#Gifsets that were absolutely a labor of love and it's not my best work but well... It's done now. :)

[iero]

HAYLEY WILLIAMS The Eras Tour | 5/9 - 8/20

[redbelles]

hello! I just found your blog via your recent titanic gifset with hozier lyrics and it truly is the most gorgeous thing I have seen on this site in recent times... so so amazing! could you talk about the fonts you used and a bit about the coloring/blending process? thanks so much and hope you have a wonderful week. - A

hello! this is such a sweet ask— thank you so much! i'm so thrilled to hear that you love my silly little titanic gifset 🤍

i spent,,,,,, way too much time on it as a way to try and distract myself from a) politics and b) the bomb cyclone. we live in a time.

anyway! it's probably the most labor-intensive set i've ever made: lots of frame by frame coloring, layer masks, etc., and honestly i would love to talk about it!

all of the gifs were challenging to some degree, but i'd be here for another two weeks if i went through the whole set, so i'm going to narrow the focus to just the second gif. info on how i made this guy below the cut!

i tried out probably six different scenes before i settled on the two that i used: rose wading through the corridor (top blend gif) and jack and rose embracing (base gif). i went with them because even though there's a lot of motion in each gif, they lined up more neatly than any of the other options— rose sort of wades through the embrace while staying pretty much centered in the gif

so, scenes selected! however, the color and lighting situation was... well. it was this:

dingy! dark! the hallway lights are a problem! me @ me girl what are you doing!

basic coloring/lightening on both gifs took me from here:

to here:

a good start, but i needed to drastically reduce the brightness behind rose in the base gif and manufacture some blue tones for the top gif to match general color scheme of the set. to that end, i turned each gif + coloring into a smart object, converted to frames, and sat down to do so much goddamn frame by frame coloring

for rose, i used a black color fill layer, normal, 65% opacity

for the embrace, i went with a custom blue gradient map, soft light, 100% opacity

once each gif was back in smart object form, i got to work fine tuning the color: amping up the blues, doing a little bit of lightening, making sure rose's hair really popped. after that, i did some final layer masking to make sure the blend was nice and soft

don't worry about how long the scroll bar is! everything is fine! yes there are multiple copies of both smart objects! it’s all good! <— actively lying.

the before vs. after is pretty great though:

on to text! i wanted to use a different (but complementary!) font for the large text on the gifs that didn't have orpheus/eurydice. i went with against— a little rounder, but still in the same vein as sunroll. the small text on all the gifs is tw cen mt std

to get the fancy color effect on the large text, i slapped a color overlay (bright blue, multiply, 61%) on a white text layer set to difference. to make sure the blue stayed blue, below that text layer, i duplicated the layer, cleared the layer style, and set the blend mode to color. as a final step, i went back to the top text layer with the color overlay and added a drop shadow (pale pink, normal, 29%)

the small text got the same color overlay + base color layer treatment, except the overlay (pale pink, linear burn, 100%) was different

there you have it! one (1) gif from the set that consumed two wholeass weeks of my life!

if you'd like more technical information on my personal giffing/coloring process, i have an absolutely massive tutorial that covers everything from start to finish. for blending, becca @nataliescatorccio (one of tumblr's undisputed giffing queens!) has a great tutorial that goes into more depth than i did here

all that said, blending/coloring/giffing in general really are just a matter of trial and error; practice and patience are your best friends

thank you again for the very sweet ask! i really had fun breaking down the work that went into the set 💕

[greensaplinggrace]

How do you manage to enjoy the fandom even with all the antis and fandom drama? You seem to have it figured out, please share your secrets!

I mean, it's certainly not a perfect system, but I do have some tricks.

For one, I'm not someone who's afraid to block liberally. As someone who's rejection sensitive and has severe anxiety issues, and as someone who's also been blocked by blogs I really liked for one reason or another, I can assure you that you have nothing to feel guilty about for blocking whoever you need to in order to curate your internet experience. Another thing I do is that I always blacklist any anti tags almost as soon as I enter any new fandom. These two tricks are pretty well known, but I feel like a lot of people don't use them quite as much as they should, largely because of Tumblr's weird insistence on guilt-tripping people about the ways they engage with fandom. But seriously, as someone who's been on Tumblr for years, just block and blacklist as much as you want to or need to. It's fine.

Personally, for fandoms with shipping wars that I heavily multiship in, like SaB and FFVII, I use blacklisting more than blocking, because the fandom is usually so divided that it's hard to find neutral or respectful blogs, and I get the most content from simply avoiding well tagged posts. Anybody who doesn't tag correctly gets blocked, and that eliminates a lot of the people who want to bait or harass others. Cross-taggers are the worst parts of a fandom. People who are anti or don't like things for personal reasons and not harassing reasons are usually very good at tagging things correctly. They're respectful of others and just want to enjoy the content they like. That's amazing and I'm totally here for it.

Also creation tags are amazing! Going into the gifmaking tags is like a breath of fresh air. It's just pure creative heaven in tags like that. You can see everybody's labors of love for this thing they're passionate about without any of the drama. It's incredibly liberating. And its easy to realize in spaces like that that this is just a group of people who love a piece of art so much they dedicate their time to engaging with it and with the people who love it on a regular basis. The people that harass others and constantly abuse fans that like the things they don't, the worst people in the fandom, are always just a very loud minority. Remove them from the equation and you've got something beautiful.

Lol honestly though, I'm not the best person to come to for this kind of thing. A lot of it is simply the stuff I do outside of tumblr. When I get frustrated with fandom, I have my siblings to talk to or vent to. When I see an anti post that I'm not able to avoid, I'll simply post a lot of positivity in the tag instead. I devote a lot of energy to turning negative emotions into positive actions. Sometimes it doesn't work, but other times I'll see someone call the darkling homophobic and then go on a bisexual!Darkling positivity spree, gifset included XD. I also have Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder, so I pace and daydream a lot. It's stress relief to the highest degree for me, and it really helps. I go outside. I play with my niece. I discuss hcs with my fandom friends. A lot of this stuff is simply methods that work personally for me.

Honestly, when I read something really depressing I'll just like,,, go to sleep if I'm able to. A lot of this stuff should absolutely not be agonized over. Eat some food. Take a shower. Socialize. Take a nap. Get off of tumblr. Listen to some music. Watch a funny youtube video. If you're active in fandom, make some content about the things you like.

I'm really sorry if this isn't what you're looking for! Or if you were looking for something less serious and I ended up turning this into a ramble of epic proportions lmao. The truth is that I often have to disengage from fandom to remind myself there's more important stuff in the world, and that there are real people behind these screens. I love rewatching or re-engaging with the original content to remind myself why I love this thing in the first place. Writing fanfiction, creating gifsets, daydreaming about all of my elaborate and fluffy hcs - it all helps me remember that this is something I'm engaging with because I love it too, alongside so many others. Self reaffirmation. If you doubt the other people around you, look at why you're here and what brought you here. Anything that makes you feel unpleasant or bad about that, remove from the equation.

[cinemaocd]

Appreciation post: Idlesuperstar

This is an @idlesuperstar appreciation post. If you have not checked out Idlesuperstar and you follow me, please do so now and show her some love. She is an epic gif-maker, excellent commentator on film, smashing fic writer, expert on British film, genius fangirl and my best friend on this hellsite and in life in general.

Also she makes her living through sewing, so check out her store as well!

She was recently diagnosed with Covid-19 and is recovering, but she has been through hell. I wanted to make something to cheer her up and I think the best thing I can do is signal boost her blog.

Here is a very short list of some of my favorite Idlesuperstar Tumblr Things

RLT: Roger Livesey Thursday...different stars get different days. We used to be more efficient in actually posting content but we sorta ran out. Here is one of my favorite RLT posts....

My Wonky Scans: Apart from being a stellar gif-maker, writer etc, Idlesuperstar is a collector of film ephemera which she often scans and presents to the world.

Advent Calendars: Many years around Christmas Idlesuperstar posts a gif set every day on a theme (otps, favorite dead not American actors...). Who else does this? It’s so much work and the results are FUCKING brilliant. The most amazing part is that OP often travels at Christmas so she gets this done ahead of time.

Birthday Gifsets: OK, lots of people do birthdays but Idlesuperstar’s birthday gifsets usually have gifs from as many films as possible, are painstakingly created to be as impactful and tidy as possible and usually have salient quotes about the birthday person. The sheer amount of labor that goes into these things boggles my little mind.

AQ Wednesday: Anthony Quayle Wednesday. Idlesuperstar doesn’t even care about Anthony Quayle, but she knew I was OBSESSED with him so she made a series of amazing gifs just for me on Wednesdays because that was always my shittiest day at work. What kind of amazing friend even does that???? Idlesuperstar, that’s who!

Baby Jay Many of the things we love mutually were obsessions planted before we knew one another, but we both became obsessed with Michael Jayston around the same time for slightly different reasons, I think. Anyway, it’s been a joy uncovering Jayston things together. Last year at Christmas she gave me one of my most treasured possessions, an autographed photo of Jay that she personally got signed for me.

Photography: It’s not enough to be brilliant at like five other things, but Idlesuperstar also takes wonderful photos. She travels a lot so I get to live vicariously through her lovely adventures, which often involve classic film.

Fantasy casting: Modern actors in The Looking Glass War (an oft overlooked gem of a John LeCarre novel), Classic Warner Brothers actors in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I love these because they were often the product of a chat or film date. It’s one thing to say, “what if” another to go out and find the gifs and then put it together.

F is for Fake: Film scholarship meets completely bonkers obsessive fandom. A gifset and mini essay about Orson Welles prosthetic noses in every one of his films. Again...WHO DOES THIS???? This series alone should earn Idlesuperstar absolute “lege” status on tumblr.

Fanfiction: For those of you who are perhaps new here, the first fan fiction I ever wrote for tumblr was a lengthy co-authorship with Idlesuperstar on the series “The Life and Death of Sugar Candy.” Idlesuperstar really did so much of the heavy lifting in that. She wrote all of the Clive pieces, a great deal of the Theo pieces, made the mood boards, posted the fics on AO3 and at one point wrote postcards with different handwriting so that we could have a sort of meta new media look at our OTP. Oh she did the postcard thing TWICE!!!  It was fucking YEARS of work. Oh also as an editor she is stellar and as a co-author she always turns in work that is like 99% done. She has spoiled me for working with anyone else. Sometimes, I think “did we really spend like five years of our lives working on a fic series about the interior lives of characters from a decades old movie that like six people will read?” and then I remember, yes, yes we did that. She has also written Spooks fic and John LeCarre fic and probably other stuff I’m forgetting...

[hoedameron]

because i didn’t make any more gifs of the tfatws finale, have a thor gif i made to test new colorings <3 i love the absolute VIBRANCE of it like it brings out the richness of taika’s vision. i felt like a true marvel gif maker with this coloring :3c

one question for serious content creators: how the hell do you do it? how do y’all download the episode at lightning speed, get the clips/screencaps you want, then go into photoshop and whip a gifset in RECORD time?? i am just at AWE at y’all’s swiftness and practiced ease it’s something so remarkable....do y’all just have really good wifi and have paid photoshop...because i’m sitting here with silly wifi and a cracked ps who want me?? 

though i knew there might be like...a lot of people wanting to gif a lot of these scenes i knew would do numbers, i decided to toss my hat into the ring; put my cake in the cake walk with my version of the scene. after it was finished downloading, i got the clip, then opened photoshop which takes like TWO MINUTES TO OPEN i love cracked ps <3 then got to work. luckily i actually perfected my sharpening atn and it’s easy to use and it’s such a relief! also do not persecute me but lean in sweeties....it may be like wearing white after labor day but i used the same coloring i did with my bucky vs. lucky cat 😳 of course i tweaked it a bit because it was a brighter scene pero yes, you heard it here FIRST! a bitch is a psd repeater idk if something is good, why change it up when you are under a time crunch?? like i said, i also didn’t want to bother too much with the coloring because i wanted to churn it out as quickly as possible because it was already outside the window that i liked (an hour after the episode aired).

another question for content creators: how do y’all sacrifice sleep? i stayed up until 5:30 AM because i was too riled up :/ i only have less than 2 hours of sleep because i woke up at like 8:02 AM and was like...guess i’m up! yesterday morning was just all types of just....wrecking my sleep schedule for a gifset scream AND IT WAS JUST ONE! y’all be making more than one HOW i do not understand. my photoshop was STRUGGLING to close, breathing so heavy and chrome was like GIRLY i cannot open because SOMEBODY is taking up too much of the memory -_- like they were FIGHTING to function, one to close and one to open...it was just a MESS. i really do think i have to invest in actual ps...that sucks like i am in shambles.

okay, so, the caption. can i just say that i actually was like...OKAY! my original caption, the caption that automatically came to mind when i first saw bucky with sarah’s kids is “uncle bucky” i was like that is SUCH a cute and funny caption i want to use it. then...and i really don’t like the reason why i backed away from it but i did back away from it because i did not want to have any flame from shippers. i do not personally ship anything from marvel at all (maybe like one pero still it’s not like i’m gonna cry if it doesn’t happen lol) pero like shippers just scare me. i didn’t want people in the tags being like “uncle?? who you calling uncle?? 🤬” which is SO silly to think but i did </3 so i went with what was in the script and i think it did the job :) then funny enough, there is a more popular gifset where op does use the caption “uncle bucky” so me backing out on using that caption may have been for the best, y’know? so it doesn’t look like i was stealing WHICH AGAIN silly to think because it’s just free real estate! op doesn’t own that phrase and isn’t the only person who views bucky as an uncle to aj and cass since that was my immediate thought....anyways IT’S ALL SMOOTHED OUT!

yes, i did run into the same problem as my prodigal son gifset where i couldn’t find my gifset in the tag. then i was like...i am EXHAUSTED, it is FOUR AM, i am not FIT for this kind of content creator lifestyle of being the first to “report”...i will leave this once again in God’s hands...and y’all really came through and i cannot thank y’all enough!! i almost got emotional because i was like...when i went to bed, i was really preparing myself to only get 200 notes and i was satisfied with that number. it may seem cheesy or idk if it sounds performative idk pero i am being so damn genuine when i say that every interaction with my content means the absolute WORLD to me. every reblog and reply is like a patch on a quilt that i go back to in order to remind myself that there are people who really like my content. i do have problems with that and i am definitely working on being proud of my work so MWAHHH making edible arrangements for everyone <3