#its a little different using this one bc i had to screen record and manually edit the video. i think sketchbooks record feature autom | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rizahawkais · 4 years ago

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Hi Nia! You're gifs are so pretty! Is it possible for you to show how you get your WandaVision gifs too look so clear and hd? And how do you do your colorings too? (specifically the wanda maximoff in episode 3 gifset ITS GORGEOUS) I'm new to giffing and all the tutorials are kind of old. It's okay if you don't want to though! I understand it may be time consuming.

omg no! never feel intimidated to ask!! i don’t mind at all!

so, i’m going to show you how i made and coloured this gif

mostly bc it’s the only gif in that set w text and i’m going to share my text settings too!

tutorial is below :)

WHAT KIND OF VIDEOS ARE BEST?

.mkv files (the bigger the better BUT i usually think anything above 5 gb is excessive and unnecessary for an episode of television BUT for a movie worth it) itunes downloads (logolesspro on twitter, hd-source on tumblr, live-action-raws on tumblr have some DEPENDING on what you’re looking for) (also, there’s a chance that if you search "show/movie hd download tumblr” you’ll find a tumblr with its itunes download available)

THAT IS IT NO OTHER TYPE OF FILES MAKE YOUR GIFS LOOK GOOD

- my suggestion is always if its new (like just came out the past month) t*rrent it! it’ll be downloaded quickly and .mkv files look the best! BUT if not check the sources above see who has the BIGGEST file if they even have what you’re looking for and then if not then you look to t*rrenting!!

here are the wandavision files i use so you can see!!

SCREENCAPPING

-if you have windows use potplayer! i have a mac so i can’t show you how to use it and it’s not available for me :( HOWEVER back when i had a windows potplayer was the best method in screencapping!!

-I HAVE A MAC! so i use mpv!! (go to mpv.io and follow the directions) BUT DON’T DOWNLOAD THE LATEST ONE (it has a bug that skips frames) try each before the latest one bc from what i heard different ones work differently for everyone!! and i don’t know which one i use (yikes!) THERE ISN’T THAT MANY I PROMISE AND IT’S WORTH IT BC MPV IS THE BEST (i used to use adapter but they didn’t take impressive screencaps in my opinion and it was evident in my gifs you can see it too! )

create a folder for your screencaps! and make sure to rmb the directory order! now we want to create a text file on our built in textedit app on mac! type up all this down below (i like jpg but you can replace jpg w png if you want) AND SAVE THE FILE AS mpv.conf THIS IS IMPORTANT SO DON’T FORGET IT! save it somewhere you’ll find easily and NEVER delete it until you don’t use mpv anymore

just in case you don’t know what to insert after, go to your screencaps folder

now you want to open mpv and go to the corner towards mpv -> preferences and they’ll tell you that there is no .conf file SO GO LOOK FOR THE TEXT FILE WE JUST MADE AND DRAG IT TO THE FOLDER THEY OPENED FOR US AFTER SAYING THERE IS NO .CONF FILE

(i learned all this from @kylos tutorial!! so if any of what i just said about setting up mpv makes NO SENSE to you check out their tutorial at kylos(.)tumblr(.)com/post/178497909311)

now we can screencap!

so let’s find the scene we want RIGHT BEFORE and MAKE SURE SUBTITLES ARE OFF

i pause and then press (option/alt + s) and then SCREENCAPS ARE BEING TAKEN!! and to end the screencaps being taken you once again press (option/alt + s)!!

now we want to delete the excess frames! and put it all into one folder!! DO NOT DELETE FRAMES IN THE MIDDLE OF WHAT YOU WANT TO GIF!! WHEN YOU SKIP FRAMES IT WILL BE NOTICEABLE!!

MAKING THE GIF

this method isn’t used that much BUT I LOVE IT so this is how i put my frames in! first i check to see the size of my frames: 1920 x 1080

so i create a NEW file on photoshop with those dimensions w these settings

now i set my tool on photoshop to path selection tool bc if you have it set on smth like move tool or crop tool at the end you might end up moving or cropping frames you don’t want to!

ok so now we select ALL our frames and drag it on top of our new file on photoshop and the MOMENT we see our first frame in photoshop JUST KEEP CLICKING ENTER until all the frames are loaded!!

you can do file -> scripts -> load files into stack but it is WAYYY slower in my opinion!

now i crop out the excess BUT i don’t resize the gif yet! the dimensions wandavision is filmed in is 4:3 so i go to crop and set the settings to this:

MAKE SURE IT’S ON RATIO SO WE’RE PRESERVING THE ORIGINAL SIZE JUST CUTTING OFF THE BLACK EDGES!! We are going from 1920 x 1080 to 1440 x 1080 this is the dimensions after i cropped

WE ARE KEEPING THE QUALITY BY NOT CHANGING THE DIMENSIONS OF ANYTHING INSIDE !!

now we want to go to actions and create an action!! open up actions w one of these two depending on what your dash looks like!!

so we create an action with this button on the bottom of actions and we’re gonna title it making a gif and hit record!!

NOW LET’S GOOOOO!!

1. make sure you have timeline on your dash!

2. create frame animation (if you see create video timeline just click the arrow next to the button to see your other option which is frame animation!!)

3. now let’s meet our best friend!! the little bar in the top right corner that has all the commands for making our gifs and MAKE FRAMES FROM LAYERS

4. WE HAVE TO SHARPEN OUR GIFS NOW BUT TO DO THAT WE NEED TO CONVERT TO A SMART OBJECT SO NOW WE ARE GOING TO CONVERT TO VIDEO TIMELINE there are two ways: the button in the bottom left corner or the button in the top right corner w all the other commands!

5. select -> all layers DON’T MANUALLY SELECT THEM ALL BC THE ACTION WILL ONLY SELECT THAT SAME NUMBER OF FRAMES SO IF THERE ARE MORE FRAMES YOU WON’T GET THEM IN THE SMART OBJECT!!

6. filter -> convert for smart filters

7. NOW WE SHARPEN!! (filter -> sharpen -> smart sharpen) i sharpen twice!! first, make sure we are on legacy w more accurate and remove gaussian blue! the first sharpening will be 500% with 0.4 px radius. NOW SHARPEN AGAIN (filter -> sharpen -> smart sharpen) also w legacy, more accurate and remove gaussian blur BUT this time 10% with a 10.0 px radius!

8. it’s hd now!! so let’s flatten frames into clips!! go to the top right magic button again!! and you should see a pop up saying layers are being made

9. now we convert back to frame animation w either the bottom left button or our magic top right command center!

10. make frames from layers

11. select all frames w our magic command button

12. set the animation delay to 0.05 THAT IS THE BEST ONE ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS only use 0.06 when the character is moving really fast in the video itself and it makes the gif itself look awkward BUT NEVER GO ABOVE 0.06 it’ll look slow and laggy and we don’t want that and don’t go below 0.05 bc then it’ll be tooo fast and we don’t want that either!

13. now delete the very first frame on the timeline bc it is an oversharpened duplicate of the second frame! end the recording w this button!

this is what your action should look like expanded! if you made mistakes on the way and it shows up you can just click the specific step and press the trash can on the action tab to delete in from the order!!

NOW AFTER LOADING YOUR FRAMES AND CROPPING THE EDGES OF YOUR FRAMES IF YOU NEED TO JUST PLAY THE ACTION AND THEN YOUR GIF WILL BE MADE FOR YOU!!!!

now i delete some unnecessary frames in the beginning and end and this is what my gif looks like (the size was 46 mb and the limit is 10 mb so the dimensions of the gif are 540 x 405 to get it to 5 mb BUT I HAVEN’T CROPPED IT YET SO THIS IS ME CROPPING JUST TO SHOW YOU WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE)

CROPPING THE GIF

in my opinion if you want your gif to look hd you shouldn’t crop before you sharpen!! i believe that if you crop before you sharpen you don’t allow photoshop to sharpen all the pixels whereas if you crop beforehand there is less to work with!!

dimensions is all up to you!! just make sure to go by tumblr rules!! 540 is the max width and if you want to make two gifs per row then my suggested width is 268 and for three gifs per row my suggested is 177 px! Just have the right width and the length can be whatever you want!!

now i’m going to crop my gif to 540 by 590!!

NOW THIS IS WHAT MY GIF LOOKS LIKE!

COLOURING BASICS

let me show you the best adjustment tools in my opinion and a brief explanation for what they do!!

brightness/contrast: pretty simple increase/decrease the brightness/contrast BUT one of my techniques for when i first start colouring a gif is i select all my frames and do nothing to the settings of the adjustment but i set the layer to screen LIKE THIS

curves: ik others use curves to change brightness/contrast w the squiggly thing BUT i like it to set a white point and black point, this is also a technique i use when i first start colouring a gif when screen doesn’t look good for me SO you use white point to select a pixel on the gif to set as the lightest color on the gif (setting the white point) and you use black point to select a pixel on the gif to set as the darkest colour on the gif (setting the black point) usually the white point makes it TOO bright and that’s why we use the black point to counter it and same goes for when i use screen with brightness/contrast, it gets too bright so i use black point to counter it below is the button for white point and the button for black point, respectively they are shaped as color picker tools

vibrance: generally, i never use this except for color p*rn sets but they work really well in making colors seem more strong

hue/saturation: like vibrance, i never use this except for color p*rn sets but this adjustment is to help change the colors or hue of a color for example: turn blue into purple or turn a blue into a little lighter shade of blue

color balance: I ALWAYS USE THIS!! except for in black and white gifs BUT THIS IS MY GO TO AND IF I DON’T USE IT MY GIFS ARE JUST BLAND i feel like color balance is what essentially balances the colors on your gif and adds dimension to it, it makes your gif go from looking way too yellow to a more golden neutral look and it is an essential adjustment in my opinion

channel mixer: i rarely use channel mixer BUT it is so so useful when you are working w a dark scene just play w the settings and all of a sudden all the blue in a dark scene will be a little more yellow and red and your scene will kind of just look brighter and more visible

selective color: THIS IS ALSO AN ESSENTIAL this helps SPECIFIC colors pop you’re working on a scene where there is too much red on someones face you use this tool to remove the magentaness from the yellow section OR when you feel someones face is TOO yellow and needs more blush you add more magenta in the yellow section of selective color

gradiant map: gradiant map is perfect when you’re lazy if you feel like your gif looks more neutral and you want some red in it but you don’t want to mess with any other adjustments just set a red to black gradiant on soft overlay with a very low opacity and BOOM slightly red but not too much red added!

NOW TO COLOR THE GIF!

today i have decided to start with a brightness layer set on screen

and this is what we got!

now that’s a little to bright and washed out in my opinion SOOOO to counteract it, i’m going to use my black point tool in curves and i’m going to select this point on the gif (it’s better to choose smth in the background and not smth that’s paid attention to such as monica’s hair or either of their eyelashes)

now my gif looks like this! the base color is complete!

now i think i need to balance all this yellow and red! SOOOO WE GONNA USE COLOR BALANCE!!

i think the best way to use color balance is to keep swinging the balancer until you see what you like and then keep going midtones i think i want more red and i don’t want a cyan midtone and then for shadows i think i want more cyan to counter the redness of the gif but highlights i don’t touch that much NOW HERE ARE MY SETTINGS SO YOU CAN SEE

and this is what my gif looks like

now you can stop here if you want but in my opinion i think the gif looks a lil too dead still SO IMMA USE SELECTIVE COLOR

i think there needs to be a lot lot more RED so i amp up the yellow magenta and black in the red! but i also think the yellows need to be LESS RED so i remove magenta from the yellow! and bc there’s some cyan and blue bc of monica and the flowers in the background im going to make the cyans more cyan and the blues a lil more black! i’m going to remove some yellows from the magenta!! and i add more black to the neutrals and black!! i think it’s always important to add more black to neutral and black bc it adds more depth to the gif by not just making it a bunch of bright colors and having dark colors to contrast to!! my settings are below!

and the result!

now let’s see everything together!

and the before and after!

I HOPE MY COLOURING EXPLANATION MADE SENSE!! if not you can always ask me more questions i don’t mind!!

ADDING SUBTITLES

we want to grab the text tool!

make a text box from anywhere in the middle from the left to right edge. this is so we can make sure our text is centered and will be in the same place for when we have sets w more than one gif w text!

type your text out and make sure you highlight the whole text so that all the settings apply to EACH character! you can find the alignments (for center) in the paragraph tab!

now lets right click on the text layer and go to blending options! add stroke and drop shadow!

now drag it to the desired height you would like and make sure to keep it in mind for when you have more than one subtitled gif in a set!

NOW TO MAKE SURE THE TEXT STAYS IN PLACE AND THE BLENDING STAYS YOU HAVE TO CONVERT TO SMART OBJECT!!

if you want to only have the text applied to certain frames instead of all frames, select the frames you don’t want by clicking the first frame in ur don’t want section ON THE TIMELINE and WHILST HOLDING SHIFT click the last frame of ur don’t want section and then toggle the eye switch next to the text layer

now you see the text

now you don’t

tip: use opacity to fade the text in and out!

the text is going to be on all my frames so i don’t need to toggle the eye but i just wanted to show you just in case!!

now here’s my FINAL RESULT

save for web (file -> export -> save for web)

your gifs have to always be under 10 mb! so, if your WAYYY overboard YOU HAVE TO DELETE FRAMES! or you can divide the gif in two and have two gifs instead of one! however, if you plan on going the deleting frames route MAKE SURE YOU DELETE FROM THE BEGINNING OR END OF YOUR SELECTION i promise you that most of us won’t notice that your characters dialogue is being cut off BUT WE WILL NOTICE IF FRAMES ARE BEING SKIPPED so, don’t delete frames in the middle of ur gif!! idc how little you do it IT WILL RUIN YOUR GIF AND I SAY THIS FROM EXPERIENCE i would delete every fifth frame to cut down my gifs and that may seem like not that big of a deal BUT IT IS my gif looked choppy and poor so it is way better to cut from the end/beginning of the gif

ANOTHER LAST PIECE OF ADVICE in the bottom left of when the save for web menu shows up THERE’S A PREVIEW BUTTON click on it! it’ll show you your gif on your default browser and show you what it’ll look like once uploaded! this is perfect to check the speed of ur gif and the colouring and to notice if there’s a problem with your subtitles or maybe there’s an obvious jump in frames you never noticed before!! i always use preview bc the built-in photoshop viewer of ur gif shows the colors differently and the speed is NEVER ACURRATE!

I USED THESE SAVE SETTINGS!! many say to use selective pattern but i DISAGREE and i think these save settings are the ✨ best ✨

OK NOW THAT IS THE END OF THIS VERY LONG GIF TUTORIAL!! I HOPE THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED!! IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK I SINCERELY DON’T MIND!! JUST DON’T BE RUDE OR ANYTHING BC PPL HAVE BEEN RECENTLY :(

I WISH YOU ALL THE LUCK AND FUN IN YOUR GIFFING ADVENTURES !!

#tutorials #asks #sourceblog #allresources #completeresources #itsphotoshop #dailyresources #resourcemarket #chaoticresources #onlyresources #hisources #sibylresources #dailypsd

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ganzeer · 7 years ago

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MAKING THE INTANGIBLE TACTILE Scripps College Frederic W. Goudy Lecture, Spring 2018

Let's get one thing straight: I'm not a printmaker, nor am I a bookmaker. I might've cranked the lever on a letterpress machine two, maybe three times. Which makes even first year students at this here institution far more knowledgeable about printmaking than I can ever hope to be. You are probably a lot more clever as well, because anybody who goes off to study things like printmaking and bookbinding in the year 2018 is likely wise enough to avoid the manipulation of today's mass media, which seems far too taken by the virtual and augmented. Regardless of how useless these technologies have proven to be so far.

But let's not forget that when printmaking first came into existence, it too was considered "mass media". A new and revolutionary way to share ideas with a great many people.

Before Gutenberg printed bibles using movable type in 15th century Europe, there was the movable type invented by Pi Sheng in 11th century China. A detailed description of Sheng's invention was described in Shen Kuo's THE DREAM POOL ESSAYS, a seminal work that covered everything from astronomy, geology, and natural phenomena to architecture, philosophy, and even UFO sightings.

Some might find it surprising that this massive book was printed using tried-and-true woodblock methods rather than the new emerging technology of movable type, but I don't think its weird at all. After all, we still shoot movies on traditional film even with the advent of Virtual Reality. And we still walk into brick-and-mortar stores to buy books printed on paper, even when armed with the power to download them onto our more convenient Kindles. Not to mention the comeback of Vinyl, which absolutely no one could've anticipated.

What this tells us is that the advent of one technology doesn't necessarily have to spell the end of an older one. There's room for coexistence, there's room for variety.

Many will tell you that printmaking began with block-printing in the Far East, and they wouldn't be wrong. But prior to woodblocks there was the stamp or seal. Evidence points to cylinder seals originating in Mesopotamia around 7000 years BC. Often carved out of stone, these seals would be rolled onto soft clay, leaving an impression that could be replicated an endless number of times.

Seals dating back to Ancient Egypt were also found. Egypt is also where the art of stenciling was common practice. Hieroglyphs were stenciled onto stone walls, which were then chiseled by sculptors. An ingenious method that allowed for the speedy reproduction of information without skimping on the tactile qualities of 3-dimensional materiality. But perhaps, the greatest mass media device invented at the time was likely Egyptian paper, what the Greeks called: papyrus, which was produced as early as 3000 BC if not earlier.

A lot of craft and labor went into the making of papyrus, which made it valuable. So valuable that a scribe would not be allowed to write on papyrus prior to spending several years honing his craft on discarded pieces of wood and shards of pottery. Once a scribe was ready, he or she would use papyrus for religious texts, official documents, letters and love poems, erotica, technical manuals, record keeping, spells and medical texts as well as, rebellion.

The image of seated mouse draped in fine linen being serviced by wild cats is a fine example of rebellion in Ancient Egypt. So powerful is this satirical image that it is immediately understood regardless of language, regardless of culture, regardless of time. The prey ruling over the hunter. The hunter serving its prey.

It should come as no surprise that this fragment is dated back to the 19th dynasty, between 1295 and 1186 BC. Which coincides with the first known strike in recorded history - carried out by the artisans who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. These artists knew they were more powerful than kings and queens and shamans and aristocracy. They knew they were more powerful because it was their artwork that propped up regimes and made legends out of ordinary men. They knew that they were the cats in this story, and their rulers no more than mice.

This rebellion must've been organized, or at the very least, significantly infectious, because we find variations of this same image surviving on more than just one fragment, all dating to the exact same period.

What we're looking at here, may be the earliest surviving form of the protest flyer, or even... the meme.

This is also significant because the Ancient Egyptians believed that the act of writing and drawing was no less than magic. That by putting a rather abstract thought in writing on a tangible object in the physical world was a way of making that thought become reality.

Which is perhaps why we find sculptures of scribes carved out of ever-lasting stone, a material usually reserved for the statues of gods and pharaohs.

I think about this often. About the special power of materializing ideas, of putting them out into the world, physically. I think it was 2011 when I started thinking about it seriously, when I created this image known as the Mask of Freedom. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was recently ousted, and the military took over, promising it would only be temporary. A transitional period in which the military oversaw the country's transformation to a legitimate democracy. Referendums were held and people went out to vote in unprecedented numbers. Inspiring montages flickered on television screens and proud patriotic music took over the airwaves. The ushering of Egypt's newfound democracy was on everyone's lips, with the role played by the country's honorable military never going unmentioned. It seemed like... a good idea to question that. Hence the Mask of Freedom, with accompanying text reading: "NEW! The Mask of Freedom! With salutations from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to sons of the beloved nation. Now available for an unlimited period of time."

I first posted the image online, and it got its generous portion of likes and shares and what have you. It was all good, but then... about a week or two later, I hit the streets armed with stickers of this image and proceeded to put them up on lampposts around Downtown Cairo. And within an hour, I was arrested.

Luckily, I still had Twitter on my phone back then (I don't anymore), and I was able to tweet about it before getting thrown in the back of a police car. The reaction to this was something akin to Kim Kardashian's ass breaking the internet, except... instead of Kim's ass, it was the Mask of Freedom.

Within hours, thousands of people changed their profile pictures to the image of the Mask. And Cairo's very acute activist community managed to stage a protest where I was taken for questioning. Before I even got there. And they were armed with fresh printouts of the Mask of Freedom, a hi-res image of which was already available online. And within hours, I was released without charge.

That wasn't the end of The Mask of Freedom. Within two days, bootlegged T-shirts sporting the mask were being sold in Tahrir square. In fact, different versions of the same shirt were going around, and the image was seen often at protests over the next couple years.

This is the difference between putting a picture on the internet and giving it a physical manifestation in the real world. The internet, believe it or not, isn't as important as some make it out to be. I keep coming across college art magazines where students frequently talk about the power of clicks and "engaging content", and it is one of the saddest, most disheartening things I've ever seen. As someone who has participated firsthand in a revolution described by US media as a social media uprising, let me tell ya: online activism is bullshit. Egypt's dictator would have never been ousted had people not taken to the streets and occupied public squares, and I would've never been released from military-police custody had activists not showed up at their doorstep.

Even the term "online activism" is ridiculous. It's a little akin to saying "telephone activism". There's no such thing, it's just a communication tool. Sure, it's a pretty good one, but a rather pointless one if what is being communicated does not seep into the physical world in some way or function.

Realizing the rather versatile applications of the Mask of Freedom, in that -much like the ancient Egyptian image of mouse ruling over cats- it could work in a range of situations regardless of time, place, or culture, I found myself using it more than once.

Poland, 2012 - After joining the EU, Poland's market really opened up to big multinational corporations. And after years of suffering under soviet dictatorship which lasted til 1989, you could now see the Polish embracing consumerist culture with intense fervor. My response was to use the Mask of Freedom in a stencil on a wall in Katowice, historically known to be a big mining town in Poland. Hence the figure equipped with mining tools, while clad in Gap, Adidas, and Converse.

The text in Polish reads, very simply: "Beware the Mask of Freedom."

Fast forward to 2015, and the Mask of Freedom reemerges as a very applicable American critique, in a 3-color screenprint on wood at a solo exhibition at Leila Heller Gallery in New York City.

Of course, having come from a very old place, where dynasties have fallen, and others have risen, where Gods were no longer worshiped in favor of other Gods, and where culture has shifted and changed and altered more than once, I find it quite easy to look at everything with a critical eye, whether they be old... established, often deemed unquestionable things... or new.

Of course, as much as I'd like to, I don't always get to do this sort of work. The unfortunate reality of being a working artist is that every so often you're gonna have to take on commissions. One such commission was a sort-of art-video I did for Irish rock band, U2. This was part of a big campaign where they got 11 artists to do visual companion pieces to songs from their latest album. The band had stated that their inspiration for this particular album, Songs of Innocence, was the punk rock of the 70's. And in thinking about that, it occurred to me that music videos weren't yet a popular artform in the 70's, and one's visual experience of a band pretty much relied on the artwork on record sleeves and gig posters. So I thought why not make a video made up entirely of posters. This would also bring a very physical, very tactile quality to the video which I thought would be cool.

youtube

862 posters. Designed over 3 weeks. Filmed in 1 day.

Okay, I have one last project I'd like to talk to you about. For a museum in Germany, I was asked to do an exhibition based on my current work-in-progress. A sci-fi graphic novel titled THE SOLAR GRID. Now I didn't want to just take pages from the graphic novel and display them on the wall. It's really not how the pages are meant to be experienced. They're meant to be in a book that you could curl up with. And I really didn't think it would make for a very compelling exhibition. What I wanted to do was create something specific to the museum experience. Not something meant for a book, and not something meant for the internet, but something really specific to entering into a museum space.

The premise of the graphic novel is that, after a major environmental catastrophe on a global scale, a lot of people leave Earth and settle on Mars. Over time, Earth becomes a de facto factory for Mars, exporting goods that are produced in solar-powered factories that never stop. This is made possible by a network of satellites, called The Solar Grid, that orbit the planet and keep it basked in eternal daylight. Effectively eliminating night on Earth.

Not everyone has migrated to Mars. In fact, most people haven't. And they are left on a nightless Earth to suffer the consequences. Not just that, but they have the waste that Mars sends back to deal with.

So, there are a lot of somewhat abstract ideas here. Ideas that I wanted to bring to the museum's space in a tangible way. The result was this installation.

So we built this room, and covered it in blown up panels from the graphic novel. This particular scene shows the sun setting, and then the sky lighting up with a great many smaller suns. And where there would've been another panel from the book, instead you have actual light blasting out of the room. Once inside the room, you see the walls covered in all the waste that the characters in the book would have to go through to survive. And right above your head, the ceiling is covered with these very harsh overhead lights, giving you a bit of the actual experience of being within the world of the graphic novel.

Now you'll notice that all the examples I've cited here show work where the form and the content are closely related. I first think of an idea, and then I figure out the form it should take.

A lot of the time I come across book-arts and printmaking where the materials used are the extent of the artist's idea. Where, rather than... the form an artwork takes being informed by an idea, the tools themselves become the idea. Where there's an almost kind of fetishization that this is a letterpress on top of a screenprint or whatever. Please don't do that.

Remember than not everything written in verse is poetry, and not everything covered in paint is a painting. What is being expressed is what truly elevates something to a work of art. How it is expressed is of course equally important. But before you get there, you must first consider what it is that needs expression, that demands expression.

That is your starting point.

Because that is what makes you unique, what makes you powerful. More powerful than kings or pharoahs or presidents. More powerful than CEOs or advertising executives or even Kim Kardashian. Remember that. Remember that every time you set pencil to paper–or even stylus to tablet–because that line you draw... has the potential to change the world. Every time.

Good luck.

Ganzeer March 19, 2018 Claremont, CA

#blog #ganzeer #text #talk #work

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gamerszone2019-blog · 5 years ago

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Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Review - Fall Of The Planet Of The Apes

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/ancestors-the-humankind-odyssey-review-fall-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Review - Fall Of The Planet Of The Apes

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey sure isn’t afraid of throwing you into the deep end. My first foray into Panache Digital’s survival game began as a young ape alone in a dark forest, the imagined laughs of hyenas and snarls of tigers echoing in the trees in a confusing cacophony. Before I could finish reading the message detailing my very first objective, a warning popped up and demanded I dodge out of the way–of what, I couldn’t be sure. Not knowing what to do, I couldn’t respond in time, and my ape was left alone, scared, hallucinating, bleeding, and poisoned, my screen a milky display of dark green and shifting shadows. I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do or where I should go. I began to wander and, thankfully, about 30 minutes later I found the rest of my clan.

At first, I believed the entire ordeal was simply a poor start. As it turns out, that first journey through the confusion of a dangerous jungle, blindly limping in different directions in hopes of finding someone to help me, is a fairly accurate depiction of what your journey in Ancestors will regularly entail. My time with the game saw me suffer similarly disorienting fates over and over, testing me to figure out what I’d done wrong and then do my best to adapt. Ancestors prides itself on giving you as little information as it can and daring you to rely on your ingenuity and resourcefulness to survive. Though the game fulfills its promise to do the former, it fails to deliver a compelling reason as to why you’d even want to rise up to the challenge of the latter.

You play as a member of an ape clan in 10 million BC Africa, and you try to ensure your lineage continues through to two million BC–the time period archaeologists say our ancestors’ evolution finally transitioned us from ape-like beings into a new, more human species. To survive that long, you need to manage how much you eat, drink, and sleep while also steering clear of predators and taking care of injuries. As your life continues, and you interact with more aspects of the world, you grow smarter and acquire new skills, which you can then pass on to your descendants. Upon death, you take control of another ape within your clan and continue the process, striving to evolve into a brand-new, more human-like species before your entire clan completely dies out.

Every second of real-world time translates into a minute in-game–except during sleep, which speeds this equation up. Your in-game progress produces opportunities for further clan evolution to then jump ahead in time by months, decades, or millennia. If you or one of your clanmates becomes pregnant, for example, giving birth to a baby will cause you to leap forward 15 months. For significantly larger jumps in time, exploring as an adult with a baby on your back will allow you to accrue energy to further improve your neurological network and unlock new abilities, which then allows you to advance a whole generation and move time forward a full 15 years. A jump in generation can be followed by an evolution, which moves you to a new, calculated placement on the timeline that’s dependent on which advancements you make. Adapting your metabolism to new plants doesn’t give you as huge a boost, for instance, as learning to use rocks as tools. Evolutions push you ahead tens of thousands of years, providing the most efficient way of getting from 10 million BC to two million BC.

It’s definitely not easy, though, especially since your clan needs to sustain itself throughout those eight million years in a single lineage. Though your clanmates learn what you do in real time, losing an entire clan means you have to restart from a brand-new lineage and relearn everything you’ve previously discovered. If your clan dies after you’ve adapted to eating fish, for example, you’ll not only need to go through the entire process of reacquainting your diet, but you’ll have to teach your new lineage how to make fishing spears all over again. When it’s a few minutes of knowledge lost, it’s not that big of a deal. But when you’re losing hours of progress, it can be quite disheartening.

Instead of saving your skills and knowledge between runs, Ancestors records your progress by keeping track of how far you travel. Initially, you can only begin a new lineage on a cliff within a jungle. However, you can discover and unlock other starting points in the jungle, and even reach other biomes, such as a lake-filled swamp and arid savanna. Unlocking these new start points provides welcome variety–as each environment contains its own unique ecosystem of creatures and plants as well as its own set of weather-based challenges–but your primates always begin in the same clueless state. Even if you already know what to do, you’ll have to retrace your steps and go through the same motions over again to recreate the same conditions that pushed your ape’s neurological network to evolve to where you were in the game before your clan was wiped out–ideally with more of your clan intact this time so you can go further.

This gameplay loop can be immensely frustrating, and it’s one that gets more drawn-out the more you play. By my fourth lineage, it was taking close to two hours to retrace my steps and redo everything I had already had to relearn a few times already. There’s nothing in the game that allows you to recover from a failure and quickly rebuild what’s been lost, either, which is demoralizing when your downfall is your own fault and downright frustrating when it’s just bad luck. I’ve lost entire clans because of my own hubris, sure, but I’ve also lost a clan because, after going through an evolution, the game randomly spawned my clan next to a tiger’s den and there were no materials nearby to make weapons. I spent the final 15 minutes of that eight-hour run helplessly watching my entire clan be slowly devoured before needing to start over.

I couldn’t go back and try a different approach to escaping the massacre of that unfortunate run because there’s no manual save feature in Ancestors. The game saves automatically when you discover a new location or go to sleep, with each lineage tied to one save file. You can manually back up your save to your PC, but there’s no easy or straightforward in-game solution to help you avoid a punishing death.

What small satisfaction the game does provide is consistently ruined by violent predators, though the threat does lessen once you make it far enough into the neurological network’s expansive skill and perk tree.

Having to redo everything you’ve already done also keeps you from discovering new things–which is paramount to surviving and one of the few good parts of Ancestors. With practically zero tutorials, Ancestors forces you to be experimental in order to succeed. There’s joy to be had in bashing different items together to see what happens and then compiling and testing hypotheses. As much as I was frustrated by needing to redo the entire process of creating the aforementioned fishing spear in repeated playthroughs, I felt genuine accomplishment in figuring it out the first time. Most of Ancestors’ puzzles can be solved with logical sense, so the challenge comes in figuring out where to find the materials you think you need. Granted, this being a game, there are occasionally arbitrary hurdles you need to jump through to build certain tools, but you’ll typically only find these associated with more advanced, late-game tasks.

You don’t get to enjoy much of the satisfaction in discovering new things and regularly evolving, though. Predators repeatedly sneak up on you and interrupt your efforts, which typically causes you to drop whatever you were messing with. It’s disheartening to want to explore and forge new tools, only to then have to put your odyssey on hold to limp back to your clan and deal with your injuries–and then be attacked again almost immediately upon heading back out. Yes, the jungle is a dangerous place. But when a tiger leaps out of the reeds to aid a crocodile that’s trying to eat me, it’s a stark reminder of how Ancestors upholds the need to rise to the challenge of survival above the experience of evolution. Historically, it makes sense, as our ape ancestors undoubtedly lived many more years as prey than predator. But in the context of a video game, the constant barrage of spawning enemies gets in the way of the gameplay loop of learning, responding, and evolving–a roadblock that’s only chipped away at and eventually toppled once you acquire the skills and tools so that your entire clan can work together and put up an adequate defense against the creatures that hunt you. Much has to be done to get to that point, though, so contending with larger predators–especially the collection of deadly wildcats that stalk and pounce on you at seemingly every quiet moment–feels unfair early on, especially in areas where there are no trees to escape up into. Dealing with their near-constant attacks or the wounds they inflict can make it discouragingly difficult to actually experiment and evolve.

The closest you come to feeling safe while playing Ancestors is when you’re up in the trees. You spend a lot of time in the branches as a result, but unfortunately there’s no easy way to travel between them. You can climb practically anything in Ancestors provided you have the stamina, so scrambling up into a tree is a quick, painless process. However, with no way to easily course correct yourself–and since trees are rarely positioned in a straight line–you typically only get to enjoy a few seconds of fast-paced, energetic movement before you run out of branch, plummet to earth, and possibly break your legs if you were too high up. And that’s a shame, because it’s actually pretty fun to leap from branch to branch once you’ve got the swing of things. There just aren’t many opportunities to use what you’ve learned once you’ve got the mechanics down. Upon leaving the forest, your chances slim down even more, as the follow-up areas are sparse on the first environment’s signature large trees.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey lingers for far too long on its most toilsome aspects. The game does reward initial experimentation, but then asks you to repeat processes over and over again without any means of securing your legacy. It’s an absolute grind to reach the closest that Ancestors has to an endgame goal–survive for eight million years–and one costly mistake, whether the game’s or your own, can erase everything you’ve accomplished. What small satisfaction the game does provide is consistently ruined by violent predators, though the threat does lessen once you make it far enough into the neurological network’s expansive skill and perk tree. But as it stands, investing in Ancestors’ journey demands too much effort for too little reward.

Source : Gamesport

#Game Reviews

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Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Review - Devolution Of The Species

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Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Review - Devolution Of The Species