filmmakers taped additional cameras to the laptops of their key talent. In Host, each of the Zoom participants had iPhones recording at their highest resolution “so we knew we were getting a clean 1080p,” says Savage. In Searching’s case, it was a GoPro taped to the rear of the various computers used by John Cho.

“Before we started shooting the film,” Chaganty explains, “we had to make [an animatic] version using Adobe Premiere, because much of John’s performance is knowing his eyeline. He needs to know exactly where the iMessages open up—in order for us to know that we almost have to know those decisions already.” Chaganty and his team developed a 100-minute animatic cut, with Chaganty playing every role; “understanding where every window is, where every cursor is, so that by the time we get to set, what I’m doing is showing John ‘okay, this is where that message pops up, and while you’re talking to Deborah, you’re going to look over there, go down there, open Chrome, type in…’ So everything is very specific eyelines. Sometimes my notes after a take would just be ‘John that was great, just move the cursor a little further to the left this time’.”

Haley Bishop as séance host Haley in ‘Host’.

Develop your characters and the genre will take care of itself.

Chaganty and the Host team have the same advice for how to ratchet up the tension in a limited-setting film: it’s all about character. “If you’re going to end up putting these characters through tough times and potentially kill them,” says Shepherd, “develop them as real characters, so that we care about them.”

Although Host’s script was, in fact, only a seventeen-page beat-sheet, the most important part of its structure was the long stretch up front where the characters are dialling into the call and catching up—what Shepherd calls the “getting to know you bit”. “That first part is really important because if it wasn’t for that, the third act wouldn’t work at all. The best thing to do is make your characters real, authentic, believable. Everything else takes care of itself.”

Chaganty agrees: “When you are writing something that is genre, your other decisions don’t have to be genre, and in fact it might elevate it more when you don’t do that, because everything else is already doing that, you know?”

In particular, he advises, trust your talent to lean into their characters, rather than into the genre. “This was my challenge at least, as a totally amateur director: sometimes what I was looking for was the most obvious take as opposed to the most subtle take. “When we left the shoot I was thinking it was take six, or the one where it was most obvious [John] was angry or he was sad or something—and what we ended up using was the most subtle takes. That subtlety, that underneath layer, so much of that was him. He’s so good. He’s so good. I hate to say it, but I didn’t realize how good he was until we edited it together.”

Spend time getting the interface right.

“There’s not a frame of Zoom footage in the actual movie.”—Rob Savage

Found-footage films and browser horrors rely on the believability of the content. Searching and Host work because the footage feels real, even though the reality is there are multiple takes and a lot of post-production. Just as Searching was built around a detailed animatic, Host is, in fact, not a recorded Zoom call, but a result of three weeks of filming every actor in multiple takes, with stunt set-ups, followed by the addition of VFX and Zoom interface details.

“Originally the plan was just to screen-record a Zoom call, but then we realized that we were pumping so much money into doing these crazy stunts and effects that we could blow half the budget in 30 seconds,” says Savage. “You’re basically making five movies. We have to make sure the performances are all tight in every single screen. Radina might be amazing in take one and Jemma might nail it in take three and we have to cut them all together so they work seamlessly.”

Savage praises Host editor Brenna Rangott for pulling it all together, underscoring the importance of post-production in your budget and schedule. “Honestly, what Brenna did with all this footage? It’s her movie as much as it’s anyone else’s movie. She absolutely smashed it.”

The Host crew also relied on fellow filmmaker and designer Dan Hawkins to build the almost 4,000 individual assets in the film, and producer Douglas Cox, who went through the whole movie to type out every single name, label and other Zoom interface detail. “4,000 times he had to do that, and that’s what you see to make it play seamlessly.” (And, yes, they had Zoom’s permission.)

Jed Shepherd, Rob Savage and Gemma Hurley during a Zoom séance for Slashfilm with Chris Evangelista.

Trust your gut.

The Host team were pursued for a feature-length version of Savage’s Twitter prank by a “mind-blowing” number of studios—“it was a really competitive situation,” says Savage—but they went with Shudder for one reason: instinct.

“It was the height of the lockdown and a lot of production companies just started ringing and saying ‘Is there a longer version of this? Because it’s the only thing we can shoot right now’. So we pitched to a bunch of places, and the pitch was basically ‘a Zoom séance, we don’t know if it’s going to be any good, we’re going to use our mates, are you in or not?’ and Shudder [was] like ‘of course we are’.”

It wasn’t about the money. Some companies offered more generous budgets, but wanted to release six to eight months after filming. “We were like, ‘no, this needs to be out this week’.”

Move away from the wall.

Since so much of the movie business—all those endless meetings—has pivoted to video-calls, we asked the filmmakers for specific advice on how to present yourself online, in pitch meetings, table reads and the like.

The very minimum, they all agree, is to have good lighting. “It’s crazy what a difference a desk lamp can make to your environment,” says Chaganty. And move away from the wall. “Rule number one any director of photography will ever say, is don’t shoot at a wall,” he adds. “The further that you can place yourself from that wall, it’s just going to look better.” (It also gives you more protection from any demons that may burst from cupboards during your Zoom, Host’s filmmakers advise.)

Chaganty reveals that the pandemic has actually helped his pitching abilities in video meetings with executives. Chaganty and Ohanian are currently developing a heist movie, while simultaneously pitching a television show. “Right now pitches are all digital. Traditionally when you pitch something, it’s a lot of material and you just memorize it. But now, you can have your script with you—but you can’t make it seem like you’re reading off a screen.” The trick, he says, is to re-size the window of the person you’re pitching to, and re-size the script to the same dimensions, then place them directly over each other.

“So you’re reading and your eyeline is exactly where they are, and then you switch over, and they’ll never know and you’ve just pulled it off perfectly because you’re still looking at the exact same spot. It just kind of feels like an incredible performance where you’ve pulled these great words out of your mind and your heart, without anyone knowing.”

On the other hand, don’t put too much effort into details that nobody will notice. “We were doing a table read for a film,” says Host’s Shepherd, “and I thought it would be fun to change the background to correspond with what scene were were reading. I thought it was really clever but nobody noticed except me.”

Producer Natalie Qasabian, writer-producer Sev Ohanian and writer-director Aneesh Chaganty on the set of their forthcoming feature, ‘Run’.

There’s no time like the present.

“When digital cameras came out, everyone started saying ‘this is a great thing for filmmakers because it really democratizes filmmaking’,” says Chaganty. “We are in a very small bubble where it’s even more democratized than it was before—that’s because everybody has the same resources that we do right now.

“It feels like John Oliver and Hasan Minhaj and Trevor Noah are all making stuff with the same quality that you can make, that I can make, just in our own houses right now. The longer this pandemic goes on, and the longer that it feels that Hollywood can’t make traditional stuff the way it used to, the more likely it is that the demand for content is going to rise.

“If you can make something good in this time, I think you’re in a really good spot as far as getting eyeballs on it. And eyeballs essentially are the things that can propel a career to the next stage.”

Plus, there are mental health benefits to making movies together, at a time when we are all being urged to stay socially connected while physically distant. “What’s been really nice about the whole thing is it just made it so clear how collaborative a process filmmaking is,” says Savage. “Normally people kind of forget about that and you have ‘a film by’, but here you had to put so much trust in everyone. It was just a really fun way of working. I recommend it to everyone.”

‘Host’ is available now on Shudder. ‘Searching’ is available via VOD platforms. ‘Run’ is coming soon to Hulu in the US and will be released theatrically in international markets. (Aneesh Chaganty has been diligently updating his Letterboxd diary, which includes one of our favorite recent reviews of Steve Soderbergh’s ‘Contagion’.)

#filmmaking #filmmaking tips #filmmaking process #horror #thriller #aneesh chaganty #host #shudder #hulu #searching #run #sarah paulson #rob savage #jed shepherd #gemma hurley #browser horror #found footage #found footage film #letterboxd

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lovelylogans · 5 years ago

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Can I ask for more Rory salt? Right after finishing the show I didn't realize why everyone was so upset about her but now that I've rewatched I kind of understand. I'd like to hear more about your opinions on her! (Mostly bc I have 2 braincells so stuff like that flies over my head lol)

okay, granted, a Fair amount of my salt comes from the perspective of a journalism student, ie who they’re trying to portray, and also like. someone at a similar Point in their life, so. here we go. rory Salt.

like i will say she isn’t like, bonafide the Worst Character of all time, but like...... okay. like. this tracks back to one of my original and largest gripes with gilmore girls, and also a large reason of why i like the earlier seasons better than the later ones.

this post explains it very well; the early seasons (and first episodes) of gilmore girls seem to promise healing, moving forward, bettering familial relationships. the actuality of gilmore girls is the repetition of mistakes and things continuing in cycles, and often getting worse.

so, like. rory. rory’s character is established as this sweet, innocent, naive kid, with a fairly decent work ethic and big dreams to aspire to journalism and a certain level of fame (like christine amanpour, i think was the journalist she mentioned in the first day at chilton ep?) she’s smart, quiet, beginning to establish a relationship with her parents, but still a bit uncomfortable within the realm of chilton/privilege—i think this is best exemplified within the debutante episode, in which she’s uncomfortable with the premise, but goes through with it for the sake of making emily happy. same with the golfing episode with richard—she has zero interest in golf, but she gets to spend a day with her grandfather, and she wants to establish that relationship with him.

but then there’s that thing kicking in, in which gilmore girls is essentially a cyclical tragedy; rory gradually becomes more confident in herself and her abilities (becoming valedictorian, going up against paris for the speech on cspan) and in her relationship with boys; she goes after jess, and, once he leaves, lets him go and eventually is like “you shouldn’t have left me. but i’m saying goodbye to you, on my terms.” i think that s3 is where her character is strongest; she’s still sweet and shy, but she has a bit of an edge. she’s caring toward her friends, she, sure, makes the occasional mistake, but she eventually rallies from them. that’s when i like rory’s character best.

rory starts her decline in season four. this dates back to the whole cyclical thing; she’s the one who goes to her grandparents for money, echoing the original premise of the show, and a cycle starts anew. she goes to another new, prestigious school (yale) where she’s pushed to new limits.

but rory makes mistakes. she stands up for herself, yes, namely taylor when he pushes for her to be ice cream queen, but she also has a certain level of... entitlement, i suppose. like. let’s take “die, jerk.”

(i’m gonna go briefly into a journalistic tangent here, which is especially heaped by the fact i’ve been writing a lot of reviews lately. also, it applies.)

so, first of all, she takes her mom to her job. her mom. literally think about every other job in the world and, barring a “family day” at the office, please name a situation in which that’s acceptable. right? there’s basically no other situation in which that’s a thing you do when you’re being professional. (this is a repeated gripe, by the way; she often brings lorelai along. this could have been achieved with some phone calls where she hangs up and then does her job. but i digress. this goes into a whole rant on how women in journalism are portrayed in tv shows and other media, but seriously, i digress.)

then there’s the review itself. it’s mean.

“she has the grace of a drunken dock worker.” compared her to a hippo. “the roll around the bra strap,” the line about regretting how evolution had led man to stand on two feet because it led to this night. the ballerina comes to yell at her, which is wrong, but holy god, that never even should have been published. sure, it’s partially the fault of doyle, who as an editor should have stepped in, said, “rewrite the holy hell out of this,” and given her a talking-to on how reviewing should be about the performance and not body-shaming her, because yes you can give things a bad review but not to that level, but rory is the one who wrote it. and she only begins to seem apologetic when people start to react to it other than doyle; the ballerina, her mom, emily and richard. this happens a few times throughout—rory (and lorelai) never seem to realize how mean they can get until people start reacting to what they’re doing and saying.

she’s willing to write those things, read them, have other people read them, and put them out into the public, and doesn’t even consider the potential ramifications that it could have had on not only the dancer, but the ballet performance (which gets shut down, in part due to rory’s review) the costumer, the crew, everyone involved. yes, bad reviews exist, and yes, they can be brutal, but they’re almost never so personally vindictive and mean. she says she’s writing her opinion. look at how harsh that opinion is.

that’s part of why my opinion of rory takes a decline; being mean. another part of it is a certain level of entitlement.

because the revival is on my brain lately, let’s talk revival stuff. making it as a freelance journalist is hard. it’s hard work. it isn’t for a lot of people. especially in new york city, where the industry is so competitive that finding a job in journalism is a whole Thing. rory has a piece in the new yorker (not bad!) and is writing a piece for gq (also not bad, not bad at all!) about people waiting in line for a certain event.

now. let’s take, like, season four/season five rory, who compiled like three separate PILES of research for a story that wasn’t even hers, worked hard enough at chilton, a highly academically competitive school, to get valedictorian. rory is portrayed as a hard worker. she does what’s necessary for the job and to improve.

revival? whoosh, out the window!

she falls asleep during an interview for the gq job. she continually jets off to london to go see logan. she’s completely unprepared for a job interview, having absolutely zero ideas for any stories, despite the fact that freelance journalists are almost always working multiple stories and coming up with new ideas so they can, y’know, get paid. chilton offers her a job as a teacher if she gets her masters, but she turns it down, which, on one hand, sure, follow your dreams, on the other, if you’re continually complaining that you’ll take a job, ANY job, and get a very good job handed to you on a silver platter with the potential for more growth post that job with the addition of your masters and DON’T TAKE IT?!?!?!

plus, in the job interview, when she doesn’t get it, UNDERSTANDABLY, she calls the interviewer angrily saying that the interviewer practically promised her the job, despite the fact that it was a PRELIMINARY JOB INTERVIEW and there are OTHER CANDIDATES who DEFINITELY AT LEAST HAD STORY IDEAS. no matter how impressive your resume is, you have to at least show that you’re trying, because the whole thing in journalism (esp for those breaking into a business) is that EVERYONE has an extensive resume. that’s part of why it’s so competitive.

and still complains that she’s broke, in addition to the trust fund that we know she received at 25, plus whatever money richard left her in his will. if she was broke, she’d be living entirely above her means—those continual trips to london, living in a sizeable one-bedroom apartment in NEW YORK CITY, going out to eat very often.

and then just??? i could ramble more (the whole sleeping with a MARRIED DEAN thing, her partnership with logan, i could go back in and ramble about how the body-shaming is continual despite the fact that they frequently eat fattening foods and make fun of sports and are only so thin bc, well, tv magic, but also because they have Miraculous metabolisms, the way that they treat their friends, to some extent, but. yeah. here is some Rory Salt.)

#magicquill42 #ask #annalise talks gilmore girls

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mittensmorgul · 5 years ago

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Who is Belphegor?

I mean, who is he, really? There’s a possibility that he’s exactly what he claims to be, but everything in me is screaming THIS IS A ZEKE SITUATION, and we don’t yet understand his true motives or identity. Since 15.01 aired, I’ve been playing around with theories, and I’ve got it narrowed down to a few I would really enjoy. I think I’ve talked about (or around) each of these theories in my tag for Belphie, and you can go read those posts here for further edification and general waffling on my part.

1. Belphegor. He might actually be exactly what he says he is. I mean, why NOT believe him? Reasons FOR the theory:

because he said so

his general behavior fits what we know about the demon Belphegor in a general sort of way

Reasons AGAINST the theory:

because he said so, and we’re watching Supernatural

the two characters I’ve seen most people ping to in reaction to him are RUBY (who lied about her entire motivation for befriending them and being helpful) and EZEKIEL (who lied about his identity and motives from the moment he showed up, and was actually Gadreel... which went over swimmingly)

his appearance was entirely too ~convenient~ to believe it at face value (he was the ONLY demon to pop out of hell in that mess, conveniently knew the exact spells they needed to get out of that predicament, is REALLY good at manipulating TFW specifically, etc. etc.)

what kind of torturer is AFRAID of the things he tortures? why would a demon fear a human ghost?

What kind of demon would ASK FOR A SACK OF SALT and then handle said salt as if it was nothing?

2. The Shadow. This was one of my first thoughts, even before the episode aired, because of the situation we knew to be true of Jack, where he was at the end of 14.20, and what he was DOING there-- i.e. having a friendly chat with Billie and the Shadow, and what the PR said about Jack feeling conflicted about returning to his body because of guilt. This felt like one of those situations that Billie would need to have HANDLED SOONEST, and the Shadow was conveniently RIGHT THERE to fill in for Jack. We already know he has the power to appear to be other beings (Cas faced him as himself in the Empty, and couldn’t tell he wasn’t Dumah in Heaven, for example), and can theoretically convincingly take on the form of whatever he wants to T-1000 style. That said, Reasons FOR:

Incredibly powerful being who could pull off everything we saw Belphegor do

snarky personality that also lines up with what we saw

INTENSE PERSONAL DIRECT KNOWLEDGE of the contents of Cas’s knowledge bank, his emotions and personality, feelings “i tiptoed through all your little tulips” style

can appear to be other types of beings in a way that Cas can’t perceive his true nature and accepts what he does see as truth

we don’t know the scope of his powers or abilities outside of the Empty or Heaven, or how he would be limited or affected by possessing a human-ish body (explaining his discomfort around a human soul since they aren’t relegated to his domain upon death, and his particular vulnerability to injury and pain in a human-ish body)

The Empty is outside of God’s purview, and therefore he may be able to operate in complete stealth without alerting Chuck to his presence on Earth in a way literally no other being could, making him the ultimate secret agent here

literally ZERO other demons seem to have escaped Hell during this containment breach. Every other being who got out has been a human soul.

Reasons AGAINST:

we just don’t know what he’s actually up to in canon. He could still be in the Empty babysitting Jack (not that we know that would be a limitation on where he could still be, if he could just scoop out a pile of goo-him and send a bit of himself off to animate Jack’s body for a while, but we don’t know if that’s possible, either)

3. Metatron. Based on what we know of how the Empty works, and how Metatron specifically died, there’s a good chance we’re seeing the return of Metatron for one of two separate reasons. He died without grace-- as a human-- so theoretically he would’ve gone to heaven, right? Like Jack did in 14.08? We know the Empty didn’t invade Heaven for HIS soul, though, so there’s a possibility that he may have gone directly to the Empty anyway. Though the way Amara killed him... there’s a chance he was “absorbed” into her (like she stated several other times happened when she “consumed” souls, you know? but we don’t know exactly what happened to Metatron other than he disappeared into a lil poof of darkness, so this is entirely theoretical conjecture). But I’ve long paralleled Amara to the Empty, and I don’t think there’s really a functional difference between being consumed by Amara and being sent to the empty, you know? They are both The Void. I literally JUST wrote this post, which inspired me to make a list in the first place, where you can read my thoughts in detail. Reasons FOR:

talk about someone ready to play foil to Chuck, the writer out of control in desperate need of an editor. Think 11.20, to the nth degree here.

golly he KNOWS Chuck’s whole “writing process,” and NOBODY is more familiar with the entire body of Chuck’s writing, going all the way back to creation

Even after he lost his mojo, he was still proficient in the sorts of spells we saw Belphegor pull out of thin air, you know?

he’s also the exact sort of snarky Belphegor has been

he was weirdly obsessed with Cas’s trenchcoat (lol, abomination) and had a MASSIVE jealous-on for Cas in general

the spell Belphegor used to erect the wall referencing river imagery (the river shall end at its source and all that)

metatron’s reluctance to engage in “direct combat” himself, and his comments to Cas from the get-go that he needed Cas because he’s not a warrior himself, which lines up with the “bad ghost! no!” behavior when faced with a direct confrontation

tangential to the above point, the fact he died HUMAN without supernatural powers would leave him vulnerable to injury from a ghost, as well as the “general pains of humanity” we saw demonstrated when Constance was able to cut his hand and cause him physical pain that way

Metatron, being the Scribe of God who basically possesses not only the knowledge of all of creation and a vast swath of human writings as well, would love the sort of game of pretending to be a specific demon this way, and would love the subterfuge of it all as well

He is REALLY good at this sort of manipulation

theoretically whether he went to heaven or the empty, billie was on hand to fetch him out and sign him up for service

Reasons AGAINST:

we don’t know where metatron went after he died, and if Amara did consume him it might not be possible to have brought him back (unless Amara is also part of this bigger cosmic plotting and helped his return the way she did with Mary, so this might not be a reason against after all)

would Metatron be able to cloak his true identity behind a false mask of a “true demon face” that Cas identified immediately? (unless he was, again, helped along with that by the Shadow or Amara... we don’t know if their powers would extend to that)

it’s a possibility that-- for whatever reason-- his soul did end up in Hell-- whether by nature of his “sins” or by design of some outside force (Bobby ended up wrongfully in Hell, too, so who knows), and he has actually become a demon, but this seems incredibly unlikely... would his soul have been demonized yet? it’s only been a few years... and again, this is pure conjecture for the sake of argument, and not based in anything in canon.

4. Balthazar. I mean, for all the reasons I stated above for Metatron being handy and ready to serve, and possibly getting an assist from Billie or the Empty to cloak his “true identity,” we know he would’ve been handily found in the Empty. Reasons FOR:

Belphegor kinda sounds like Balthazar... especially the way the being himself pronounced it (more like Belphagar)

readily to hand in the Empty and familiar with all the players on the board

broadly fits within the personality of Belphegor, known to have participated in a “menage a... what’s the french word for twelve?” aka an orgy

lol Belphegor is the Infernal Ambassador to France and that would be a hilarious coincidence... >.>

Balthazar is good at subterfuge, resourceful, good at spellwork (he was the one buying human souls in 6.03)

also pretty good at subterfuge and spy work, though Cas did see through him (sadly) and killed him for it once upon a time...

Reasons AGAINST:

would he be able to cloak his true identity? basically apply what I said about Metatron for this one

Belphegor’s speech patterns. He uses a lot of “filler words,” and Balthazar... didn’t. Then again, he uses SO MANY of them that it could be a deliberate affectation

the line about Cas’s trenchcoat (the one in the dirty trenchcoat, who’s in love with you), so he doesn’t have any particular reason to refer to it as an “abomination,” though it’s not entirely out of the question

5. A Random Reaper. Billie may have ordered one of her Reaper Babysitters to make sure Jack’s body remained safe and viable for when he was ready to return, as well as allow one of her reapers to... to quote Dean from 6.09... “interact more forcefully” with creation. Reasons FOR:

would report directly to Billie, and give Billie an on the spot window on the Winchesters

intimately familiar with the Winchesters from having kept tabs on them for the last several years

have the innate ability to control others’ perceptions of them and the world in general, so disguising their true form from Cas would’ve been easy

Reasons AGAINST:

do reapers have any other magical abilities beyond their known functions?

WHY would A REAPER be afraid of a human ghost? Literally their JOB is dealing with human ghosts

I don’t think a reaper would’ve been able to have been injured by a ghost, unless these ghosts have somehow been “supercharged” by the way Chuck forced their souls from hell... one screenshot of the ghost Cas smashed with the big stone slab showed a weird glowy-orange patch on its shoulder, almost as if it had been “marked by Chuck” and granted some sort of special dispensation of powers, like we know all those sorts of “marks” on people have in SPN canon, so this may not be an issue against.

Billie’s own “clean hands” policy for reapers... if that’s something that would still bind their actions if Billie gave them a direct order to play this specific role now.

Other theories I’ve considered are that it could be a specific reaper-- thinking possibly Tessa, since she was already in the Empty, too, and I just love her and hate what happened to her. Or possibly a random other demon, but again most of the reasons I objected to it being Belphegor apply to other demons even more strongly to Random Demon Minion #3, too. It might be a specific demon we’ve known in the past, or someone we’d known as a human who’s since become a demon, but again... that seems highly doubtful. It could also potentially be Goocifer, i.e. dead!Lucifer, but I don’t think the Shadow would’ve allowed him to just trip out of the Empty so easily. Though he did have a connection to Jack, and after death it’s possible his attitude toward everything has... shifted? the way Billie said hers did after ascending to the mantle of Death and she saw a bigger cosmic picture. If he’s had an enlightenment of sorts in death, this could be a possibility, but again... I think it’s less likely than the above notions but not something I can discount entirely, unfortunately. If he’d been “specifically depowered” like he’d been when his grace had been drained, that could explain his ability to have been injured by a ghost, for example, but would he even have the ability to hide his true form from Cas-- an angel he literally knows from the inside out, having possessed him for half a year... >.>

I’ll update this list as canon unfolds. :D

#spn s15 spoilers #spn 15.01 #belphegor #spn s15 speculation

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chiseler · 5 years ago

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Utopia and Apocalypse: Pynchon’s Populist/Fatalist Cinema

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in.

--from the last page of Gravity’s Rainbow

To begin with a personal anecdote: Writing my first book (to be published) in the late 1970s, an experimental autobiography titled Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Harper & Row, 1980), published in French as Mouvements: Une vie au cinéma (P.O.L, 2003), I wanted to include four texts by other authors—two short stories (“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, “The Secret Integration” by Thomas Pynchon) and two essays (“The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” by Charles Eckert, “My Life With Kong” by Elliott Stein)—but was prevented from doing so by my editor, who argued that because the book was mine, texts by other authors didn’t belong there. My motives were both pluralistic and populist: a desire both to respect fiction and non-fiction as equal creative partners and to insist that the book was about more than just myself and my own life. Because my book was largely about the creative roles played by the fictions of cinema on the non-fictions of personal lives, the anti-elitist nature of cinema played a crucial part in these transactions.`

In the case of Pynchon’s 1964 story—which twenty years later, in his collection Slow Learner, he would admit was the only early story of his that he still liked—the cinematic relevance to Moving Places could be found in a single fleeting but resonant detail: the momentary bonding of a little white boy named Tim Santora with a black, homeless, alcoholic jazz musician named Carl McAfee in a hotel room when they discover that they’ve both seen Blood Alley (1955), an anticommunist action-adventure with John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, directed by William Wellman. Pynchon mentions only the film’s title, but the complex synergy of this passing moment of mutual recognition between two of its dissimilar viewers represented for me an epiphany, in part because of the irony of such casual camaraderie occurring in relation to a routine example of Manichean Cold War mythology. Moreover, as a right-wing cinematic touchstone, Blood Alley is dialectically complemented in the same story by Tim and his friends categorizing their rebellious schoolboy pranks as Operation Spartacus, inspired by the left-wing Spartacus (1960) of Kirk Douglas, Dalton Trumbo, and Stanley Kubrick.

For better and for worse, all of Pynchon’s fiction partakes of this populism by customarily defining cinema as the cultural air that everyone breathes, or at least the river in which everyone swims and bathes. This is equally apparent in the only Pynchon novel that qualifies as hackwork, Inherent Vice (2009), and the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of it is also his worst film to date—a hippie remake of Chinatown in the same way that the novel is a hippie remake of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald—seems logical insofar as it seems to have been written with an eye towards selling the screen rights. As Geoffrey O’Brien observed (while defending this indefensible book and film) in the New York Review of Books (January 3, 2015), “Perhaps the novel really was crying out for such a cinematic transformation, for in its pages people watch movies, remember them, compare events in the ‘real world’ to their plots, re-experience their soundtracks as auditory hallucinations, even work their technical components (the lighting style of cinematographer James Wong Howe, for instance) into aspects of complex conspiratorial schemes.” (Despite a few glancing virtues, such as Josh Brolin’s Nixonesque performance as "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, Anderson’s film seems just as cynical as its source and infused with the same sort of misplaced would-be nostalgia for the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, pitched to a generation that didn’t experience it, as Bertolucci’s Innocents: The Dreamers.)

From The Crying of Lot 49’s evocation of an orgasm in cinematic terms (“She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she’d come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera’s already moving”) to the magical-surreal guest star appearance of Mickey Rooney in wartime Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow, cinema is invariably a form of lingua franca in Pynchon’s fiction, an expedient form of shorthand, calling up common experiences that seem light years away from the sectarianism of the politique des auteurs. This explains why his novels set in mid-20th century, such as the two just cited, when cinema was still a common currency cutting across classes, age groups, and diverse levels of education, tend to have the greatest number of movie references. In Gravity’s Rainbow—set mostly in war-torn Europe, with a few flashbacks to the east coast U.S. and flash-forwards to the contemporary west coast—this even includes such anachronistic pop ephemera as the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men and the 1955 Western The Return of Jack Slade (which a character named Waxwing Blodgett is said to have seen at U.S. Army bases during World War 2 no less than twenty-seven times), along with various comic books.

Significantly, “The Secret Integration”, a title evoking both conspiracy and countercultural utopia, is set in the same cozy suburban neighborhood in the Berkshires from which Tyrone Slothrop, the wartime hero or antihero of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), aka “Rocketman,” springs, with his kid brother and father among the story’s characters. It’s also the same region where Pynchon himself grew up. And Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s magnum opus and richest work, is by all measures the most film-drenched of his novels in its design as well as its details—so much so that even its blocks of text are separated typographically by what resemble sprocket holes. Unlike, say, Vineland (1990), where cinema figures mostly in terms of imaginary TV reruns (e.g., Woody Allen in Young Kissinger) and diverse cultural appropriations (e.g., a Noir Center shopping mall), or the post-cinematic adventures in cyberspace found in the noirish (and far superior) east-coast companion volume to Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge (2013), cinema in Gravity’s Rainbow is basically a theatrical event with a social impact, where Fritz Lang’s invention of the rocket countdown as a suspense device (in the 1929 Frau im mond) and the separate “frames” of a rocket’s trajectory are equally relevant and operative factors. There are also passing references to Lang’s Der müde Tod, Die Nibelungen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, and Metropolis—not to mention De Mille’s Cleopatra, Dumbo, Freaks, Son of Frankenstein, White Zombie, at least two Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, Pabst, and Lubitsch—and the epigraphs introducing the novel’s second and third sections (“You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood — Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray” and “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more…. –Dorothy, arriving in Oz”) are equally steeped in familiar movie mythology.

These are all populist allusions, yet the bane of populism as a rightwing curse is another near-constant in Pynchon’s work. The same ambivalence can be felt in the novel’s last two words, “Now everybody—“, at once frightening and comforting in its immediacy and universality. With the possible exception of Mason & Dixon (1997), every Pynchon novel over the past three decades—Vineland, Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge—has an attractive, prominent, and sympathetic female character betraying or at least acting against her leftist roots and/or principles by being first drawn erotically towards and then being seduced by a fascistic male. In Bleeding Edge, this even happens to the novel’s earthy protagonist, the middle-aged detective Maxine Tarnow. Given the teasing amount of autobiographical concealment and revelation Pynchon carries on with his public while rigorously avoiding the press, it is tempting to see this recurring theme as a personal obsession grounded in some private psychic wound, and one that points to sadder-but-wiser challenges brought by Pynchon to his own populism, eventually reflecting a certain cynicism about human behavior. It also calls to mind some of the reflections of Luc Moullet (in “Sainte Janet,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 86, août 1958) aroused by Howard Hughes’ and Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot and (more incidentally) by Ayn Rand’s and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead whereby “erotic verve” is tied to a contempt for collectivity—implicitly suggesting that rightwing art may be sexier than leftwing art, especially if the sexual delirium in question has some of the adolescent energy found in, for example, Hughes, Sternberg, Rand, Vidor, Kubrick, Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and, yes, Pynchon.

One of the most impressive things about Pynchon’s fiction is the way in which it often represents the narrative shapes of individual novels in explicit visual terms. V, his first novel, has two heroes and narrative lines that converge at the bottom point of a V; Gravity’s Rainbow, his second—a V2 in more ways than one—unfolds across an epic skyscape like a rocket’s (linear) ascent and its (scattered) descent; Vineland offers a narrative tangle of lives to rhyme with its crisscrossing vines, and the curving ampersand in the middle of Mason & Dixon suggests another form of digressive tangle between its two male leads; Against the Day, which opens with a balloon flight, seems to follow the curving shape and rotation of the planet.

This compulsive patterning suggests that the sprocket-hole design in Gravity’s Rainbow’s section breaks is more than just a decorative detail. The recurrence of sprockets and film frames carries metaphorical resonance in the novel’s action, so that Franz Pökler, a German rocket engineer allowed by his superiors to see his long-lost daughter (whom he calls his “movie child” because she was conceived the night he and her mother saw a porn film) only once a year, at a children’s village called Zwölfkinder, and can’t even be sure if it’s the same girl each time:

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pökler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child—what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you can speed or slow at will…)?

***

Cinema, in short, is both delightful and sinister—a utopian dream and an apocalyptic nightmare, a stark juxtaposition reflected in the abrupt shift in the earlier Pynchon passage quoted at the beginning of this essay from present tense to past tense, and from third person to first person. Much the same could be said about the various displacements experienced while moving from the positive to the negative consequences of populism.

Pynchon’s allegiance to the irreverent vulgarity of kazoos sounding like farts and concomitant Spike Jones parodies seems wholly in keeping with his disdain for David Raksin and Johnny Mercer’s popular song “Laura” and what he perceives as the snobbish elitism of the Preminger film it derives from, as expressed in his passionate liner notes to the CD compilation “Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones” a half-century later:

The song had been featured in the 1945 movie of the same name, supposed to evoke the hotsy-totsy social life where all these sophisticated New York City folks had time for faces in the misty light and so forth, not to mention expensive outfits, fancy interiors,witty repartee—a world of pseudos as inviting to…class hostility as fish in a barrel, including a presumed audience fatally unhip enough to still believe in the old prewar fantasies, though surely it was already too late for that, Tin Pan Alley wisdom about life had not stood a chance under the realities of global war, too many people by then knew better.

Consequently, neither art cinema nor auteur cinema figures much in Pynchon’s otherwise hefty lexicon of film culture, aside from a jokey mention of a Bengt Ekerot/Maria Casares Film Festival (actors playing Death in The Seventh Seal and Orphée) held in Los Angeles—and significantly, even the “underground”, 16-millimeter radical political filmmaking in northern California charted in Vineland becomes emblematic of the perceived failure of the 60s counterculture as a whole. This also helps to account for why the paranoia and solipsism found in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient and Out 1, perhaps the closest equivalents to Pynchon’s own notions of mass conspiracy juxtaposed with solitary despair, are never mentioned in his writing, and the films that are referenced belong almost exclusively to the commercial mainstream, unlike the examples of painting, music, and literature, such as the surrealist painting of Remedios Varo described in detail at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, the importance of Ornette Coleman in V and Anton Webern in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the visible impact of both Jorge Luis Borges and William S. Burroughs on the latter novel. (1) And much of the novel’s supply of movie folklore—e.g., the fatal ambushing of John Dillinger while leaving Chicago’s Biograph theater--is mainstream as well.

Nevertheless, one can find a fairly precise philosophical and metaphysical description of these aforementioned Rivette films in Gravity’s Rainbow: “If there is something comforting -- religious, if you want — about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” And the white, empty movie screen that appears apocalyptically on the novel’s final page—as white and as blank as the fusion of all the colors in a rainbow—also appears in Rivette’s first feature when a 16-millimeter print of Lang’s Metropolis breaks during the projection of the Tower of Babel sequence.

Is such a physically and metaphysically similar affective climax of a halted film projection foretelling an apocalypse a mere coincidence? It’s impossible to know whether Pynchon might have seen Paris nous appartient during its brief New York run in the early 60s. But even if he hadn’t (or still hasn’t), a bitter sense of betrayed utopian possibilities in that film, in Out 1, and in most of his fiction is hard to overlook. Old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) don’t like to be woken from their dreams.

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Footnote

For this reason, among others, I’m skeptical about accepting the hypothesis of the otherwise reliable Pynchon critic Richard Poirier that Gravity’s Rainbow’s enigmatic references to “the Kenosha Kid” might allude to Orson Welles, who was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Steven C. Weisenburger, in A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion (Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), reports more plausibly that “the Kenosha Kid” was a pulp magazine character created by Forbes Parkhill in Western stories published from the 1920s through the 1940s. Once again, Pynchon’s populism trumps—i.e. exceeds—his cinephilia.

#Jonathan Rosenbaum #The Chiseler #Thomas Pynchon

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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I Worked for Alex Jones. I Regret It. https://nyti.ms/2PiTeFr

This piece by former InfoWars "video reporter" (?) Josh Owens reveals all the insanity you'd expect but also the pathetic sadness of those who continue to enable, peddle, and profit from his malicious lies.

Confession is good for the soul, but I'm trying to get my head around the fact that the author continued to work for Alex Jones for several YEARS after the latter made his vile claims about Sandy Hook.

Josh Owens was drawn to #InfoWars while "vulnerable, angry & searching for direction"; after 4 years w/Alex Jones, he saw "virulent nature of his world." Read if you can stomach Jones' deeply disturbing behavior. This model has infected right-wing media.

Josh Owens is a seriously good writer. Too bad he didn't make the subject of this piece himself. Why was he angry, why did he stay with Jones so long, how did he feel as he did his work? These unexamined questions are the heart of the story, not how disturbed a plainly disturbed man Jones is.

"Owens admits that his personal mental and emotional issues led him to Jones. We should be glad for him, that he found the strength to recognize it, address it, and walk away from a bad situation. Owens shouldn't be vilified for his past mistakes, but celebrated for his return. Prodigal son, no? But forgiveness does not imply absolution."

"This can't be the end of the road. As he is responsible for a lot of anguish and grief. Is he even an accessory to murder? The pain that he enabled will live on in families for decades and become part of our national fabric. How does he intend to make amends? This written catharsis is a good first step, but it's only a first step. Is he the little girl in the airplane, seeing the world for the first time? What does he intend to do with this revelation, and fix the damage he has done?"

"At 23, Josh Owens quit film school to work as a video editor for Alex Jones. This is his account of the years he spent within the Infowars empire." /1

"At first, he found it easy to brush off Alex Jones’s fever dreams as eccentricities and excesses. But he eventually found that he had his limits." /2

"Once, at a private ranch, Owens said, Alex Jones picked up an AR-15 and accidentally fired it in the writer’s direction. The bullet hit the ground about 10 feet away from him, he recalled. Jones claimed he had intentionally fired the gun as a joke, he said."/3

“Over time, I came to learn that keeping Jones from getting angry was a big part of the job, though it was impossible to predict his outbursts,” he writes."/4

“There was a time when I shared his anger. In fact, I was still angry. But this is where we differed: I wasn’t angry with others; I was angry with myself. And once I realized that, it was easier to walk away”/5

I WORKED FOR ALEX JONES. I REGRET IT.

I dropped out of film school to edit video for the conspiracy theorist because I believed in his worldview. Then I saw what it did to people.

By Josh Owens | Published Dec. 5, 2019 | New York Times Magazine | Posted December 6, 2019 |

On Election Day 2016, I sat in the passenger seat of Alex Jones’s Dodge Hellcat as we swerved through traffic, making our way to a nearby polling place. As Jones punched the gas pedal to the floor, the smell of vodka, like paint thinner, wafted up from the white Dixie cup anchored in the console. My stomach churned as the phone I held streamed live video to Facebook: Jones rambling about voter fraud and rigged elections while I stared at the screen, holding the camera at an angle to hide his double chin. It rarely worked, but I didn’t want to be blamed when he watched the video later.

Four years earlier, Jones — wanting to expand his website, Infowars, into a full-blown guerrilla news operation and hoping to scout new hires from his growing fan base — held an online contest. At 23, I was vulnerable, angry and searching for direction, so I decided to give it a shot. Out of what Infowars said were hundreds of submissions, my video — a half-witted, conspiratorial glance at the creation and function of the Federal Reserve — made it to the final round.

Unconvinced I could cut it as a reporter, Jones offered me a full-time position as a video editor. I quit film school and moved nearly a thousand miles to Austin, Tex., fully invested in propagating his worldview. By the time I found myself seated next to Jones speeding down the highway, I had seen enough of the inner workings of Infowars to know better.

Before we left the office, Jones instructed me to title the video “Alex Jones Denied Right to Vote” when uploading to YouTube. He knew before we left that they wouldn’t let us walk into a polling location with our cameras rolling. I don’t think Jones even intended to vote. Rather, he hoped to turn this into a spectacle, an insult to him personally, another opportunity to play the self-aggrandizing victim.

“Look at this great city shot,” he said pointing out the window at Austin’s skyline. As soon as I pulled the camera off him, he reached for the white Dixie cup. Is this really how I’m going to die? I thought to myself, imagining the scene: Jones veering too close to the guardrail, ranting about George Soros and Hillary Clinton. Sirens echoing in the distance, flashing lights reflecting off oil-soaked pavement as he grabs the camera and utters his final words, “Hillary ... rigged ... the car.” His listeners would have believed it. Years earlier, I would have believed it.

Fortunately, there were no sirens or flashing lights, and I was relieved when “Vote Here” signs began to appear. A line stretched out the door of the polling place, in a local strip mall, by the time we arrived. As I expected, Jones was told multiple times that he couldn’t film at a polling place, and he decided to leave. Walking back to the car, still taking sips from his white cup, he began noticeably slurring his words. A friend of Jones’s who tagged along — for “security purposes” — offered to give me a ride back to the office. Jones revved his engine, tires squealing as he sped out of the parking lot.

I began listening to Jones’s radio show — the flagship program of what is now a conspiracist media empire with an audience that until recently surpassed a million people — in the last days of George W. Bush’s presidency. The American public had been sold a war through outright fabrications; the economy was in free fall thanks to Wall Street greed and the failure of Washington regulators. Most of the mainstream media was caught flat-footed by these developments, but Jones seemed to have an explanation for everything. He railed against government corruption and secrecy, the militarization of police. He confronted those in power, traipsed through the California redwoods to expose the secretive all-male meeting of elites at Bohemian Grove and even appeared in two Richard Linklater films as himself, screaming into a megaphone.

But it wasn’t the politics that initially drew me in. Jones had a way of imbuing the world with mystery, adding a layer of cinematic verisimilitude that caught my attention. Suddenly, I was no longer a bored kid attending an overpriced art school. I was Fox Mulder combing through the X-Files, Rod Serling opening a door to the Twilight Zone, even Rosemary Woodhouse convinced that the neighbors were members of a ritualistic cult. I believed that the world was strategically run by a shadowy, organized cabal, and that Jones was a hero for exposing it.

I had my limits. I can’t say I ever believed his avowed theory that Sandy Hook was a staged event to push for gun control; to Jones, everything was a “false flag.” I didn’t believe that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama smelled like sulfur because of their proximity to hell or that Planned Parenthood was run by “Nazi baby killers.” But it was easy to brush off these fever dreams as eccentricities and excesses — not the heart of the Alex Jones operation but mere diversions.

Once I started working there, however, it became obvious that one was impossible to separate one from the other. Soon after I was hired, Jones’s Infowars-branded store — which sells emergency-survival foods, water filters, body armor and much more — introduced an iodine supplement, initially marketed as a “shield” against nuclear fallout. Still learning the ropes, I was tasked with creating video advertisements for the supplement, which he ran on his online TV show. One of these ads started with a shot of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as it exploded. I doubled the sound of the explosion, adding a glitch filter and sirens in the background for dramatic effect. Jones stood over my shoulder as I edited. “This is great,” he said. “See if you can find flyover footage of Chernobyl as well.”

Shortly after Jones began selling the supplements, someone posted a video on YouTube holding a Geiger counter displaying high radiation readings on a beach in Half Moon Bay, Calif. The video went viral, stoking fears that radiation from Fukushima was drifting across the Pacific Ocean. Jones saw an opportunity and sent me, along with a reporter, a writer and another cameraman, to California. We had multiple Geiger counters shipped overnight, unaware of how to read or work them, and drove up the West Coast, frequently stopping to check radiation levels. Other than a small spike in Half Moon Bay — which the California Department of Public Health said was from naturally occurring radioactive materials, not Fukushima — we found nothing.

Jones was furious. We started getting calls from the radio-show producers in the office, warning us to stop posting videos to YouTube stating we weren’t finding elevated levels of radiation. We couldn’t just stop, though; Jones demanded constant real-time content. On some of these calls, I could hear Jones screaming in the background. One of the producers told me they had never seen him so angry.

We scrambled to find something, anything we could report on. We tested freshly caught crab from a dock in Crescent City, Calif., and traveled to the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in Avila Beach, asking fishermen if we could test the small croakers they caught off a nearby pier. We even tried to locate a small nuclear-waste facility just so we could capture the Geiger counter displaying a high number. But we couldn’t find what Jones wanted, and after two weeks of traveling from San Diego to Portland, we flew back to Texas as failures, bracing for Jones’s rage. (Jones did not respond to detailed queries sent before publication by The Times Magazine.)

Over time, I came to learn that keeping Jones from getting angry was a big part of the job, though it was impossible to predict his outbursts. Stories abounded among my co-workers: The blinds stuck, so he ripped them off the wall. A water cooler had mold in it, so he grabbed a large knife, stabbed the plastic base wildly and smashed it on the ground. Headlines weren’t strong enough; the news wasn’t being covered the way he wanted; reporters didn’t know how to dress properly. Once a co-worker stopped by the office with a pet fish he was taking home to his niece. It swam in circles in a small, transparent bag. When Jones saw the bag balanced upright on a desk in the conference room, he emptied it into a garbage can. On one occasion, he threatened to send out a memo banning laughter in the office. “We’re in a war,” he said, and he wanted people to act accordingly.

I also saw Jones give an employee the Rolex off his own wrist, simply because he thought the employee was mad at him. “Now, would a bad guy do that?” Jones asked as he handed over the watch. Once, when I went to interview a frequent guest of Jones’s, I was sent with a check to cover a potentially lifesaving cancer treatment. A few times I came close to quitting, and like clockwork, just before I pulled the plug, I received a bonus or significant raise. I hadn’t discussed my discontent with Jones, but he seemed to sense it.

Jones often told his employees that working for him would leave a black mark on our records. To him, it was the price that must be paid for boldly confronting those in power — what he called the New World Order or, later, the deep state. Once my beliefs began to shift, I saw the virulent nature of his world, the emptiness and loathing in many of those impassioned claims. But I was certain that after four years working for Jones, I would never be able to get another job — banished into poverty as penance for my transgressions, and rightly so.

When Jones wanted to blow off steam, we would travel to a private ranch outside Austin to shoot guns. Among other firearms, we would bring the two Barrett .50-caliber rifles he kept stashed in the office. Because we never missed an opportunity to create more content, we also brought along cameras to turn whatever happened into a segment for his show.

I remember one trip in particular. It was the summer of 2014, and I rode to the ranch in the back of a co-worker’s truck, surrounded by semiautomatic rifles, boxes of ammunition and Tannerite, an explosive rifle target. A few of us left early in the morning, arriving before Jones to film B-roll and load magazines; he had no patience for preparation. When he came hours later, after eating a few handfuls of jalapeño chips, he picked up an AR-15 and accidentally fired it in my direction.

The bullet hit the ground about 10 feet away from me. One employee, who was already uncomfortable around firearms, lost it, accusing Jones of being careless and flippant. This was one of the few times I saw someone call Jones out and the only time he didn’t get angry in response. He claimed he had intentionally fired the gun as a joke — as if this were any better.

I stood by silently, considering what might have happened if the gun had been pointed a little to the right. After a while the upset employee let it go, and no one brought it up again. We cracked open a few more beers, filled an old television with Tannerite and blew it up.

One weekend, a few people from the office went hunting at a game reserve. On the following Monday, I was handed a hard drive full of video files and told to edit them for Jones to air on his show later in the week. “There are clips in here that are pretty bad, things we don’t want to get out, so let me take a look at this before we upload it,” one of my managers said.

The first video I clicked on came from a cellphone. The camera pans across a blood-covered floor in what looked like a garage. Dead animals were scattered about: eyes lifeless, tongues hanging from their mouths, crimson streaks splashed on their fur.

In another video, a bison grazed quietly in the shade of a large tree; it reminded me of a tableau at the American Museum of Natural History. Then the camera panned over to Jones, maybe 20 yards away, holding what looked like a handgun. Jones began firing at the bison, tufts of hair flying with every hit. The animal remained standing as Jones shot round after round. Finally, the hunting guide yelled at Jones to stop and handed him a high-caliber rifle. Jones took a moment to make sure the cameras were still recording and fired a few more rounds as the animal finally collapsed.

I shared a large room with three other employees, and Jones often walked into our office after he wrapped for the day. His first question was always “How was the show?” If anyone said it was great — someone, if not everyone, always said it was great — his response was the same. “Really?” he would say, moving over to their side of the room. “Did you really think it was great? What did you like about it?”

Working for Jones was a balancing act. You had to determine where he was emotionally and match his tone quickly. If he was angry, then you had better get angry. If he was joking around, then you could relax, sort of, always looking out of the corner of your eye for his mood to turn at any moment.

Late one night, after an extended live broadcast, Jones walked into my office shirtless. This was normal; he removed his shirt frequently around us. He pulled out a bottle of Grey Goose from a storage cabinet and filled his cup. He stumbled into his private restroom, changed into a clean black polo shirt and stepped back into our office. “Hit me,” he said to an employee in the room. When the employee refused, Jones got louder, his face redder. “Hit me!” He kept saying it, getting closer each time. Finally, knowing Jones would never relent, the employee gave him a weak tap on the shoulder.

“Oh, come on,” he said, “hit me harder!”

The employee punched him hard in the shoulder. Jones grunted on impact, seeming to enjoy the pain. Then, it was his turn. Smirking, he planted his feet, reared back and lunged his body weight forward as his fist connected with the man’s arm. I could hear the dull thud of impact, then a wincing sigh. They traded a few more punches, each time seeming less playful. Jones became wild-eyed, spit flying from his clenched teeth as he exhaled. On his last hit, the sound was different. Wet. I thought I could hear the meat split open in the employee’s arm. Jones roared as he punched a cabinet, denting the door in. A few weeks later, I heard that Jones had broken a video editor’s ribs after playing the same game in a downtown bar.

Having aligned himself with Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race, Jones might now be considered a version of a conservative, but his perspective is much more complicated than that. Infowars was like a lot of digital-media outlets, in that we reported on the things our top editor thought would go viral. But because our boss was Alex Jones, this was a peculiar process. Assignments were often handed down live on the air during his show. We were to have it playing throughout the office, always listening for directives. Ideas for stories mostly came from what other news outlets reported. Jones wanted us to “hijack” the mainstream media’s coverage and use it to our advantage. If it fit into the Infowars narrative, it played.

When I wasn’t at the office, I spent much of my time traveling for Jones. I inhaled the tear gas in Ferguson, Mo., during the Black Lives Matter protests, retching as I hid with protesters, corralled by cops in riot gear. I stood next to armed cowboys and ranch hands as they faced off against the Bureau of Land Management to retrieve Cliven Bundy’s cattle in Nevada. I had dinner with the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, at his home in Phoenix and spent a weekend at the compound of Jim Bakker, the televangelist who spent time in prison for fraud. Jones’s instinctual desire to distance himself from the mainstream led us to unusual and sometimes dark places.

In December 2015, the day before Jones interviewed Donald Trump, still a candidate at the time, on his radio show, I made my way to upstate New York on assignment, along with a reporter and second cameraman. We were sent to visit Muslim-majority communities throughout the United States to investigate what Jones instructed us to call “the American Caliphate.” After the California Geiger-counter debacle, we had meetings with Jones before trips in order to ascertain exactly what he wanted. If we “hit some home runs,” he said, we would get significant bonuses.

We landed in Newark at 12:30 p.m. on Dec. 1, 2015. The first stop was Islamberg, a Muslim community three hours north of Manhattan. It was founded in the 1980s by mostly African-American followers of a Pakistani cleric named Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, who encouraged devotees of his conservative brand of Sufi Islam to establish small settlements across the rural United States. Gilani was suspected of association with the organization Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which was briefly designated as a terrorist group by the State Department in the 1990s; Gilani has denied any connection to the group. His followers in Islamberg had no record of violence, and some of them had denounced the Islamic State in an interview with Reuters earlier that year, saying they didn’t believe Islamic State members to be real Muslims. But unfounded rumors circulated around far-right corners of the internet that this community was a potential terrorist-training center. Jones, who thought the media consistently ingratiated themselves with Islamic extremists, believed them.

We pulled in, unannounced, to a dirt drive leading to the community, stopping at a flimsy cattle gate guarded by two men. The reporter, wearing a hidden camera, approached the entrance as we filmed the interaction from the vehicle. The men were calm and polite, if a little suspicious — reasonable given the circumstances. They denied our entry into Islamberg but took our number and told us we could return after they verified who we were.

It was only later, after listening to the audio from the reporter’s hidden camera, that I heard what he told the two men guarding the gate. “Basically, what we do is, we go around, and we do videos debunking claims of stuff,” the reporter said. “The word is, people say this is some kind of training camp, so we wanted to come in and get some footage and kind of put that whole rumor to rest.”

He gave them his real name — a name that, with a quick Google search, would lead back to Infowars, with its headlines like “Inside Sources: Bin Laden’s Corpse Has Been on Ice for Nearly a Decade,” “Special Report: Why Obama Brought Ebola to U.S. Exposed” and “VIDEO: ‘Demon’ Caught on Camera During Obama Visit?” Those headlines could be described by many words, but none of them would be “debunking.”

Because of the conspiracy theories about the place, Islamberg was a constant target of right-wing extremists. That April, a Tennessee man was arrested and later convicted of plotting to raise a militia to burn Islamberg’s mosque to the ground. Only days before we arrived, the F.B.I. issued an alert to law enforcement to be on the lookout for a man named Jon Ritzheimer, the leader of an anti-Muslim movement in Arizona who posted a video threatening violence against Muslims less than two weeks earlier. In the video, he brandished a handgun, saying: “I’m urging all Americans across the U.S. everywhere in public, start carrying a slung rifle with you, everywhere. Don’t be a victim in your own country.”

So the phone call we received later that night from a law-enforcement agent shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The officer who contacted us said he simply wanted to verify who we were after receiving a concerned call from someone in Islamberg. We told Jones about it, and he chose to believe the call was a veiled threat, an attempt to intimidate us into silence. To him, this verified that we were onto something. He even went so far as to include Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, in the purported conspiracy, claiming he wanted to abolish the Second Amendment — and that somehow intimidating us would achieve that.

Jones told us to file a story that accused the police of harassment, lending credence to the theory that this community contained dangerous, potential terrorists. I knew this wasn’t the case according to the information we had. We all did. Days before, we spoke to the sheriff and the mayor of Deposit, N.Y., a nearby municipality. They both told us the people in Islamberg were kind, generous neighbors who welcomed the surrounding community into their homes, even celebrating holidays together.

The information did not meet our expectations, so we made it up, preying on the vulnerable and feeding the prejudices and fears of Jones’s audience. We ignored certain facts, fabricated others and took situations out of context to fit our narrative, posting headlines like:

Drone Investigates Islamic Training Center

Shariah Law Zones Confirmed in America

Infowars Reporters Stalked by Terrorism Task Force

Report: Obama’s Terror Cells in the U.S.

The Rumors Are True: Shariah Law Is Here!

Our next stop was Hamtramck, a Muslim-majority city embedded within Detroit that alarmists in neighboring communities called Shariahville. As we headed west, my phone vibrated, and a news alert appeared on the screen. There were reports that a mass shooting that week in San Bernardino, Calif., had been perpetrated by Islamic extremists, making it at the time the deadliest Islamic attack in the United States since Sept. 11.

I knew that when the details emerged, they would substantiate the lies we pushed to Jones’s audience. It didn’t matter if the attack took place on the other side of the country or if the people in Islamberg had no connection to the perpetrators in San Bernardino. Jones’s listeners would draw imaginary lines between the two, and we were helping them do it.

I quit working for Jones on April 7, 2017. When offered another job, an introductory position with a 75 percent pay cut, I jumped at the opportunity. Instead of giving two weeks’ notice, I left in three hours. Jones had gone home for the day, so I didn’t speak with him in person. I said goodbye to co-workers and managers, handed over my company credit card and hoped that would be the end of it. Two nights later, I received a call from Jones: “Let me tell you a little secret,” he said in his gravelly voice. “I don’t like it anymore, either.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I don’t want to do it anymore,” he said, “and I got all these people working for me, and you know, then I feel guilty. I don’t want to do it. You think I want to keep doing this? I haven’t wanted to do this for five years, man.” I sensed that he was pandering, but I couldn’t help thinking that for the first time since I started this job, Jones and I finally had something in common. Sure, there was a time when I shared his anger. In fact, I was still angry. But this is where we differed: I wasn’t angry with others; I was angry with myself. And once I realized that, it was easier to walk away. When I left, I tried to put myself in his shoes, to figure out why he said and did the things he did. At times I saw a different side to Jones, one that was vulnerable, desiring validation and acceptance. Then he would say something so vile and callous it became impossible to look past it.

Even though I was no longer beholden to Jones for financial security, I couldn’t be honest about how I felt. I was to blame for my actions, unequivocally, and yet I resented Jones for creating an environment of rage, fear and confusion that diminished discernment, increased self-doubt and left me feeling as if my brain had short-circuited. I wanted to say these things to Jones, but I didn’t.

He offered to double my pay, suggested I work remotely and even proposed funding a feature-length film of my own. I said it wasn’t about money and turned him down. To this day, I still don’t know why he wanted to keep me around. He said it was because he cared about me, but if I had to guess, I would say his main concern was losing control.

The next morning, he called numerous times, and then again that evening. I let the calls go to voice mail.

There wasn’t a single moment that persuaded me to leave, but there was a turning point: a moment that stuck with me long after it happened. I thought of it as I sat next to Jones speeding recklessly down the highway on Election Day, when I walked out of the office for the last time and when I decided to sit down and write this article.

It was early morning, and we were headed back to Austin after the trip that began in Islamberg. As we boarded our flight, I took my window seat close to the rear of the plane. An older woman wearing a hijab sat next to me. With her was a young girl, giddy with excitement, who bounced in the middle seat, holding a bag of pretzels. The woman leaned over and asked if I would let the girl sit by the window. “This is her first time on a plane,” she said. I agreed and moved my bag from under the seat.

I thought of the children who lived in Islamberg: how afraid their families must have felt when their communities were threatened and strangers appeared asking questions; how we chose to look past these people as individuals and impose on them more of the same unfair suspicions they already had to endure. And for what? Clickbait headlines, YouTube views?

As I sat on the aisle, the plane now lifting up into the pale blue sky, I glanced over at the little girl staring out the window in wonder, her face glowing from the light reflecting off the clouds. She was amazed, joyful, innocent, carefree and completely unaware of the world beneath her.

Josh Owens is a writer living in Texas. This is his first article for the magazine.

7 notes · View notes

marril96 · 6 years ago

Text

Smokescreen

Pairing: Rowena x reader

Summary: Rowena’s attempt at a surprise goes up in flames.

A/N: @angel-e-v-a and @rowenaisfabulous liked a backstory bit I mentioned in my fanfic Fluffs, so I decided to write it. It is not necessary to read that fic to understand this one, though. The two are totally separate.

Editor: @oswinthestrange

You couldn't have been gone for more than an hour. It was a quick run to the post office, a trip you'd made countless times. It was impossible for something to happen, for something to go horribly, terribly wrong in that amount of time. This was a small town. Aside from a few quarrels between neighbors, nothing ever happened here. Nothing sinister. Nothing remarkable.

Or so you'd thought until two minutes ago when the taxi had dropped you off in front of your house.

In front of your house, whose wide-open windows bled smoke like gaping wounds, while firefighters, scattered around your yard like crimson ants, rushed in and out, left and right, a flurry of movement and pounding feet and raised voices.

Heart stopping dead in its tracks, you started running toward it. The smoke, thick, dark, seeped out in gallons. Your house, shiny white, was tinted grey as if someone had wrapped a cloud of mist around it. What happened? How big was the damage? Had someone — a hunter, a demon, an unfriendly witch — attacked Rowena while you were away?

Where was Rowena?

Your blood ran cold, followed by a chilly cascade of shivers sliding down your spine. You looked around frantically, desperate, pleading to every deity you could think of that she was okay, that she was safe and unharmed and far away from danger. Please, you begged. Please, be okay. Please, be okay, Please be okay.

A rush of images flooded your brain. Tossed furniture. Blood-smeared walls. A charred skeleton lying in the middle of the room with a phone on its chest. A lock of hair on the bed, as crimson as blood on the walls, neatly folded, a souvenir of what had gone on. A prize. Pieces of scalp still clinging to it, staining the sheets underneath it.

The smell, as fresh as the day you'd first felt it, flared up your nostrils, burning like acid. The smell of burnt flesh, of death, of everything good forever gone, never to return again. Never to be the same again.

No!

You shook the thoughts away. It hadn't happened again. It couldn't have! Lucifer was dead, rotting in the Empty forever. Hunters, rogue witches, and everything and everyone else Rowena could handle.

Right?

Just as another horrible stream of thoughts flashed in your mind, you saw her. In the corner of the yard, behind a couple of firemen who were discussing something amongst themselves, Rowena stood tall (well, as tall as she could manage at her height) and proud. Her head was held high, lips a firm line that betrayed nothing, face equally blank. No emotion, all business. If the incident affected her (and you were certain it did), she didn't show it. These people, these strangers didn't get to see her weak. They didn't get to see her hurt.

"Rowena!" you called, relief washing over you. She was okay, you told yourself. She was safe. You had nothing to worry about.

She turned to you, and a small flicker of a smile grazed her mouth. "Y/N!"

You headed for the yard, only to be stopped by a firefighter. "Ma'am, you can't go in there," he said in that professional tone cops usually used. Polite, but firm. A tad friendly around the edges for a better effect.

"I live here," you told him. Gesturing to Rowena, you said, "That's my girlfriend over there!"

"Alright," he conceded. "But go no further than the yard. The house has still not been cleared."

You gave a nod and went in. Rowena met you halfway. As soon as you were near her, you threw your arms around her, wrapping her in a tight, bone-crushing hug. She smelled like smoke, but other than that she appeared fine. She stood still as a statue, frozen in place; she let you hold her, let you pull her in and feel her, bask in her presence. She was alive. She was safe. Nothing else mattered.

"Honey, are you okay?" you asked, pulling back and looking her over.

"I'm fine," she said, more tired than distressed.

Her hands were on her stomach, one clasped over the other. On first glance it appeared to be nothing more than a nervous gesture, but as you looked more closely, you could make out dark, reddish markings sprawled over her lower hand.

"What's this?"

Before she could utter a response, your hands were on hers, gently pulling it free to look it over. Aside from a defeated sigh, Rowena made no protests. It was useless to fight you. A losing battle she'd stopped engaging in a long time ago.

The top of her pale hand was red. The stain was sprawled over it like a crimson bruise, deep, dark, painful to even look at, let alone bear. You stared at it, shocked, mouth agape, then your eyes met Rowena's once again and you got a sudden urge to hug her again. No wonder she hadn't hugged you back.

"Its nothing," she said nonchalantly, but you could tell by her expression it was anything but. It hurt. Not only that, it probably reminded her of the last time she'd been burned.

The time when it wasn't just her hand — her entire body had been burned to a crisp.

You shook the unpleasant memories away, willing them to stay in the back of your mind where they belonged. Twice in one day was enough. You didn't need to remember it. You didn't want to remember it. You wished there was a way to erase the horrifying images out of your head for good.

"It's not nothing. You're hurt!" you said. "You need to get that looked at."

"I do not!" Rowena insisted. "It's just a wee burn. I've had worse." She shot you a meaningful look as she said it, a wordless reminder that you were there, that you'd seen it, felt it, smelled it right alongside her. That you'd held her hand and talked to her, even when she couldn't answer, when her throat and mouth hadn't regenerated yet, for hours on end. She'd survived that, and she would survive a mere second degree wound on her hand.

You were about to tell her it didn't matter, that she was still hurt, when one of the firefighters standing nearby said, "We offered to call for an ambulance, but she refused."

"She's good considering the entire kitchen was on fire," the firefighter next to him said. "That, and she wouldn't let us into the house."

You shot Rowena a pointed glare, a (you hoped) perfect replica of her murderous one. She rolled her eyes dramatically.

"Because I'm fine," she said, exasperated. "I had everything under control until these red bampots shows up!"

"Rowena!" you hissed warningly, cheeks flaming with shame. A small smile bloomed up on your mouth, fake but polite. "She didn't mean that. She's in shock."

The firefighters didn't appear convinced, but, with tight smiles and curt nods, they let it go.

Rowena gave another roll of her eyes, equally dramatic as the first one. You swore she had to have practiced them in the mirror.

"What happened?" you asked.

"Just a wee accident."

You looked to the small streaks of smoke still seeping out the windows and back to her. Your eyebrow shot up, suspicious, disbelieving. "A wee accident?"

"Yes!" Rowena exclaimed. She turned her head to the side, suddenly finding the fence interesting. Desperate to avoid your eyes, your suspicion, your accusation. Giving a sigh, she said in a voice that was barely above a whisper, "I was trying to cook."

No way! You had to have heard it wrong. "You were what?"

She glared at you as if you'd just killed her entire family. "I was trying to cook!"

Before you could try to hold it back, a snort escaped you. Then another, and another, and soon your were laughing heartily as if you'd just heard the funniest joke of your life.

Rowena had tried to cook. Not only that, but she'd almost burned the house down while she'd been at it. If someone had told you that, you wouldn't have believed them.

Rowena never cooked. Never. She made potions and tea and various other beverages, but she never, ever cooked. She refused, and you respected that. The restaurant food the two of you ordered was more than excellent. There was no need for either her or you to cook.

As it turned out, there was a reason she never did.

"You're horrible!" she whined, cradling her burned hand to her chest. Her lower lip popped out in a pout. "Laughing at an injured woman."

"Sory," you said in-between fits of laughter. You took a breath, one, two, three deep ones, to regain your composure. "It's just… you never cook."

"I wanted to today," she said petulantly. A bratty little thing she was.

Your bratty little thing. You loved her exactly as she was.

"It was supposed to be a surprise."

You cocked up an eyebrow. "A surprise?"

"Aye." Her cheeks burned red, embarrassed, awkward. Adorable. "I wanted to make your favorite food."

The admission made you melt like an ice sculpture hit by bright, warm sun rays. She wanted to do something nice for you, wanted to surprise you, and had gotten hurt in the process. You couldn't be mad at her for that, couldn't laugh and poke fun. She had nothing but the best intentions at heart.

"You're adorable, you know that?" you said.

Rowena's eyes locked right with yours, defiant. "Am not."

"Are, too," you insisted. "My precious little cupcake."

"Y/N!" she warned, not at all appreciative of the nickname, especially surrounded by strangers.

You grinned. "You are! And I love you for it. So much." You grabbed her healthy hand in both of yours and gave it a squeeze. "But I beg of you, never try to cook again."

"I don't intend to," she said with a scowl.

"Good. One fire was enough."

A snort, and then a chuckle, accompanied your words.

Rowena rolled her eyes. "You will never let me live this down, will you?"

"Nope," you said, popping the p.

"That's what I get for trying to be nice."

"Uh huh. No good deed goes unpunished."

"Rude."

"Always, honey." You pecked her on the cheek, a swift brush of lips over warm, flushed skin. Your eyes trailed down to her injured hand. "You really should get that taken care of."

"I will, when we're allowed back in," Rowena said.

"I volunteer to be your nurse," you said.

She smirked. "Naughty."

"Pervert," you retorted, laughing.

"You started it," she said nonchalantly.

"It's not my fault you sexualize everything," you teased.

"Sure."

"It's not!"

"Keep telling yourself that, dear."

The banter lasted for a good few minutes, until the firefighters announced the house was safe to go back in. The smell of smoke would linger for a while, they warned, and gave a few tips on how to make it go away. You listened intently, even though the advice was useless to you; Rowena already had a spell ready. A few Latin words, and your house would smell as good as new.

And, once you made a call to the restaurant, it would smell like your favorite food.

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#rowena #rowena macleod #rowena x reader #spn #supernatural #my fics #smokescreen #fanfiction

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jarvnation-blog · 5 years ago

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Short Film Production Editing Blog

Week 1 - 21/10/2019

We met in our production groups and talked over the film idea that we had been assigned. The idea is based around a theatre student who is performing in a play and gets too deep into the role and the mind of this character. With this idea being a thriller, my instant thought was that it would be similar to the story of Black Swan. With this to go on, I knew I could look at Darren Aronofsky and Andrew Weisblum and the techniques they used to tell the story as well as manipulating the audience’s emotions.

At this point, a story and script were yet to be developed so I decided to research film editing in general. I had already read On Filmmaking by Alexander Mackendrick which has a section on editing and decided to revisit that. I also read In The Blink Of An Eye by Walter Murch which explained the early concepts and techniques of editing video shot on film.

Week 2 - 28/10/2019

Speaking to the producer, I gained more of an idea of the story which is about an actor struggling to separate his private life with his life on-stage. With this in mind, the idea of representing and transitioning between his two lives became apparent and the producer had asked me to look into some CGI mirror effects and how we could remove the camera from a shot. From my own personal interest in CGI and movie special effects, I knew that one of the ways this would be possible would be to shoot a green screen in place of the mirror and then compose a separate shot of the reflection on top. The first thing I did was research how to achieve this kind of effect on Avid Media Composer and found a tutorial on YouTube:

Media Composer - Basic Motion Tracking 101: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUY9fYZ5Glw&t=794s

The tutorial covered the basics of composing one shot on top of another through motion tracking. The only problem with this was that it used an older version of Avid and I would have to also find out how to do it on the newest version. This video helped in that through following the steps, the effect seems straightforward to achieve and so I thought that, with my limited experience, I would be able to do it.

In terms of the logistics of setting up this kind of shot I decided to meet with the module leader and discuss whether it would be feasible in reality, and the best way to go about setting the shot up. From the meeting I learnt that the majority of this shot would be gained in the actual shoot of the film as we would need to match the lighting and angles of the two shots to make them look realistic and convincing. If we got these shots, then the actual compositing of them in Avid would not take up too much time.

Week 3 - 05/11/2019

This week we met in our groups and talked more in depth about the production and our individual roles. We talked about the story and what happens so that we can better research our own jobs. As the editor I will look into films that deal with the same themes of obsession, commitment and theatre acting and see how the editors of those films chose to show those different themes. I will also look at the colour palettes of these films to prepare me for colour grading the final look of the film as well as research further into how to accurately achieve the look and feel that the director and producer are wanting. We decided as a group against the mirror shot as it would be too difficult to match the shots and do the post production on them. It would have taken up a lot of time just for one small shot that wasn’t significant to the story.

Week 4 - 12/11/2019

This week on the workshop we learnt how to colour balance and colour grade in DaVinci Resolve. This workshop was particularly interesting for me as this is going to be one of my main jobs on the production. We practiced balancing and grading video clips in the workshop which was very useful as the tutors were on hand to help with any questions. I have never colour graded any footage before and so this was a good introduction for me as it enabled me to practice before the final production. We also learnt how to use the university servers so that we can upload the footage and have it be accessible on different computers. Uploading and managing the footage for the film was one of my main jobs and while it appeared confusing at first, it saved a lot of time during the edit as I learnt more about the software and using Avid.

Week 5 - 19/11/2019

This week I carried on with some more research and tutorials as the director and producer were working out and writing the script. I decided to further research my role and look into colour correction and grading. I started by watching some videos on YouTube to help me with the basics starting with:

DaVinci Resolve 16 Basic Color Grade Tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8lXqB_4lZM

This video covered the bare basics of DaVinci Resolve 16 and, even though we covered it last week in the workshop, it still proved to be valuable. It gave an overview of each section of the Resolve window as well as what the most important functions are. It gave an introduction to the use of nodes and how to best use them as well as the basic functions of the colour wheels and how to best use them and just helped me to get a good grasp of the basics.

Alongside researching colour grading I also looked into colour theory and how it works for films. I found another YouTube video that explains the different aspects of colours, hue, saturation and brightness:

Color Theory in Film — Color Psychology for Directors: Ep5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lINVnA3rVIE

The video explains how each aspect works, what effects they have as well as showing examples with film clips. I find that researching and learning these things through videos is beneficial because it is easier to explain, and you can see examples of how things affect the image.

Week 6 - 26/11/2019

This week was the first week of our filming and I was on set to record the sound. We had two locations to film this week with the first being a bedroom set for all of the bedroom scenes. We shot these scenes on the Tuesday and Thursday as they were the only days the room was available. With my main job on set being to only record sound, I also helped set up the camera, the tripod, the lights as well as dress the set ready for filming.

This week we also filmed the kitchen scenes on the Wednesday and Thursday. As with the bedroom set, my main job was recording sound so again I helped set up the equipment and dress the set.

After every day of filming, the footage was copied over onto an external hard drive so that at the end of the week I could upload what we had shot so far onto the university servers. I also started putting together a basic edit of the film from what we had.

Week 7 - 03/12/2019

This week we had a few more things to shoot in the kitchen scene and then I started working on a rough cut with footage we currently had. There were issues with booking and gaining access to locations, so we didn’t film for the rest of the week.

Week 8 - 10/12/2019

This was our second week of filming and we only had one location left to film which was in the university theatre. There was a lot of shots to be filmed in this location and so we spent all of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday filming just these scenes. Again, my main job was recording sound but, in this location, we also had access to the stage lights which really helped in getting a correct ‘stage’ look.

Once we had completely finished filming, I uploaded the rest of the footage onto the university servers so that all of the clips were in one place and ready to be edited.

Week 9 - 03/01/2020

This week was the start of the final edit with all of the footage. I already had a rough cut and started to build the rest of the scenes around what I already had. I decided to organise my project into separate bins for each individual scene so that I could work on them independently to make sure they worked on their own before combining them all at the end. One of the difficulties of organising the clips was that all of the individual takes did not transfer onto the server in any particular order, so I had to go through and watch each take before working out what scene it was part of. This did get confusing as further down the line I ended up with takes that I couldn’t find and found out that they had been accidently put into the wrong bin. Once all of the clips were organised into their respective bins, I could then start on building up the stage scenes and fine tuning the bedroom and kitchen scenes.

There was one bedroom scene in particular that I spent some time on as it required a few effects to get the desired result. The shot is of the protagonist, Jack, who is sitting at a desk while two separate versions of him are sticking notes to the wall all within the same shot. On the shoot, they filmed the scene three separate times without moving the camera so that I could line them all up easily in post-production. The idea was to have the figures on the sides of the frame to be sped up with added jump cuts to give the impression of time moving fast while Jack was sat in the middle at the desk. I had originally planned to layer each shot and then crop the edges of the frames so that they would all appear in the frame together. Unfortunately, when it was being filmed, the moving parts of the shots, in this case Jack, overlapped and therefore part of the shot was cut off. To fix this I had to use the 3Dwarp effect on each shot and adjust the transparency so that you could clearly see what each version of jack was doing while still retaining the time lapse effect.

I also sent a version of the edit of what I had done so far to the director and producer so that they could see the progress as well as give me some notes on any changes they think I should make.

Week 10 - 06/01/2020

This week I started to make changes to the edit from the notes that I was given by the director and the producer. These notes were mainly changes to certain shots and the order of certain parts that was different from the script. This week mainly consisted of making sure all of the cuts and edits were tight. I also started adding effects to certain shots that required it. In particular there is a shot in the film of a close up of a particular line in a script that you are supposed to be able to read on screen. There wasn’t a clear or stable enough shot filmed for me to just insert into the edit and so I had to add some effects in order to achieve this. It was quite straight forward as I first added a stabilizing effect to reduce the movement of the shot and make the line readable. I was also able to change the tracking so that the line remained relatively central to the screen. I also added a zoom so that you could read the line easier and also to make the cut between shots smoother and more motivated. I also had to slightly zoom in on a few shots so that the aspect ratios matched with the rest of the shots which was a result of filming on two different cameras.

There were a few basic transitions to be done throughout the film, but they were just either fading to or from a black screen or fading between two different shots. These were easy to do as I just added a dissolve using the quick transition tool and set the parameters to what was needed.

At this stage there were some changes to the script and some extra dialogue had to be recorded and added in. I recorded the lines for the role of the doctor using Audacity in the edit pods and imported them in which proved easier than I thought. There was also another VO for the character of Jack’s sister which was recorded by an actor and then sent to me so that it could be edited in.

One of the last things to do before the colour grade was to add sound effects and music. There were only a few sound effects that had to be put on after which couldn’t be recorded on the day of filming. These sounds were found on the internet and were added to the morning scenes to give them a bit more life than just having music. Cheers and applause sounds were also added to the last scene to give the impression that he was being cheered on stage at the end of his performance. The transitions of the sound were done much in the same way as the clips. I used the quick transition tool to do simple fade in and outs but on some clips, I had to manually adjust the volume so I could be more precise with the levels. We used the same piece of music for the three separate morning sequences to give them consistency and make it a repeating motif that the audience can recognise.

Once sound had been edited the last thing to do was the colour grade. This was done in DaVinci Resolve 16 and proved a challenge as none of the shots had been white balanced on set. I spent most of my time making sure that all of the shots matched up visually by trying to match the skin tones of the main actor. Once I was happy with them all looking the same, I looked through the LUT’s to see if there were any appropriate to the film. I felt none of them did the film justice as they all looked a bit intense and fake. I ended up just adding a film grain to the whole project to remove the digital crispness and give it a slight cinematic look. I also added a slight vignette which really helped add to the film look. Once the grade had been finished it was just a case of exporting the film and submitting it.

Critical Analysis

I feel that the final film has a professional look and that the desired style was achieved but unfortunately, I think that it struggles narratively. Going into filming we all knew that it was going to be a complex story that smoothly transitioned between two locations to imply the sense of confusion and madness that was going on in the protagonist’s life. Towards the end of the edit, the voice overs by the doctor and Jack's sister were added to give some clarity towards what is supposed to be happening in the story, but I feel that it was added too late and now comes across as a bit of an information dump.

Some of the shots look a bit awkward as the director had planned on some complex camera moves to give the impression of long, continuous shots but I felt these didn’t come off as well as they could have and so had to edit them together so that they had better pace within the film.

I felt like the music could be more appropriate to the film as well as it is a very famous piece of music and I feel that while watching the film, you start to focus on the music as opposed to it complimenting what is happening on screen. I also felt that it was too melodic which made it a problem to edit as it tended to fade out or cut in the middle of a melody.

Overall, I think that the film has a good look to it and has its own sense of style, but it just falls short of telling a story as well as it could have.

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brittneybouchard-blog · 5 years ago

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On-line Audio Conversion

Is the quickest and best option to convert audio to video on-line. MP3 Toolkit is a set of six separate audio manipulation tools which might be all useful ultimately: Converter, Ripper, Tag Editor, Merger, Cutter, and Recorder. Mix many separate music tracks right into a non-cease one to create audio CD. The software enables you to report reside audio by way of a mixer or microphone; you may as well import MP3, WAV, AIFF and OGG file codecs - then, digitize previous recordings, edit them and export. We must also admire the excessive-prime quality outcomes posts the cut up, as the entire MP3 recordsdata created with this machine maintains the identical audio efficiency because the unique monitor.

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Now you needn't upload your mp3 information to join songs collectively online or merge two mp3 recordsdata on-line, all you want - simply download merge mp3 on-line. Audio Cutter Professional is a web based app that may be utilized to chop audio tracks correct in your browser. Medieval Cue Splitter - Good for other audio file varieties if you want to split into unique CD tracks a ripped audio file with an accompanying CUE file; helps mp3, flac, ape, ogg, wma, mpc, wv (lossless WavPack compressed) and ta (True Audio codec) recordsdata.

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wmzjacklyn9192-blog · 5 years ago

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WAV Joiner

Wav Merger Software can merge wav or wave recordsdata into one giant wav file. Software program has capacity to combining, merging, including and becoming a member of wav recordsdata collectively. Hmmm. Probably because the audio program comes throughout some code within the merged wave file that it considers to be the end of a file, and so it stops enjoying it at that time, essentially ignoring every little thing thereafter. Suggestions: Drag and drop the folder the place the MP3 files are to this MP3 Joiner, in case you do not need to add files one by one. Observe that these MP3 information are organized in keeping with the play order. So if you have to change the location of two MP3 files, simply free drag them to your wanted place. To sum it up, Be a part of Multiple WAV Information Into One Software program is an environment friendly, though the relatively limited program, developed that can assist you get hold of single files out of quite a few enter WAVs, completing the operation in only a few keystrokes. Use it to crop, be part of, break up, mix and edit audio files and produce music for clips, movies, mp3 cutter merger online and presentations. With FL Studio Cellular you may create and save complete multi-monitor music tasks on your Android cellphone or tablet. This is an audio modifying tool which comes with a lot of exciting options like you may report, sequence, edit, mix and render full songs. So, this is one other finest audio enhancing app which you need to have in your Android machine. Free MP3 Cutter and Editor is a straightforward audio editor which, despite its title, works with each MP3 and WAV recordsdata. You'll be able to seamlessly be a part of lossy and lossless codecs no matter what bitrate and codec they're using. For example, you'll be able to take a mix of MP3, FLAC and OGG recordsdata and be a part of them into a single AAC file. MP3 Toolkit is a set of six separate audio manipulation tools that are all useful not directly: Converter, Ripper, Tag Editor, Merger, Cutter, and Recorder. For this article, we're most fascinated within the Merger and Cutter. The audio CD comprises audio tracks (.cda) information which cannot be copied to make use of directly. CD to MP3 Ripper will assist you to tear the audio from CD to MP3, WMA, APE or WAV for mp3 cutter merger online common gamers. With the monitor within the clipboard left click on the location of the other monitor the place you need to paste your music into. Should you simply wish to merge, click on the place on the very end of the observe and press Ctrl-V to add the music there. You'll be able to select every other position should you prefer that. Step 5. Lastly, click on on Okay" and combine music information at one go. I then downloaded Audacity and tried merging there. It took longer as a result of I have a peek here to manually string the files together, but the new merged files play completely on the web site. With Music Maker Jam, you may combine thousands of skilled samples and bring your musical concepts to life. Document vocals, rap or random sounds and use the eight-channel mixer to provide your combine the best stability. You're going to get prolonged features like the harmony editor and actual-time effects. And you will be higher off choosing a lossless splitter or joiner that can reduce or merge your information speedily, even on an oldish laptop, with none loss of sound high quality due to decompressing and recording. On the lookout for even a more superior on-line music editor able to dealing with multiple tracks at the identical time? Then has the answer for you. They have a very advanced music studio that can handle pretty much any challenge you can throw at it. It's so advanced that you will really must spend time reading about easy methods to use it. You may also make the most of the other options of this program, such as audio recorder, audio converter, CD burner, radio station and YouTube MP3 extractor. That's to say, you may get extra uncooked sources from this software earlier than you join a number of audio information. That is indeed a program that can take audio file merging to a new degree. With this merger, besides WAV and other audio recordsdata, you too can merge video files For examples, you possibly can be part of MP4 , AVI files and so forth with simple steps. And before clicking the Run" button, you'll be able to normalize audio volume and mute the sound on Setting interface. Add your mp3 information, than click "merge" button to merge. Do you will have numerous separate music files saved in a Home windows 10 folder? If so, it could be higher to merge a few of those recordsdata collectively so that you can play through a number of music tracks included within a single file. Ok these files are recorded information of lectures recorded by a mp3 player. I would like to join these two files collectively (m2v and wav) after which chop up them up into small clips to post on the internet.

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annabellestrack-blog · 5 years ago

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Order Lossless MP3 Cutter Joiner, Safe Online Buying

Freemake Audio Converter converts music information between 50+ audio formats. 1. A exceptional on-line MP3 cutter and audio joiner online gratis joiner: scale back or be part of the upload recordsdata in a couple of clicks. And no person can promise the manual uninstallation will totally uninstall EZ Softmagic MP3 Splitter & Joiner and take away all of its information. AAC can be the usual audio format for Sony PS3 and www.magicaudiotools.com MPEG-4 video. Apart from, some hottest output audio codecs are available to choose. You may click the "Open file" button in this window to begin enjoying the joined MP3 in your default audio player. Eusing Free MP3 Cutter is a straightforward utility that means that you may reduce out gadgets of an audio file (MP3, WAV, WMA). Step 1. Upload your audio information. MP3Gain is not a complete enhancing program, nevertheless it does present a vital audio service. It additionally has different video enhancing options like audio filters and results which could make it easier to to deal with music info which are problematic in a roundabout approach. Any Audio Converter supports a wide range of video and audio codecs including but not restricted to the formats under. sixteen Free Greatest Mp3 splitter and Joiner instruments to separate and merge Mp3 info: - When you haven't too way back bought an MP3 participant, you must be all in favour of digging extra about the precise option to split audio data or merge music recordsdata. Generally consumer needs to entry various WAVE data one after the other because of their work requirement, on this scenario WAVE joiner software program is time saving and fast decision to process a variety of WAVE recordsdata by merging them collectively and generate one large WAV file. Tools ~~ Mp3 Joiner ~~Drag & Drop ~ Select your Folder ~~ Rename If Wished. Audacity is the best free audio editing program bar none. three. Then you could possibly view the uploaded audio files on the page. Windows Media Participant is the default participant for Windows laptop that helps a variety of video and audio codecs likemp4,mp3,wma, and so forth. On-line Audio Joiner. Audials Tunebite Platinum is the most expensive audio converter software program in our comparability, however this software program has essentially the most comprehensive characteristic set of all the converters we tested.

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