#i am mildly tipsy and weirdly emotional about this silly little hobby of mine

[jameszmaguire]

4, 23, 40

CJ coming through to feed my sudden appetite to be chatty about gifmaking, I appreciate you so, thank you for indulging me <33

4. A set that flopped but deserved better

It's interesting, because I just went through my gifmaking tag and just. Seeing my own interests of the past five years reflected back at me through time lovingly spent on making gifsets of them. I feel warmth for myself here tonight. And there's a lot of sets that would be nice to have more notes, but a lot of them I make knowing there's not much of a target audience on here anyway, and thus am not expecting them to crack 500 or even 100. However. I maintain that my gifset of Mako and Raleigh from Pacific Rim just looking at each other while trying to kick each others ass deserves better. Fun fact: this was actually made literal years before it was posted, waaaaaay back when I had just learned to gif, and the fact I still deemed it postable is a minor miracle tbh.

23. What is the thing you gif when you don’t have anything else you want to gif?

Usually Umbrella Academy and just specifically any Five acting moments I enjoy, mostly because I have the caps for the show ready and stored away. Getting the frames and chossing moments and getting them to fit into a specific frame count is always my least favourite part of gifmaking, so the fact that TUA has a lot less of that hurdle makes it very compelling to be as a destressing gifmaking go-to. Also Derry Girls, but the Discourse that happened around S3 as well as just a more hit or miss quality of episodes than I was used to, plus just the steadily declining engagement us gifmakers get really makes me focus on what I want to gif in any given moment, giffing for me rather than anyone else.

40. Why do you make gifs?

This is a good one, I love you for sending me this. I just love how gifmaking makes me engage with a piece of media. It leads to me looking at it more clearly, more precisely. I start to pick up patterns in the filmmaking, I can appreciate the acting better, and I get to keep a bit of it moving on my blog, so I don't have to go back to it every time I want to see a specific moment. It relaxes me and is the perfect activity to do when watching a video essay or something similar in the background. To me, it really is a way to appreciate and interact with a piece of media that I love on a different level where I get to pull it apart a little bit and try to figure out how it works, how it stands in relation to itself, to other media. Sometimes, I get to gif things for other people and try to make them smile, so it's a very beloved activity for me.

Gifmaking asks?