#the editing is so on point and the colour grading so pretty

[pharawee]

FOUREVER YOU PROJECT ❖ Coming Soon

[bgomtori]

☆ colours - c.bg

synopsis - despite everything you two have been through, all good things must come to an end right?

-> beomgyu x reader

-> listen to colors by halsey for an experience 🤍

-> friends to potential lovers to acquintances, highschool au

-> warnings! beomgyu pushes reader away, angst, talks on mental illness and eating disorders, yn becomes an insomniac, beomgyu's a year older than you

-> notes! i've gotten back into jjk for the 7th time, and i saw like 3 edits abt stsg to the song colors, so i just wanted to LET IT OUT. GEGE AKUTAMI WATCH OUT

love is the most twisted curse of them all

tired eyes scanning through the folder of memories on your phone, your head dipping into the fluffy cushions underneath you. you didn't want to go through it again, but you couldn't stop your fingers from moving. your eyes watered, tears dripping from the corner. this was at least your 50th time rereading past messages, past folders, and old voicemails you had with choi beomgyu

choi beomgyu, the man that he was. talented, charming, and pretty. he was constantly bombarded with the squeels from your schoolmates along the hallways. however, he would always stick to you like glue, to him, you were everything he wanted. what a trope, maybe opposites do attract.

he was the light to your darkness, even if he stuck onto you like a emotionally attached puppy, you appreciated his presence. as much as you wanted to ignore his pestering, you enjoyed it, too much, to the point where your heart starts beating rapidly whenever he's around.

"ynn, let's go to the arcade after school. you don't have anything after right? let's go." the way he drags his words to persuade you into doing something he wants to do with you, and how your name rolling off his tongue perfectly, has an effect on you. his arms leaned on your desk, giving you puppy dog eyes.

"beomgyu, we have a test next week, i can't just waste my time playing games with you." you closed your textbook, placing your pen back into your pencilcase, making eye contact with beomgyu.

"come onn, you've been studying so much this entire week, you've barely hung out with me." beomgyu whined, using the tip of his shoes to kick your shins.

"beomgyu. this test is important for my final grade." you firmly stated your point, hoping that it'll get through beomgyu's thick skull. you sigh when beomgyu continues to look at you with the same puppy eyes, your words going deaf to his ears.

"fine.." you muttered out, you could have sworn that you saw beomgyu's eyes sparkle when you said that. he jumped out of the random chair he stole from the person who sat infront of you.

"i'll wait for you outside your class! see you!" beomgyu beamed, messing your hair before skipping out of the class like a lunatic. you watched as he left your class, smiling to yourself.

"are you giggling over choi beomgyu like everyone else?" your tablemate, natty, commented. knowing the teasing glint she had in her eyes, you glared at her.

"shut up."

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁

"i'm graduating in a month, will you miss me?" beomgyu smirked, biting on the straw of his drink. you took small bites out of the bread beomgyu got for you, giving him a disgusted glare.

"what's with that look." beomgyu gasped, swinging his arm around your shoulder, pulling you closer to him. the side of your body was completely squished against him, you could feel your heart about to jump out of your throat. he was too close, too close for your liking.

"i'm going to miss my favourite junior ever, you know that right? you're my favourite junior, no one can ever compare to you." beomgyu reminded you, your lips pursed into a line, pushing his body away from yours.

"don't you have other juniors to care about? why me?" you asked, your eyes not leaving his own round ones.

"isn't it obvious.." he mumbled, not loud enough for you to hear.

"huh? speak up."

"it's nothing! come on hurry, i have a new song to play for you on the guitar." beomgyu grabbed your hand, running towards the direction of his house. you screeched as he pulled you at a speed you were not ready for. you felt like you were running a track competition at this point, just how much stamina does choi beomgyu have?

your head was dizzy, you haven't ran in such a long time at a distance you don't even want to remember. the click of beomgyu's door caused your head to look up from your phone.

"sorry for making you run, i was just excited." beomgyu apologised, placing a plate of fruits and a cup of water on the floor, finding himself on the floor beside you.

"it's fine." you shook your head, poking the fruits on the plate, not having an appetite for them. beomgyu noticed your odd behaviour throughout your entire conversation with him, from the way you just took small bites of the fruits and taking huge gulps of water.

"have you been eating these days?" the sudden question had you panicking, is he always this observant? your eyes darted around his room.

"i ate the bread earlier, doesn't that answer your question?" you replied non-chalantly.

"i meant like proper meals, when was the last time you have eaten an actual meal?" his face has gotten serious, you thought to yourself, your nails dug into the flesh of your thigh, trying to think of a plausible answer.

"i can read you like a book yn, you can't lie to me." beomgyu sighs, his hands reaching out for yours, pulling them away from your thighs.

"i know i'm always not serious around you, but this has to stop soon okay? don't starve yourself, it's unhealthy, and i'm worried for you okay?" beomgyu carressed the knuckles of your fingers. slowly, you calmed yourself down from the unsettling thoughts that were eating you alive, smiling at beomgyu,

"i'm sorry, i'll stop. i don't like seeing you all worried because of me."

beomgyu's lipped tugged up into a smile, standing up, "i'll make something for you to eat, wait here."

from that day on, you knew you could rely on beomgyu with whatever problems you had. he's your best friend either way, opening up to him was easy. he was your solution to everything.

that was until a week before beomgyu's graduation, you've noticed that his radiant aura was turning dull, his eyes slowly getting more tired by the time. despite that, he has been wearing a fake smile around his batchmates, smiling whenever he was with them, returning the same energy they were giving him. your eyes squinted at his odd behaviour, you too, could read him like a book.

"you're not actually that optimistic right?" you stated, trailing behind beomgyu. beomgyu paused in his tracks, turning to face you.

"what are you talking about yn?"

"you know what i'm talking about. if you need it, i'm here to help you." you inched closer to beomgyu.

"please, if you're hurting let me help you too. let me return that favour. isn't that what friends are for?" you gagged at your words, friends? of course. you two were just friends, nothing more.

"aren't you cute? don't worry about it yn, i'll tell you everything soon." beomgyu patted your cheeks, waving a quick goodbye to you before disappearing into his classroom. you stared at the empty spot infront of you, why isn't he telling you anything after everything? didn't he tell you that he trusted you with all his life, if not, why isn't he opening up to you?

you bit your lips, trying to suppress the tears that were about to flow out. you groaned, walking back to your class as if nothing happened, but your mind was overthinking, again.

what you failed to notice was that beomgyu was watching you from the window of his class, his heart ached seeing your pained expression. he then felt a tug on his sleeve.

"when are you going to tell her?" seungmin whispered, his eyes watching beomgyu's actions carefully.

"soon enough."

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁

it was finally the day every senior had been dreading or anticipating. you stayed back after school to watch the ceremony, in hopes of seeing your seniors for one last time before they leave, including choi beomgyu.

you felt so proud for him, he's finally done with this hell, and now he can follow his dreams. however, you couldn't escape the feeling of emptiness, without him, what were you? ever since he started distancing himself from you, you felt horrible, you felt like shit.

before you knew it, the ceremony was over, the crowd screamed in joy, running to find their best friends in the crowd. you did the same, dashing to where beomgyu might be at. you hated running, but in order to talk to him in school one last time, you ran as fast as you could.

finally, you found him, your eyes watched as he took multiple pictures with the girls from his batch and yours. your face fell as you realise that the crowd practically engulfed him, you probably wouldn't have enough time to have a decent conversation with him.

however, your eyes met his, your body tensed up, he looked exhausted, yet he was still able to flash you a cute smile that you reciprocated. he signalled you to go towards him, telling the crowd that he needed to leave soon, and that was when you walked towards him.

"congrats on graduating." you hugged him, feeling his body slowly soften under your touch.

"lovebirds, wanna take a picture together?" seungmin shouted, his hand stretched out, asking for your phones. both you and beomgyu handed him your phones. seungmin smirked, snapping numerous shots for the two of you.

when he returned your phones, he whispered something in beomgyu's ear, causing him to blush and yell at him to shut up.

"don't mind him. come with me, i have something to tell you." beomgyu shoved his phone back into his pocket, dragging to towards a familiar direction.

the walk was comforting, you talked about everything that came to mind. beomgyu stared as you rambled, watching you as if you hung the stars in the sky, you were stunning.

"sorry, was i saying too much?" you mumbled, sitting beside beomgyu on a bench at the park where you first met. beomgyu shook his head.

"i like hearing you talk don't worry." reassuring you.

"what did you want to tell me anyways?"

"before that, take this, i want you to cherish this forever, as if your life depends on it okay?" beomgyu pulled out a ring, placing it on your pinky. your heart raced, the butterflies in your stomach turned into a whole zoo, your face felt warm.

"what for..?"

"i'm leaving daegu to pursue my dreams, i may not be able to see any of you again, so i just want you to have this as a reminder of me." beomgyu suddenly announced. your eyes widened, a lump formed in your throat, leaving your mouth dry.

"what are you saying? can't you at least keep in contact with me? that's stupid, you can't just cut everyone out of your life like that." you argued, biting back the tears that were watering your eyes.

"you're making this harder for me." beomgyu laughed, "you'll distract me from achieving what i want, my priority isn't you."

you were smacked with the hard truth, beomgyu was more determined to pursue his lifelong dream, and in order to do this, he has to let go of one of his dreams, and that dream was to be with you forever. your goals were completely different, you would only hinder his progress towards success. your eyes stung with tears, it hurts.

"gyu, you can't do this, maybe we can figure something out?" you pleaded, you couldn't live without him by your side. beomgyu wiped your tears with his thumb, making you look at him.

"you know i love you right? if you love me back, promise me that you'll let me go." beomgyu forced a smile, trying to calm you down.

"you? what? why didn't you tell me this earlier? we could have spent more time together as a couple." your voice was shaky, you wanted to leave, but you wanted to stay by his side till the end.

"yea i could have, but i guess i was too scared, so were you though." beomgyu shrugged, laughing dryly to himself. he hated this, he hated the fact that you were crying because of him, he hated that he can't do anything to stop you from crying. beomgyu watched you sobbed, his eyes beginning to sting, but he blinked the tears away.

"this is just a bad dream right?" you looked at beomgyu. beomgyu held your hand, shaking his head slowly, your eyes tearing up once more.

"sometimes love can be the most twisted curse of them all." beomgyu chuckled, looking off to the side.

"then at least curse me a little at the end." you hiccupped. beomgyu's eyes widened, softening once he made eye contact with you. he pulled you into a kiss filled with longing and desperation. you were quick to kiss him back, you didn't want this to end, you wanted him to stay by your side forever. you slowly pulled away from him, wiping off the dried up tears from your face. beomgyu took your pinky, intertwining them with his,

"i'll go now, take care of yourself for me okay? please eat well." beomgyu kissed your lips once before walking away from you. leaving you to cry by yourself on the bench, at the park where you first met, and now you've ended it at the same spot.

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁

bonus!

beomgyu started sobbing when he walked away from you. you must have endured so much pain when he left you in the dark for so long. his first love, a love where it could have blossomed into something more than friends, crumbling down like that. he hated himself for that, he hated seeing you hurt, but you would still suffer the same fate if you stayed by his side. thus he made his decision that week prior to his graduation.

perm taglist! (send an ask to be added) @mrsyawnzzn @tinyelfperson @woncheecks @boba-beom @naveries @be-argyu @defnotleee

[the1312daysofchristmas]

actually on the topic of the last post sometimes people try to rectify that by colourpicking pictures of pete and that doesnt really work, it really depends on the context.

for example, magazine photoshoots from before mid mania era will be pretty washed out and overexposed, so even though you got it directly from a pic of him he looks really pale. additionally, hes had different skintones at different points of the year and at different times in his career (ive mentioned this phenomenon of people getting fairer as they get more successful before) (no its not skin bleaching or even intentional) so like using a picture of pete from warped 2005 vs a picture of pete off of wintour will have completely different skintones. also, you may be tempted to just make him way darker than the other members of fob, but thats not accurate either (depending on the time of year and lighting and white balance and exposure of a photo pete and joe can appear the same shade!) and while colourism is a big problem, it feels like. i dont know, minstrel-y when someone makes pete way way darker than he actually is.

i would recommend looking at a candid picture of the band all together and noticing the difference between their skin tones in different contexts. one of the reasons i really like elliot ingham as a photographer for fob is the way he edits photos to really capture the variation in skintone in fob. a lot of photographers turn the saturation down on them, but elliot turns it up (its not a perfect reference though, he does some things w the colour grading so its more orange and blue, but the contrast is clear)

for me my rule of thumb is 'is pete noticeably darker than the rest of fob?' and i go from there. sometimes the colour palette or style means that thats not as big as a difference in value as it might be in a different style, sometimes its exaggerated by the style, but its a good thing to notice.

[chvrrycola]

STRAY KIDS X CLICHE MEETCUTES - HWANG HYUNJIN

word count: 0.9k

warnings: one swear word :o

currently listening to: like this by stayc

meet the other meetcutes!

when your teacher told your class that your final project of the semester would be done in pairs, you could tell there was not one person who was pleased. with some of your other teachers it would have been fine, since they always let you pick your partners, but you knew you’d have no such luck this time around. 

you walked home from school with your friend, listing off name after name of people you’d had nightmare experiences working with in the past, ending up at the conclusion that the next two weeks of preparation would almost definitely be a nightmare. 

you would be told who you were paired with in class the next day, and you were just crossing your fingers that it wouldn’t be.. well anybody really. the best case scenario was that it was just somebody totally incompetent who left you to get it all done yourself, not bother you with changing the slide colours or editing your writing in real time, lurking in the google doc everytime you were close to finishing something. 

you got to class and wished your friend good luck with their partner, which they returned, before heading over to their seat on the other side of the room. your teacher was late, as usual, but came with the announcement that your partners would not be from your own class, but one of the other classes in your grade.

you sent a puzzled look to your friend, who looked back at you, pleading expression on their face as they willed fate to treat them well. you were given the names of your partners and a topic to base your presentation around, being told to come back to the same classroom at the end of the day so that you could organise when to get your work done. 

you scanned down the list once it got passed round to where you were sat. you were paired with someone called hwang hyunjin, who you had never knowingly met, but thought you might as well ask around about. nobody at any of the neighbouring desks knew much about him, but they said they had seen him around, that he was always hanging out with the same group of guys and that he seemed pretty cool from what they could tell. 

you were already feeling kinda awkward sitting at a random desk after school, waiting for hyunjin to show up. most people were already talking to their partners and checking their timetables to see when they could get to work, but there you were, looking at the clock in the hopes that you wouldn’t have to be here too long. 

the other class’s teacher walked passed you, smiling as she asked who you were supposed to be waiting for. she chuckled when you told her, and gently pointed to the boy sitting alone at the desk next to yours, checking the time on his phone. 

you waited for him to look up, catching him by surprise when he did. you introduced yourself quickly, not wanting him to spend too long thinking you had been staring at him just because, and he promptly did the same, complimenting your shoes once he was done. 

he scooted his chair over so that he could show you the sheet of paper you had seen him  scribbling on while he was waiting. you were both impressed and pleased to see that he had an almost complete plan somewhat frantically mapped out on the single sheet of a4.

‘i wasn’t sure if you were gonna be one of those people who just leaves all the work to their partner,’ he said as your eyes scanned the sheet, awkwardly chuckling and adding, ‘but we definitely don’t have to go with this, i don’t wanna like, take over the whole thing.’

you assured him that you had no problem with his plans, adding a couple of extra ideas as you talked it through with him. you were both fully hunched over the table making your notes, barely managing to avoid hitting your heads together as you focused. it was only when you sat up to stretch your back out that you realised that everybody who had been there to meet their pair had left. 

you nudged hyunjin, wondering if he had realised how much time had passed. he hadn’t, or at least that’s what you assumed from his reaction.

‘shit, i said i’d meet my friends at 4:30, they’re gonna kill me, i’m so sorry.’

he immediately started shoving stuff into his bag, writing a couple more things down before he slid the sheets between his folders. 

‘it was great meeting you though,’ he began, already halfway out the door, ‘we got this, we’re gonna nail it, i’ll see you soon.’

he left so quickly that you only realised that you had absolutely no way of getting in touch with him until he had disappeared around a corner. you went back to the desk and slumped into your chair, hoping it wouldn’t set you back too much. 

to be fair, you had already done most of your work, and basically all that was left was to actually put the slides together. you started arranging your papers and putting them into your bag when a little yellow post-it note fluttered to the floor next to your desk. 

it had to be his number scrawled on the bottom of the note, but the handwriting was so rushed that you couldn’t make out what it said until you held it right up to your face.

we should meet up again sometime, i won’t be able to see your awesome shoes over a google doc ;) (sooner the better pls)

[stanfordsweater]

2023 creator wrap-up

hiiiii

this year i posted 15 edits and scrapped 3-4 ideas that i'll get back to at some point, which is less than the 55 (!) i posted in 2022. my resolution for next year is to create more and scroll less but overall i'm still happy with that level of output

top five:

rowena / ruby parallels-- i actually fucking hate this one and i'm really disappointed with how it turned out!! all the same it was me getting back to giffing after a dry period and even though i hated it, i still posted it and some people seemed to enjoy it. i tend to scrap projects frequently, but i managed to power through my self-criticism and put this one out there. it set a good tone for the rest of the year.

hook man edit-- something you may not know about me is that i HAAAAAAATE giffing with subtitles because i cannot grasp how to make them look good. this is the first gifset i've ever made where i don't look back and cringe at how the subtitles look, so it stands as a milestone in my editing career :')

maybe 1996 was-- this was a return to form for me, having not made many asw edits in a while. it's commentary on hindsight and living in the past etc. etc., idealized moments in dean's personal history, but also how it's okay to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses when your life is so painful. the subtext here is that dean is denied heaven through his deal, but in exchange he gets to know that sammy lives (even though we know better, lol). i think this memory of sam and the fireworks was something dean thought about in his last moments.

15.20 letters to milena edit-- this one makes me tender ;~; i like that it's simple and understated but packs that emotional punch. it was pretty easy because as soon as i had that line in my head it was obvious to me what to do with it. i think it looks good too!

my letters to milena wincest edit-- this was created over the span of about 6 hours but is hands-down my favourite edit i've made PERIODDDDD partially because i love kafka but moreso because it came to me so easily... it had been cooking in my head for a few months before i made it and every scene i chose i knew immediately that i wanted to include it. the colour grading was really fun and i liked the process of experimenting with the format. if i could change one thing about it i would swap some of the scenes for the "really a reflection of everything else / which is a lie" portion because it makes more sense if the first line has all the good memories and the second has the bitter reality memories, eg. sad baby sam and the spaghetti-os.

[laskulohi]

Tagged in by @ducklikethedaffy thanks!

Are you named after anyone?

- My first name, not really, no. But my middle name, Samuel, comes from the name "Sami," which was supposed to be my name at one point. And apparently, Sami was supposed to be a combination of my parents' names - I was almost named as a ship name, basically. But then my bio father turned out to be a piece of shit, so yuh. (Also, Samuel might be an spn reference, but I'll deny that if asked 🔪)

When was the last time you cried?

- Pretty sure it was while watching something, but I don't remember what or when it was🤔 Like a month ago with Last of Us? Maybe.

Do you have kids?

- If not counting the pets, no sir.

Do you use sarcasm a lot?

- Whatever do you meeaan?

What sports do you play/have you played?

- I did taekwondo and football as a kid. The football phase evolved into a running hobby that I still do (even if it's more walking/jogging these days adhshaja)

I also did weightlifting as a teenager and would still like to do it if I had the equipment. Or not anxious and just go a gym-

And swimming has always been fun.

What's the first thing you notice about other people?

- Copying Rebe here, but yeah, their vibe!

Eye colour?

- Dark/forest green!

Scary movies or happy endings?

- Ooo depends on the mood. Generally I prefer the 'happy ending' movies, but I do appreciate a good scary movie.

Any special talents?

- I've been told I have good musical instincts, like with the rhythm/pace and my voice. Not too confident with my musical side tho; not pursuing that in any way. The pacing thing comes in handy while video editing tho.

The other thing I've gotten positive feedback is storytelling! Literally my favorite thing in my free time is to work on the Orielo project & storytelling aspects in collage projects. Both creating and analyzing existing media are just *chef's kiss* I'm trying to be more confident and excited to learn more.

Where were you born?

- Finland

What are your hobbies?

- Writing, video editing, gaming.

Do you have any pets?

- We have our wonder trio! I had my snake Philip first. He turns 6 this year and is the most well-behaved child.

My family rescued a cat family from the woods back in 2019 and I bonded with one of the kittens pretty quickly. I was the only human he trusted and went agshsjsj😭💖 I named him Myrsky (storm in finnish) cuz he's such a menace for everyone else.

And then there's Bakugo, our tiny bagel tail akita. We got her last fall - she has grown so fast🧡

My second cat Pekka is still alive and well. He didn't take our last move well and I had to return him to my mother. We tend to move around a lot, and Pekka gets stressed easily, while Myrsky isn't bothered by traveling. I miss him, but he's much happier there💕

How tall are you?

- 172 cm / 5'7 last time I checked.

Fave subject in school?

- Definitely art and English. My only good grades throughout my academic career. I guess my grade in PE was pretty high too, but most of the school sports were horrible, horrible.

Dream job?

- Writer / Storyteller

tagging @tieflingtiefling @violetscanfly @notashrew but no pressure + mutuals feel free to consider yourself tagged

[almalvo]

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY | S1E8 "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum"

[I will react to each episode individually and in full, raw reception and then post as is unrevised here onto my tumblr for the full span of every and all NuTrek episodes and series that have been and will be released. If this falls under your field of interest - I welcome your company in joining me. Enjoy the ride.] -------

"High Ranking Vulcan". heh. This intro though - it jkust makes me wonder the sheer potential of what couldve been for Trek. Bryan Fuller made a masterpiece called Hannibal. Not too sure on his hand in Trek - imho, it doesnt compare. ANYways. ugh i love seeing hte discovery warp downwards like that Owosekun - love her name such nice colours. consistenty good colours in this show for sure. i like how goldy inside the bridge is oh interesting. what an odd source of warp power its insanely cool though. that CANT be good for stamets. is that foreshadowing did you call her what she will become damn stamets can you be like idk a bit likeable tho please. like plenty of characters who are catty af but likeable in some way if even 1%. ugh. hi tribble. keep tribblin OO SO BLUEEEE SO PRETTYYY This is so weird to me in how this show literally comes out 2 years AFTER AOS3 in terms of production quality.

very pretty landscapes though Saru. aint no way you walkin this terrain with them feets of yours love the trees. saru is so scrawnyyy Saru literally looks amazing in any lighting no joke damn classic trek mist creature living rorschach blot Kol is so cool looking those red accents work beautifully on his face

such lovely colour grading everyones GLOWINGGG there are certainly some wonderful visuals in this show ughhhh Saru, the dust speaker is that a klingon archery set what is that HAHA i wish nah its a torture kit sorry cornwell yelling like that was kind of cringe lolll this pretty blue dust dome that ash and burnham are in is so pretty ugh something im gonna just never take seriously, "Ash x Burnham" nah get out yeah yeah however, Kirk delivered this line beyond any other human's capacity what an empty ass kiss god its so forced. another huge problem with this show is they treat these characters like we know them already but bruh everyone feels so much the stranger to me, even though we are past the halfway point of season 1. is just so weird. i am not invested in like any character, even ones i really thought i would/wanted to be but its liek the show takes them away from me i like how the klingons have a definite accent when they speak terran now L'Rell is so striking looking i love her eyes such a piercing look

see like i WANT to like this away party but like i kind of dont have any real reason to like any of these characters especially with the utter animosity stuff that never got really properly resolved. like between saru and burnham. it feels almost uncomfortable. to me the viewer watching from outside ofc. thats a really pretty flower i dont like this film style it feels too tacky so many stupid zooms so cheap feeling it feels like star trek, Teen Wolf edition. literally feels like its filmed int he same way as things like Teen Wolf that were almost 10 years earlier. its so janky. zero patience and sense to appreciate the scene itself without all this ridiculous cinematic embellishment. its so unnecessary. if even this show did this less, this show would legitimately be 7x better. saru looks so beautiful with that warm white rear light this is such a gorgeous instance of practical effects and they got the PERFECT actor to don saru Ash looks like someone ive literally known in my own life 😭 i love these red jewels on L'Rell's armour/clothing costume and design department did a great great job in this show's production - i have no beef with them.

i like saru's mouth shape its so odd. idk why i feel so detached from this show. oh dang angry saru. ferocious oml yo these are such pretty crystals] saru running in THOSE? HAAHAHAH damn had to CG him hahah that one camera shot was funny though it almost looked like the show said "yes. he can run in these". lol oh damn convincing gore i like how we continue seeing blood in trek with DISCO when i t really started in Enterprise. oh shit ANGRY SARU BRUH HE BACKKICKED HER LIKE A HORSE this stick man being so strong the way hes breaking that device literally looks like classic trek style bundle two hands together and bash DBZ style XD

really pretty tree thing though oooo the transporter circles at the bottom look SOO nice dude look at his detail up close its fucking amazing oh my god such masterfully done painting speckling im genuinely impressed damn, im sorry saru. though i think, who DOES live without fear. man costume design is wonderful. these red markings are really good they compliment their faces really well This is so odd. I have NEVER had this kind of feeling of "detachment" from a Trek production before. The fuck is happening. Ugh.

Not liking Bryan Fuller x Alex Kurtzman directing style in this show, like, at all.

I am just waiting for when this show gets better.

Cuz it's lost a lot of my anticipation.

We'll see. Hopefully.

[1d1195]

Ahh I'm so happy that we are east coast girlies!!

Really I know few people who teaches high school they say that they want to leave the class but at the same time they love to teach and high school students are so chaotic!!

Oh your sister is an English major that's amazing!! Is she a teacher or author??

And see now you write such a brilliant stories for ussss!! I love that you not writing essays for your uni but now writing thousand and thousands words stories!!🤭

Green and pink sounds really good for nails!! As you said you always go for blue!! So you could do mint green or sage green and light pink but lemme know what colour you have planned for!!:)

Ah at this point I'm not sure!! I want to be a teacher but let's see what happens when I will finish my degree so yeahh!!

What you wanted to be if you weren't a maths teacher??:)

-🪴

Oh they’re kinda feral and inhumane at times but someone’s gotta teach them and I’m kinda good at it.

No tbh idk what my sister does. She doesn’t do much writing (she also majored in communications) and she DEF does a lot of that lol. Originally she wanted to be in editing and publishing but that has gone the wayside. Idk she’s happy so that’s all that matters.

In hindsight I didn’t want to waste all my words on arbitrary essays. Needed it for future fanfic 🤣

Light pink is a great idea! I’ll let you know!

I really love teaching. It’s hard. But I think a lot of people have forgotten/don’t care about how much they love it. There are some pretty sweet perks to it. What grade are you thinking?

If I wasn’t a math teacher I would want to be an accountant I think. Can’t get away from numbers. Or a job psychologist. I would also want to own a coffee shop or bookstore (or both) or a diner hahahahaha kind of a lot I know.

Xoxo

[peerbear]

Where Currents Meet Reflection on the Final Film

This project was a challenge for me because I was pushing myself out of my comfort zone, but I'm so happy I did this. I know I have an eye and intuition that are good for cinematography, I just need my confidence and then experience to follow suit, but both are of course things that come with time. I feel we worked well as a group and everyone tried their best to get us to where we are now. I believe we made the film we set out to make on our own terms and true to our creative dreams. I hope we have created what Bethany wanted and that she knows she can be proud of the world she has created.

I did my best and I am happy with that and I'm very happy with the shots themselves and how they turned out. I am less happy with the grade, but this again was a learning curve with many things to take away with me.

I feel scenes 1 and 2 at the beach did not turn out quite how I hoped in terms of lighting consistency and colour grading, but as I have previously mentioned this is due to different positions to the sun that were unavoidable due to positioning in relation to the water from a narrative point of view.

I feel scenes 3 and 4 at the bus stop and pavement were both quite different, the lighting in scene 3 at the bus stop was rather cloudy and thus easier to manipulate both on camera and in the edit. The only shot here that I was unhappy with was of Kallie where I feel she is over-saturated and over-contrasted. In scene 4 on the pavement the sunshine was beautiful but there was an inconsistency in sunshine as it kept moving in and out of the clouds, this meant it was not fully consistent when it came to the grade, however here I feel like the grade is letting the image down a little bit because the shots are very pretty, I just couldn't seem to find the right balance and again have a little too much contrast.

Scene 5 in the woods is a little inconsistent in the grade, here again, I am happy with the shots especially the two-shot from behind as they are walking. Sadly as I said the grade is a little inconsistent and has a clear difference in wash and tone to the previous scene and thus has a different style. I feel the grade between shots here does not quite match.

For scene 6 part one at the river and part two at the bridge, I am overall happy with the grade. I feel like the river scene would have benefited more with a two-shot as it would have shown the actors interacting with each other. However, the two-shot that I did as shown above (ungraded) is much lower than and does not match the singles. I had done this with the intention of being the water that they looked into, but this did not edit with the other shots how I thought it would. So I had thought it through but it did not turn out as planned. For part two at the bridge, I am happy with the shots and the edit even though I feel it again shifts in tone with the colour grade in a lighter wash than the rest of the scenes.

For scene 7 in the bedroom, I am pleasantly surprised with how it has turned out, I think in spite of poor lighting the scene is exactly what I hoped for it to be. The grade is far from perfect here but it definitely aids the image a lot.

Scene 8 is my favourite scene and I think it has turned out very beautifully, but I'm afraid the grade is again quite different to the rest of the film, but I feel it is very pretty by itself. I think I missed a shot here in the shot list where there could have been a closer two-shot of the two of them for more of the scene.

Here is an ungraded example of what I mean:

It is a shame that we removed the final part of scene 8 even though I understand this choice was made for its reasons which is very valid as one of the leads was too cold and could barely hide it, this is where we removed both actresses from the water and brought them home to warm up. This was for their safety and would have felt unethical otherwise. I do understand the decision, but feel it greatly affects the film losing this scene.

Overall I wish there would have been more of the two shots because I like seeing them in frame together and how they respond to each other. I understand that this was a conscientious choice due to both creative and necessity reasons where there were issues with some of the two-shots. I personally prefer the two-shots, and I think it would have greatly improved the film overall if these had been usable in the final edit.

I appreciated working with the team of Where Currents Meet and I feel on set we really came together when we needed each other and I felt we were all supporting each other.

Here is my headshot for the project. I appear much more confident than I felt, but I have definitely gained some confidence from this project that I will be taking forward from here.

[bowel-glitch-blog]

Faygo: Vanilla Creme Soda (Review)

note: Myles didn't get around to buying this flavour last week, so he'll be editing this tomorrow to include his opinions!

Another note: because no EzyMart location I know of seems to have this flavor in stock, it seems that you won't be getting my side of this review until further notice.

(our ratings & experiences)

Flavour Accuracy

Myles: ?/20 Roni: 20/20 Average Rating: ?/20

Oh yeah. This is creaming soda. Tastes like the correct amount of sugar that's meant to be in a creaming soda drink, and is also pretty dang accurate to any other creaming soda drink. You'd think that it would, but it didn't change flavour as I drank it, either!

Health Concern

Myles: ?/20 Roni: 10/20 Average Rating: ?/20

Now that I know how bad it can get, 132% isn't too bad. It's still awful, and way too much for a drink, but it could be much worse (looking at you, Grape...) Only reason it ranks lower than Cotton Candy is because I'm more aware of how sweet it is, somehow.

Color Appeal

Myles: ?/20 Roni: 20/20 Average Rating: ?/20

This liquid is clear. In my books for drinkability, nothing can top this colour, or rather, lack of colour. Puts confidence in me that at least I won't get a lethal dosage of chemical food dye in my system. Perfect score.

Overall Enjoyment

Myles: ?/20 Roni: 19/20 Average Rating: ?/20

Honestly, this might be my favourite drink thus far. No struggle to finish the bottle and I felt satisfied after I had the last bit of it. Sugar content was in the back of my mind, but only very vaguely. No regrets, would reccomend.

Re-drinkability

Myles: ?/20 Roni: 17/20 Average Rating: ?/20

This drink is great. I would definitely get it again. I'm not sure if I'm biased or something, but I really enjoy this flavour! Minus 3 points (because it's Faygo...) but otherwise it's very very re-drinkable.

Summary

Myles’ Rating: ?/100 Roni’s Rating: 86/100 Average Rating: ?/100

Grade: TBD

[bmpmp3]

i just watched saw 2004 after like 10 years of hearing about it and like 2 years of seeing gay fanart of it THAT SHIT WAS CRAZY that shit was nuts hold on i wanna talk about it a sec

only really talking about the first movie because thats the only one ive seen as of 10 minutes ago but i know theres like. 20 other movies or something. theres like 50 other movies. who knows BUT you know this movie because of its status as the first in a somewhat infamous franchise, its reputation really takes over

like FIRST OF ALL i was a little scared to watch it because like, im good with horror movies and im usually pretty good with blood and gore (particularly with movies released before 2010, post 2010 movies have a style of cgi gore that like makes me. dizzy? motion sick? i have no clue LOL) BUT i shouldntve have been that scared like its not too bad, im assuming the sequels probably up the stakes so thats probably where it gets its reputation. LIKE dont get me wrong its bloody but surprisingly a lot of shit was off screen or barely in focus, like the foot situation or Sing getting killed in the gun trap. the only thing that got to me was Tapp's throat getting cut but i think i just personally get squeamish about gore with necks and heads for some reason LOL my one weakness......

second of all and this is purely a me thing but ive always jokingly referred to saw 1 as like. patient 0 of the post 2000s blue-ification of horror movies (weird incomprehensible observation i have. im sure it started earlier but horror every movie after 1999 kept getting more and more blue visually to me fkjdahkfds) in my head because every clip ive seen from it was in the bathroom which has some strong blue color grading BUT thats not fair. this movie is also very green. and has its reddish moments. i view movie colour grading like this. sorry

but speaking of its green and red moments NOBODY told me how nuts the plot of this movie is. there were like 20 different plotlines intertwined and like every 20 minutes there was a new twist half of the dialogue was written like a detective manga it RULED i loved all the monologuing adam and lawrence did at each other near the end in the bathroom VERY horror mystery light novel esque. half expected someone to turn their back to the camera and spin around pointing saying "and the murderer was YOU" despite that not being what the movie was about LOL and like the editing really added this near, like, absurdity to the pacing, really heightened which i think makes the bloodier bits more palatable too, really great

and lemme tell you. they were not joking about the homoeroticism in this feature film like Tapp and Sing. Tapp and Sing. okay tapp's my favourite character I KNOW hes an obsessive unhinged disgraced ex cop BUT thats why he slays. and man people dont talk about it but Tapp's relationship with Sing and his obsession with vengeance really haunts the first 3/4s of the movie, talk about haunting the narrative with Sing wowza. and then that last 1/4 with like the most heartwrenching "dont leave me" from Adam topped it off.

great movie. i was not expecting the final twist IT CAUGHT ME OFF GUARD SOMEHOW after 20 years...the twist got me.... probably because there were like twelve other twists before it LOL soundtracks really good too. almost action movie theme esque?

will you think less of me for the next sentence i am about to write. so ive been really into movies where dudes get locked up in scary bathrooms and warehouses and get tortured in shitty little white t shirts. i watched some found footage movie that was probably inspired by by saw that i cant remember the name of or much about BUT i do remember thinking the same thing when it got to a part where some guy gets locked in a scary warehouse in his pajamas. lock a guy in a scary bathroom today, its good 👍

[mollysfilmblog]

Group 12 Scene Recreation

American Psycho: Hip to Be Square

Our group had originally chosen to recreate a scene from The Royal Tenenbaums, when in our tutorial we were told it would be incredibly difficult and we would need special lenses which were not available to us. As we had already spent nearly half the allotted time planning for a scene we were no longer going to use, we had to have a very quick turn-around and pre-production process. Choosing a new scene was difficult at first and we went through many options until we settled on American Psycho, it was the the first one we were all equally excited about. I was not heavily involved in the pre-production process, but served as primary director, set designer, and secondary editor. I also was in charge of the fake blood effects.

Shooting took place in Olivia's student accommodation which was very challenging. In every scene with Logan (Paul Allen) we had to completely re-arrange the furniture to give the impression that the kitchen was facing the window, when actually it was to the left of it. This was made even more difficult by the fact that this was a small space which served as a living room and kitchen to at least 6 students, and there was furniture, decor and filming equipment immediately out of frame in every shot. Figuring out the geometry and blocking of a 'fake' layout proved to be very hard for me, and there are some shots where it was almost impossible to maintain spacial continuity, but I felt that for what was available to us the blocking and set design was done well.

I really enjoyed directing for this shoot, (Matthew and Olivia also assisted with the directing) Matthew served as DOP and together I feel we make a very good team and were able to create some shots I was really proud of. We realised pretty early on that due to the limitations of the space we were unable to recreate things as exactly as we had imagined, which meant most of the night became a series of problem-solving tasks to get the shots as close as we could manage. I found this aspect of the shoot to be incredibly stimulating. I have really enjoyed working with my production group this past semester and will be very sad to split up. We work really well as a team and each have naturally slipped into roles. I have found that I have mainly become the de-facto director of the group which was surprising to me as it was not my original are of interest. I felt that this shoot was the culmination of all of that experience, and was by far the shoot I enjoyed the most. That being said it was also the most difficult, with shooting taking around 10+ hours, not including set up time. There were some shots where we had to do an hours worth of takes for about 10 seconds of footage, but I felt that the crew all maintained a good energy and positive attitude.

Matthew is by far our most experienced editor and has edited all of our films thus far. I am not very experienced with editing but have a strong interest in it so briefly helped with the last project, and helped more in depth with this shoot. Olivia helped as well. We edited on DaVinci Resolve which I have found to be more user friendly than other softwares I have used. We started out by watching and selecting all our best takes, ordering them, and syncing sound. This in itself was an arduous process and took well over an hour. As the pacing and the blocking of the film was slightly skewed during filming, we spent a long time finding the right place to cut shots to make it look as natural and smooth as we could. We also added music. During our crit some people pointed out that in a couple of the shots with the window, it seemed as though the colour grading was very intense, that was because in every window shot the reflection of the crew was visible in the window. I was not a part of this process, but this meant that Matthew had to find a mask plugin for the window and erase our reflections, which yes may have made the colours more contrasted, but I found to be very impressive and much better than having the crew visible in the reflections. The scene where Dylan walks to the bathroom for me was the largest blunder in the film and although I had some ideas for an editing work-around, there were too many other things that required attention once I had left so unfortunately we were unable to remedy that. Overall I feel that even just assisting with the editing for this shoot really boosted my skills and confirmed my strong passion for editing.

The fake blood was quite a risky element when shooting because it means there is really only one chance to get it right unless you want to spend an hour cleaning and resetting. For the shot where Dylan swings his axe we rehearsed the movement at least 20 times to make sure our timing and movement was right. We had to get creative with our tools because the fake blood was just in a jug, so I found a spray top from some kitchen cleaner and screwed it on to the jug. I then hid just below the frame of the camera on the couch and sprayed the bottle up at Dylan's face at the moment we had been rehearsing. I felt very happy with how this turned out, and the last 4 shots with the fake blood were my favourite of the whole scene recreation. We spread the fake blood around the side of Dylan's face to mimic the half and half of the actual scene. With Logan we had to put an excessive amount of fake blood on him to try and make it look realistic, especially with the absence of the more advanced, higher budget effects they use in the real film.

This scene recreation may not have been exactly prefect, but for the time, budget, and space that we had, I feel very proud of it. It was by far my favourite experience of the term and I hope some of that energy is captured in the shoot. I feel that I learned a lot from it, and can genuinely say I'm proud of all the work we did, and will really miss working with my group.

[jacobfiel]

Class #4

Today we started by reminding ourselves of the differences between vector and raster. This is because we are moving onto using Adobe Photoshop (PS) today. We then learnt that colour correction is about fixing the colours of an image to stop it from looking unnatural while colour grading is about enhancing and image to make it look 'better' then real life (usually). We then created our new folder in the data drive and downloaded our images from Moodle.

We opened the image and started by learning about some 'quick and easy' tools under the adjustments tab such as 'Brightness and Contrast' these can be alright but can't be undone.

We then moved back to learning about curves and what happens when you pull them every which way. And how you can think of an image as a line and change each points using points and curves.

We then talked about layers and how to duplicate, delete and individually edit layers. We started learning about the controls at the bottom of the layers tab so that we can edit a layer in a 'non destructive way'. Creating an 'adjustment layer' from the control panel in the layers section will open up the properties palette which is the space you can work on to start 'non destructively' adjusting your layer.

We started learning how to use the 'histogram' on how to darken and lighten an image. THE GOAL: to preserve the highlights but have the bottom point at he start of the steep cliff. We 'fixed' this image using the curves and reaching 'THE GOAL' and saved out and moved on to doing the opposite to fix an underexposed image. To do this you bring the top line to the step mountain and fix up the blacks.

We moved onto Image 3, which was of a cat. We used these same methods yet with no help to revise the skills we had just learnt. during this process we learn about not blowing up the lightest part. So you must look for when the lightest part of your image is starting to spread out and thats when you've gone a little too far.

Moving onto the next image was are first time editing an image with lots of colours. Although we still started out by adjusting the curves first. We then jumped into adjusting our colours by looking at Hue, Saturation & Brightness. Before we fully jumped into this we quickly recapped some subjects such as CMYK and RGB and what prints 'good' and what doesn't. We upped the saturation to bring out the colours on the buildings in this image. this also gave us more green in our tree shadows. We also looked at what the hue and lightness adjusters do but came to the conclusion that the lightness has pretty much already been adjusted so doesn't need any real change. While hue is a very situational tool and wasn't needed for this particular image.

We are how moving onto learning about the limitation of hue and saturation, and started talking about colour balance. Which increases the saturation of hues, while targeting the shadows, highlights & mid tones. You can select which area you would like to target (shadows, highlights or mid tones) and then use the complimentary colour sliders and slide each way to add and extra dimension to the photo.

We then went over lots of the terms/jargon we had learnt in this session and wrote some definitions in our workbooks.

We now opened up image number 6, which was a yucking foggy image. We then went through the processes we had learnt to fix this image up. The image was a little bit underexposed so I brought up the brightness using the curves. I then added a tiny bit of saturation and moved the hue to get more of a natural blue rather than the muggy green that was over the image. I moved onto the colour balance and took out the harshness of the blue and green tinge by adding reds, magentas and yellows to the shadows and highlights.

For the last Image we once again tried to take this on ourselves and Toby gave us tips about using the curves to create contrast. Then how to balance out a colour that is overpowering the image with colour balance and sliding along the shadows, highlights & mid tones. Once I had finished editing this image I added a vignette to pull focus onto the girl in the centre of frame. Toby pointed out that my photo was quite intense and taught me that you can easily fix this by changing the opacity on layers such as your curve layer, hue/ saturation layer & even your colour balance layer. This can make the effects you added less harsh and give more of a 'real' feel to the photo you've enhanced. I also messed around with creating a group out of my photo adjustment layers so they are all in one easily assessable place and my project is a lot easier to work on due to there being less layers everywhere.

[sanstropfremir]

Hello! I was wondering if you had any favorite cheap kpop mvs? Ones like gr8u where they used an intresting trick or idea to make the mv stand out despite the lack of budget.

HI HELLO AGAIN THIS IS AN INCREDIBLE QUESTION THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!

okay okay okay. so there's a bit of a scale i'm gonna operate on here, because there's some pretty large gaps in between what i would consider 'cheap' for specific groups vs like, actual monetary cost and access to resources and stuff like that. i've separated these out into a couple of categories, because i could and to make some more distinctions. i'm judging a lot of this based on expense in terms of set, because that's generally where you're going to sink the most cost. if you want custom sets of any kind you have to have 1) the space to put the sets (a studio/warehouse), 2) the people to design the sets, 3) the materials to make the sets, and 4) the people to build the sets, which all is going to cost you. i'm also likely forgetting ones here but there's a lot of kpop mvs in the world and my memory sucks.

ok to start off, some flops (complimentary):

hair short - wings : unironically this is one of my fave songs+mvs from this era, it has such a creative premise and it's so smart and i'm sad we never got anything else from them.

annie - toppdogg : toppdogg mvs were never particularly expensive, but this one is really restricted, literally. also they get bonus points for being the only group to ever find a way to integrate the members' names into the mv without it being obnoxious.

baby i'm sorry - myname : one of the best story mvs of all time. i don't think this one was actually that cheap because there's a lot of actors but it likely had very little physical production costs because it's all shot on location and it's probably only shot with a handheld camera. there is actually choreography and styling for this and it's very inexplicably 2013.

she - vromance : i'm pretty sure they shot this mv with 12 dollars and a piece of lint and technically i think star is a more interesting mv with better thought and planning but idk. there's something about she that i think is very charming and i forgive the low budget-ness of it just for the fact that it's so wholesomely cute.

"it's just a guy hanging out":

2 kids - taemin : i know taemin would rather forget that 2 kids exists but genuinely it's one of my favourite mvs of his and hot take it's one of his best. it is the epitome of low budget stealth filming with maximum impact; he filmed this and the think of me mv in the off time he was in paris while he was on tour with superm, and the exhaustion and bitterness and sadness and remorse in this really shine. it perfectly captures that watery feeling of being awake for the dawn during a bender. taemin actually does so well with these smaller scale atmospheric mvs but they tend to be underappreciated; see day and night.

after we ride - brave girls : 99% of this is shot on location in mostly public + outdoor areas but the mv really rides on the performances of the girls and the skills of the editor and cinematographer, who really knocked it out of the park in terms of establishing the atmosphere. this has some really really phenomenal colour grading that gives everything that high sheen 'neon lights reflecting on a wet street' look that really amps up the feeling.

-> sub-genre: pandemic bottle mvs

mayday - crush : maybe the most iconic pandemic mv, which also purposefully looks inexpensive due to the camera equipment and editing techniques.

lazy - woosung : really clean colour palette and i love the integration of the feature, as well as the styling change at the last chorus. i can't remember if this made it onto my best of 2021 list in the end but it was in my runners up for a while.

down - a.c.e : one of the best things about a.c.e is their creative directors and designers, who are frankly incredible at their jobs, because they can stretch a shoestring budget and make it look so good. it was kinda tough to pick just one mv from their catalogue but i settled on down because it's all shot in a single location in one day and really utilizes the vertical format in a way that i've seen few mvs do. runner up is changer, which was shot somehow somewhere during the promos for higher, which holy shit they were so busy last summer.

unusually small budget for a big 3:

view - shinee : view changed the kpop mv game. this isn't case of low budget because no budget, this is a case of concept that doesn't play out to be very expensive to produce. by shooting everything on location (including the dance sequences) min hee jin took the money that would have gone to set building and used to pay more for location (it's shot in malaysia) and for better and more unusual editing than kpop had really seen at the time.

1of1 - shinee : again, this was all about style, and the main feature of this is absolutely the clothing. otherwise it's quite literally just filmed in a white box.

i want you - shinee : there were FOUR mvs shot for tsol and they all are absolutely fantastic. i wouldn't say any of them are cheap but i want you is shot primarly in a single studio space and on a greenscreen, so it's not the most expensive of the bunch. countless is also filmed on a single set, but i think i want you shows a much more effective use of style (even though i do love countless). i've talked about tsol before and as a full work it's one of the best kpop comebacks of all time.

blooming day - exo cbx : she's an icon. every minimalist colour pop kpop mv thinks it's blooming day and guess what? there's only one blooming day. in this case similarly to view, it isn't about a lack of budget and instead it's that the concept itself does not require a huge amount of expensive spectacle.

breath + last piece - got7 : i'm putting these together as a double feature because they were filmed back to back on the same sets and although they are not cheap by any means, since these are custom sets, but comparatively (to other jype mvs) both of these have very low production value and a high economy of shots. i remember watching these at release and actually going 'oh these are cheap....???'. however, despite being limited to these twoish locations these are very well filmed and there's a lot of very good editing here that makes them interesting.

call me baby - exo : maybe the least expensive exo mv but also one of the best. i know there's supercars but those are definitely rented and there's a grand total of three locations (and two of them are empty warehouse/studio spaces). i really like this mv because of that absolutely ripping intro with kai/baekhyun/xiumin/suho/sehun in the car, and it shows a really strong consistent creative direction that makes it look more expensive than it is.

not necessarily cheap but very good use of a gimmick:

goosebumps - onf : ENTIRELY greenscreened!!!!!!! we moved on TOO fast from this and we need to talk about it more!!! beautiful beautiful was predominently vfx but goosebumps took it to a new level. other than a few shots in a white box this mv is built entirely by a vfx team and that is neither that cheap or fast but it is a FEAT.

skinz - onlyoneof : i wrote a post about skinz here and i'm sticking to my guns about this being one of the most interesting mvs released this year so far.

gr8u - vixx : great gimmick, 10/10. honestly most vixx mvs are pretty low budget and i think this is in the middling bit but it still counts.

take over - do hanse : this is all shot in the same black box studio with a single projector screen. i'm not joking. the director of this mv is insanely smart and very good at getting bang for their buck, so i bet you that the most money went towards hiring the horse and neonmilk, probably.

rain to be - onewe : they sacrificed a whole bunch of equipment in order to film this and that's why it's not a particularly cheap mv, but it was quite literally shot all in a single session in a single location, which is more restricted than 90% of most kpop mvs. and yes i know onewe is a kband but i literally think about this mv like once a week.

fantasy - fei : another vfx heavy mv that is supremely effective. it's obviously got funding behind it but it's got quite a restricted scope that makes it feel as close quartered as it is.

face id - epik high : epik high are very good at high impact mvs with limited scales and their two from last year are both soooooo good. they were both on my best of 2021 list so i'm not gonna go into a lot of detail but face id in particular really works that gimmick good.

i'm tempted to put a couple of jackson's solo mvs here, because his mvs are very very good for being limited in funds (as he's paying for them himself) and he's really good at capturing specific styles and feels (lmly and pretty please with that 80s/90s hong kong cinema feel) but they're not technically kpop so i'll settle for just mentioning them here at the end.

[katieqnmr]

CINEHAIKU REFLECTION

already posted this to my padlet but thought I’d put it here too :)

The cinehaiku process was pretty straightforward I would say! Alex came up with this beautiful idea of someone dreaming via a projection, and eventually we developed it into two people dreaming about each other. Pretty cute stuff! We didn’t really have technical difficulties, and the cast were really helpful and patient. I directed this project, but I would say it was partly co-directed or at least I feel like I tried to make sure everyone’s ideas were involved properly. It was pretty much just teamwork! So, to the crit. I’d say everyone was super kind overall, and I’ll list and respond to the positive and negative critiques that we received here:

• Interesting sound design, for the most part was successful, perhaps be a bit careful when using sounds that connote societal shared ideas. Anne-Marie suggested specifically that it may have sounded in some sections with the breaking noises that the two characters were having a fight, which is not what we intended.

Clear sections were achieved, thus use of cinehaiku format was successful.

Perhaps concentrating on a lot going on at the same time made the message a little bit confused, though most people weren’t muddled by it which was good because that was a real concern I’d had in the edit stage! And yet it was too late to change it by then without reshooting. But thankfully it didn't appear to be a large problem.

Kind of in the same vein as the last one, it was suggested that more of the projector shots could’ve been shot closer, to confuse people less when looking at two images and attempting to combine them into one in your brain.

We should’ve masked the projector or changed it in a way to make the harsh lines a bit softer, as Zoe pointed out they were the harshest lines in the shot which she thought was distracting.

Some people were in fact surprised to see the two were in the same bed, so I’d say we achieved the kind of ‘surprise’ we were hoping for!

The colour grading done by Alex and Tom was complemented and added to the overall ambience and feeling of the film, kind of locking away the summer in the projector.

I think all the critiques were very fair and honestly though I’ve listed more negatives, we got so many positive ones too, and I think people generally enjoyed our cinehaiku. I loved working on this project, and my group was so helpful and creative!

Other projects I especially enjoyed were: the Vampire Vlog one, as I thought the idea was naturally hilarious and wow the middle shot was seriously well done especially! I also loved the sound design, using the tropes of Gothic horror and subverting them with a vampire’s morning routine.

I also really enjoyed the Knightfall interpretation of the theme. I found the production design so impressive, and the structure, although slightly confusing for my small brain, was so interesting! Just felt like a very unique take on the task. I love the reverse shot at the end too.

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 60 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about space between words and affixes, also known as clitics. But first, we have an announcement. We’re doing a special drive to encourage people to become patrons of Lingthusiasm this month.

Gretchen: If you’ve been meaning to become a patron and just never quite gotten around to it, now is a great chance to join. We’re gonna be sending out packs of four Lingthusiasm stickers to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-phabet tier on November 3, 2021.

Lauren: This is going to be a Lingthusiasm logo sticker, two different versions of our “Schwa, Never Stressed” stickers in different colours, and a bookplate sticker for Because Internet, which Gretchen is going to sign for you.

Gretchen: Yes, I am. Make me sign a lot of stickers. You can stick these stickers on your laptop, your water bottle, anywhere else you wanna have an excuse to bring up how cool linguistics is in polite company.

Lauren: If you’re already a patron at a lower level, first of all, thank you! And second, this is a great reason to upgrade as there are some cool things available, especially if you stick around in this tier, including your name and favourite IPA character on our Supporter Wall of Fame.

Gretchen: If you don’t already have a favourite IPA character, you can take our extremely scientific “Which IPA Character are You” quiz and find out.

Lauren: We hand choose all the IPA characters for our supporters on the Wall of Fame.

Gretchen: From the results of this highly scientific quiz.

Lauren: Plus, you also get a “Lingthusiast” sticker after three months of this tier that Patreon sends you.

Gretchen: That’s so many stickers. That’s five stickers. Two different things in the mail.

Lauren: If you’re already supporting us at this level or a higher level, you also get the sticker pack, and we’ll be sending you a message to remind you to make sure your address is up-to-date so we know where to send those stickers. Finally, all patrons at all levels, we appreciate you so much. As we say every episode, it’s our patrons who keep the show ad-free and who also get access to monthly bonus episodes, including our most recent, Number 54, an interview with Emily Gref of Planet Word. You also have access to our Discord to chat with other Lingthusiasm and linguistics fans.

Gretchen: We had a really fun time talking with Emily from Planet Word. Hopefully, we’ll get to check out that museum at some point. So, go listen to that.

[Music]

Gretchen: Okay, Lauren, I have a sentence for you and a task, if you’re okay with that.

Lauren: Yep. Sounds very exciting.

Gretchen: I’m gonna give you a sentence, and then in this sentence, I want you to identify the words and the affixes. That’s prefixes and suffixes.

Lauren: I’m gonna grab two different coloured pens. I’m very excited.

Gretchen: This is one of those Grade 8 English class underlining things.

Lauren: This is why I love linguistics puzzles. You get to crack out the coloured pens.

Gretchen: Exactly. The sentence is, “Later today, I’ll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of Troy’s competition, or if it isn’t necessary.”

Lauren: Before I even begin to pull this wonderful sentence apart, can we just revel in the fact that so many sentences that get said have never been said in the history of humanity before.

Gretchen: I’m pretty sure that this one has not been said in the history of humanity before.

Lauren: I like this sub-story of The Iliad that I’ve never heard before. I’ll go with it. I have an advantage that I am looking at this sentence on a piece of paper. I’m pulling out lots of words. “Prizes” is a word. But I can pull “prizes” apart because I can have “prize” and then the plural S. “Prize” gets one colour, and the S gets another colour. We’ve also got “competition.” I know “com-” is a prefix, and “-tition” is a suffix that can change the word.

Gretchen: So maybe like “compete” and “-tition” or something like that?

Lauren: Yeah. We have a whole episode on morphemes and how they build up into words. We’ll link to that in the show notes. I feel pretty comfortable with the things that are words, and I feel pretty comfortable pulling out things that are affixes. But, Gretchen, I only have two colours of pen, and I’ve got some words that I’m a bit stuck on.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: “Hafta,” as you have pronounced it and as it’s written – H-A-F-T-A.

Gretchen: As I very carefully said “hafta,” which is not my usual reading vocabulary, but there we are.

Lauren: Casually carefully you pronounced it. I know that that is an informal pronunciation of “have to” – “I have to get” – but it’s one of those things that everyone does. It’s so common. I want to kind of treat “hafta” like a single word. I’m a bit stuck on that one.

Gretchen: But you’re not sure if you’re gonna but you just sort of wanna just to put a few more in there.

Lauren: Yes. I’m gonna put “hafta” with a bit of a question mark. I’m gonna add “I’ll” to that category because, again, that “-ll” at the end of “I’ll” – I know and you know that that’s a conjoined form there. It’s normally “will” as a full thing, but it can just as easily be “I’ll.” I feel like “-ll” is kind of an affix, but it’s more word-y than an affix.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because for something like “prizes,” you don’t know where the /z/ is coming from. There’s not some other word that you know where it’s from.

Lauren: Exactly. Then, “Helen of Troy’s” is an interesting phrase because it’s got that /s/ on the end, but unlike the /s/ in “prizes,” it’s relating to the whole of “Helen of Troy’s.” It’s not just relating to Troy there. Again, question mark on that one. And the “-n’t” in “isn’t” is a bit like the “-ll” in “I’ll.”

Gretchen: We’ve got three tricky things at the boundaries which I have to confess that I carefully constructed this sentence to make it a tricky situation because we wanna talk today about what’s going on with things that are kind of word-like but also kind of affix-like and are in that tricky boundary in between the two. We’ve got a few examples like, “I’ll, “hafta,” “Helen of Troy’s,” and “isn’t.”

Lauren: We not only have talked about morphemes in an episode, we’ve talked about words. We’ve talked about whether something is a word or not in a way that was really focused on meaning. For these, a lot of it is not so much about meaning but about the shape of the affix or the shape of the word that it would’ve been as a full word. It’s revisiting that topic but from a different perspective.

Gretchen: I think the thing that’s satisfying to me is that these nebulously defined word and affix-y-like things have a name for them which is not as well-known as “word” or “affix,” these well-known things, but they’re called “clitics.” When we were preparing for this episode, we were looking up, “Okay, what is the formal definition for ‘clitic’ anyway? Surely someone’s written this. We can just read it out.” The answer is that linguists disagree.

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: Linguists disagree a lot about exactly what a clitic is precisely because it occupies that interesting space between, you know, here are these things that you can very clearly say them all by themselves in isolation like “I” and “will” and “is” and “not,” and then here are these things that you very clearly have to put them on a word. They’re incoherent without a word. And then some stuff that floats around the sentence that you’re like, “Okay, maybe this is a full word. Maybe it’s attached to something else.” It’s a little bit unclear what the status is. Different clitics can behave in different ways, and they can all be lumped together as here’s this big category of stuff that we don’t know what to do with. Or you can be someone who’s really a splitter and saying, “Okay, no, these ones, I think they are more like actual affixes, and these ones, I think they are more word-y, and these are the true clitics that are the smaller set in the middle.” It really depends on if you wanna be a lumper or a splitter there.

Lauren: In order to decide what is and isn’t a clitic, you have rules and principles that are specific to the language that you’re talking about. When it comes to drilling into the specifics of English and how the grammar of English works, you can’t get much more drilling down and specificity in a single book than the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. It’s time for another episode of Gretchen’s adventures in CGEL.

Gretchen: I have a massive copy of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. It’s over a thousand pages. It has made an appearance in some previous Lingthusiasm episodes because it’s got these very, very detailed descriptions of various aspects of what’s going on in English.

Lauren: When it comes to a phenomenon like clitics where there’s a lot of slightly different things happening between different examples, something that has a lot of detail is exactly what we need.

Gretchen: Right. One of the things that CGEL talks about with respect to clitics is that there’s a grade in English between the ones that have very a restricted set of places where they can be found and ones that have a bit less restriction in terms of where they can be found. Even within clitics there are immediately, as soon as you get there, subcategories. One of those is – so clitic forms of “am,” “are,” “have,” and “will,” attach only to a subject pronoun rather than to a full noun. You can have “I’m,” “we’re,” “they’ve,” “he’ll.” CGEL says that if you have a compound subject with a noun and a pronoun in it – like a longer thing but it still has a pronoun – you don’t generally get something like, “Joe and you are in for a shock” – “Joe and you’re in for a shock.” I don’t think I’d say that.

Lauren: You actually struggled to say it. You didn’t even get it right the first time.

Gretchen: I read it on the page, and I was like, “No, I can totally say that.” Then I’m reading it out loud, and I’m like, “No, I can’t actually say, ‘Joe and you’re in for a shock.” Maybe I can say, “Both of you’ve been pretty inconsiderate.”

Lauren: [Laughs] “Both of you’ve been pretty inconsiderate.” It definitely sounds like you’re squishing two different sentences together that don’t belong together.

Gretchen: What do you think about “The Smiths will be there, and so’ll I.”

Lauren: Oh, that one actually is less bad.

Gretchen: I don’t mind that as much. You can use something like, “Pat’ll do it.” You could put it on just a noun by itself, but if you have the compound subject –

Lauren: It gets a little bit less pleasant to my intuitions.

Gretchen: “Joe and you’re in for a shock” just really doesn’t work for me, actually.

Lauren: Which is impressive that it’s getting stronger as it’s not working for you because, normally, once you’ve been exposed to these things for a while, you’re like, “Maybe? I don’t know anymore.”

Gretchen: You can put it on something like, “You could’ve been hurt,” the “-ve” works there. The one that I find more fun – and this one is less restricted. Clitic forms of “is” and “has” – you can put them in a lot of places. You have something like, “Jean’s here,” and “Jean’s taken it,” which actually sounds the same as “jeans” like the pants.

Lauren: That is true.

Gretchen: That really works. You can also put it on longer phrases which don’t work as well for “are” or “have.” You can say something like, “Which dog’s been on the sofa?” Sounds fine to me. “That they’re wet’s obvious enough.”

Lauren: “I’m gonna have to put them in the drier because that they’re wet’s obvious enough.”

Gretchen: “What do you think’s gonna happen?” Totally fine for me.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Gretchen: “Ed, I think, is going, and so’s Sue.”

Lauren: Great. Looking forward to seeing them there.

Gretchen: “Why’s this happening?” “What the heck’s she’s doing?” All of these – totally fine. You’re like, “Yeah, I can put ‘is’ and ‘has’ anywhere. It’s fine.” And then they point out that there are some bad examples.

Lauren: Okay. Please break my brain.

Gretchen: What do you think about “What salad’s that man over there eating?”

Lauren: “What salad’s that man over there eating?” That works for me.

Gretchen: This one is with a percent sign. Some people have it and some people don’t. I find it not quite as good as the others, but I think I’m okay with it. “Don’t use more force than’s absolutely necessary.”

Lauren: “Don’t use more force than’s absolutely necessary.”

Gretchen: I don’t think you like that one.

Lauren: No, that’s weird.

Gretchen: That’s also a percent sign one. Some people might like it. Some people might not.

Lauren: Yeah, I should say it’s weird for me.

Gretchen: I think maybe I can get it but maybe not. Maybe my impressions are just broken from reading this book. Here’s one they don’t think people are gonna be able to get and that’s, “Never’s it going to be easier.”

Lauren: “Never’s it going to be easier.” It definitely is a bit trip-y up-y.

Gretchen: What do you think about, “She often’s right about things.” [Pause] [Gretchen laughs]

Lauren: Is that one a percent?

Gretchen: No. That one is star. That one is nobody.

Lauren: Okay, I am relieved.

Gretchen: “Never’s” is also nobody, but “She often’s right about things” and “Never’s it gonna be easier.” Yet, “She often is right about things,” that would be fine.

Lauren: Fine.

Gretchen: This brings us to a post that went viral from Tumblr a while back. This was somebody – just-shower-thoughts – observing that “Contractions function almost identically to the full two-word phrase, but are only appropriate in some places in a sentence. It’s one of the weird quirks of this language we’ve.”

Lauren: It’s because “have” there is being used as an auxiliary instead of the full form of having and ownership.

Gretchen: Maybe. What do you think about a further comment on it? “Some people say the English language is confusing. To which I say…It’s.”

Lauren: That one definitely feels like it’s missing another word at least.

Gretchen: I’m very delighted that I added a comment to it myself, four years ago, and that that has gotten picked up in the form that keeps getting screen capped and passed around which was, “That’s the kind of linguist I’m.”

Lauren: That absolutely does not work. Congratulations on making more than one sentence that has broken my brain this episode.

Gretchen: It actually took me quite a long time to come up with that sentence, so I’m really pleased.

Lauren: I do see that circulating occasionally. It’s very satisfying.

Gretchen: Yeah, every so often I see it, and I’m like, “Oh, that was me.” I think it also speaks to a really interesting point about clitics in general because sometimes one of the things that comes up when you’re talking about reduced forms of words or smooshing words together, people will start saying like, “Oh, these are lazy,” or “These are low effort. Why are people doing this low effort thing? Shouldn’t everyone just be talking in full words with lots of pauses in between them like a robot?”

Lauren: I absolutely refer to your example as having casual features of English. That’s a slightly less judge-y way of saying the same thing.

Gretchen: Right. But the thing that’s really interesting is there are these kinds of constraints. Nobody who is saying “I’m” and “I’ll” and “I’ve” and all of these things that everyone says is doing it in this weird position at the end of the sentence.

Lauren: If it was just about laziness and efficiency, you’d expect it to be able to be used everywhere.

Gretchen: Right! You’d expect it to just be like, “Okay, yeah, we’ve just gonna do this low effort thing,” but it’s actually more effort, at least to some subconscious level, to be keeping track of like, “Okay, yeah, you can do this reduction thing in some places but not in other places.” Imagine trying to explain that to a new speaker of like, “Oh, yeah, well, no, we have this abbreviation form, but actually it’s never put here.” Like, “Wait, why? This is an extra thing to pay attention to.” There’s a lot of interesting subtle things going on in terms of where we use them.

Lauren: I hadn’t even thought about the restrictions that clitic forms in English have until you showed me places they shouldn’t be.

Gretchen: I hadn’t thought of them either. This is why you go consult a grammar because they’ve gone through all this effort to make all these beautiful, ungrammatical sentences for you. Reading CGEL about clitics also reminded me of this other thing that’s below the level of fully conscious speech in English which is that there’s a certain set of words that have stronger and weaker forms – shorter and longer forms – at a sound level.

Lauren: Because one of the features of a clitic is that it is reduced in terms of its sound compared to a full word.

Gretchen: Exactly. You don’t get a clitic that’s four syllables long because at the point when it’s becoming a clitic, it’s already, like, maybe doesn’t even have a vowel in it.

Lauren: When “will” attaches to something else a clitic to make “-ll.” You never wanna say it can’t happen because then there’ll be one example from someone somewhere, but it would be supremely unusual for something to be a clitic and then become a lot longer.

Gretchen: I think it would be weird because the words that tend to become clitics are already words that have become grammatical words and that are really high frequency. Those tend to be short as well. I mean, never say never. Maybe there’s some language that does it. But I think it would be uncommon. This gets us into this question of what are words that are potentially good targets to become clitics. These are often words that are already getting smaller phonologically. In CGEL they talk about weak versus strong forms of certain words.

Lauren: I don’t think I’ve had someone put this like this before. What would an example of that look like?

Gretchen: Their example is “I think Pat has seen it” and “I haven’t seen it, but Pat has.”

Lauren: I don’t even know what I’m listening for there.

Gretchen: You’re listening for the word “has.” “I think Pat /əz/ seen it.” “I haven’t seen it, but Pat /hæz/.”

Lauren: That’s the difference between /həz/ and /hæz/.

Gretchen: And even shorter because the “Pat has seen it” is often just /əz/.

Lauren: Ah, yeah.

Gretchen: There’s an H written there, but “Pat /əz/” – you probably don’t even say it. Then “has” has that H, and it has a full vowel, not this tiny schwa, and then they both have the /z/ there. There’s actually quite a difference in terms of how they’re pronounced. There’s about 50 words that CGEL lists that have one or more weak forms as well as a strong form. It’s gonna actually be weird to read this list because I’m gonna have to read these words in strong form because you would say them in strong form in isolation because isolation is one of the environments where you use the strong form of a word.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: This is words like “a” –

Lauren: As in, like, “a car”?

Gretchen: Yeah, “a car.” “Am.”

Lauren: “I’m.”

Gretchen: “I’m.” “And.”

Lauren: /ənd/

Gretchen: Yeah. Or just /ən/.

Lauren: To the point where English speakers do the little /ən/ between words.

Gretchen: “Fish ‘n chips.” I’m not gonna read the whole list. You can see that there’s sort of, like, “a” and “am” and “and” are all different types of things. One of them is a verb. One of them is a conjunction. One of them is an article – a determiner. There’s a bunch of different categories. You have some prepositions like “for” which could be “for” but also –

Lauren: /fə/.

Gretchen: /fɹ̩/. You have stuff like “of,” “my,” “must,” “me,” “who,” “you,” which can become /jə/. These are all small words. All of them are a single syllable. If they begin with H, the H often gets kicked off.

Lauren: The thing I really like about “a” or “an” on that list, like “a prize,” is that this is part of an ongoing journey for that word. Because that word started off as “an,” which was essentially the word “one.” Then “one” went off in one direction with all of its articulation still, and then “an” became “a” and is now just /ə/. It’s why you get things like /əloʊn/.

Gretchen: Exactly. Or “only” because it was /oʊn/. The fun thing is, is “a” can be reduced to just /ə/, but /əv/ can also be reduced is just /ə/. “To” can also be reduced to just /ə/. You have gonna /gənə/, lotta /latə/ – “a lot of things” – /gənə/, /goʊ/. All of them can get reduced because they all occur in such different environments that it’s never ambiguous which one is which. What’s interesting is that if a word becomes a clitic – it’s because a lot of the English words started out as a weak form of a word and then subsequently became a clitic.

Lauren: The thing that makes me so happy about this is when we started this episode, I thought we were gonna look at what was between an affix and a word and that that was gonna be clitics. Now, I find out there’s a thing between clitics and words and that everything is on these processes. There are multiple steps that you can watch happen.

Gretchen: The thing that’s interesting about the steps is they interact. Something can become a clitic if it’s already in the weak form. It can become even weaker and become a clitic and really hang onto or lean onto the word next to it. But the reason why you can’t say something like, “That’s the kind of linguist I’m,” is because you can’t even use the weak form of “am” at the end of a word like that.

Lauren: How satisfying.

Gretchen: This was our “I haven’t seen it, but Pat has.” You also can’t say, “I haven’t seen it, but Pat’s.”

Lauren: No. Because I don’t even know what that /s/ is there.

Gretchen: Yeah. But “I think Pat’s seen it” – fine. “I haven’t seen it, but Pat’s.” This context forces you to use the strong form of a word, which means it’s not even a possible target for becoming a clitic, which is one of those subconscious things that you’re like “I didn’t even know I knew this.”

Lauren: I do feel like a lot of not ever noticing this phenomenon of weak forms is because we are so dependent on English writing for the way we conceptualise words even when we hear them. If you’re a very literate English speaker, your perception of the written form can play tricks on your brain in terms of the pronounced form.

Gretchen: I said, “I think Pat /əz/ seen it” to you several times, and you were like, “Yeah, the H is still there,” and I’m like, “I’m not saying an H.” Because the writing is like, “Hey, look, there’s an H.” It’s just not there.

Lauren: Absolutely hallucinated that H there.

Gretchen: The fun thing is, is not every language does this. When I was studying Dutch for a bit, one of the things that was fascinating to learn was that they actually do have different spellings for strong and weak forms of their pronouns.

Lauren: So good.

Gretchen: For example, the Dutch word for “me,” which is – you’ll be able to see the cognates with English – can be written M-I-J, which is pronounced /me/, or it can be written M-E, which is pronounced /mə/. This is probably true of English as well. There’s an emphasis given to “me” and then like, “Yeah, he gave it to me, and then whatever.” There’s probably a /mə/ form in English as well, but they’re both written the same way. You do sometimes see this for pronouns, especially for third person pronouns. Like, “Give it to ‘im,” “Give it to ‘er,” “Give it to ‘em.’” You sometimes see those written with an apostrophe instead of the H, but it’s not something you get a table of like, “Make sure you learn these weak forms,” in the same way as Dutch.

Lauren: No, I absolutely have not.

Gretchen: There is a fun story with, actually, this “‘em,” if you say something like, “Go get ‘em.” What does that E-M stand for?

Lauren: “Them.” Because it’s third person plural.

Gretchen: Well, you’d think because that’s what our modern third person plural is. But in what other context do we drop a /ð/ sound?

Lauren: It’s true. It’s not one of those easy-to-loose sounds.

Gretchen: Right. We have a strong and a weak form of “the.” You have /ðʌ/ or /ði/. Then you have /ðə/. But when you’re reducing it, you’re reducing the vowel. You’re not taking it down to /i/.

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: The “‘em” is actually a form of “hem,” which was the object third person plural pronoun in Middle English.

Lauren: Oh, how satisfying.

Gretchen: Right. Before we had “he,” “she,” “it,” “they,” we had /he/, /heo/, /hɪt/, and /hie/. These sound extremely similar to each other. There was differentiation that happened. We acquired the form “she.” Then we also acquired the “they” and the “them” instead of /hie/ and /hem/ from Norse.

Lauren: But kept our habit of using the old weak form.

Gretchen: But kept the old weak form the same with that dropped H. It’s just sort of crept along. It’s crept along in such an oral way. Because you’re not getting that from writing. You’re getting it from other people speaking in a chain.

Lauren: This is true. Although, I do find it even more satisfying now that the Pokémon trainer Ash has the surname Ketchum “Catch ‘em.” Bits of his name are in Old English.

Gretchen: There’s some Old English stuff that’s just getting re-spelled by modern speakers to refer to something.

Lauren: How delightful.

Gretchen: This is actually something that I think is a really interesting area for development in English because we have this unstressed form in the “they” paradigm, which it’s a relative newcomer in English even though it’s centuries old. But other neo-pronouns in English like “xe/xem,” you’ve got to think like, okay, they’re gonna need unstressed forms as well. They’re gonna need weak forms like /zə//zəm/ as well so that they can be used in all of the same contexts. Maybe people are already, probably, doing this subconsciously.

Lauren: Sounds like a fascinating research paper. I think I should point out even single, tiny digression we’ve been on and every single example CGEL gives has been agonised over and thought about. The space that it fits in between words and affixes has been pondered over long and hard. As we said, it is very dependent on the specific features of the language that you’re working with to decide if something is an affix or a clitic. I thought I’d give an example from the languages that I work with when I had to decide, writing the grammar of Yolmo, if I was gonna treat some things as affixes or some things as clitics.

Gretchen: Please tell me how you made that decision.

Lauren: Because the criteria are language-specific, like English, I was looking at things that weren’t quite as attached to individual words as affixes. There are affixes in Yolmo. There’s one if you want to say that you’re counting a number of people, you put an affix on the numeral that indicates specifically that that numeral is related to two people or five people. That can only ever go on a numeral. Then you have these affixes like the plural. You might have “the dogs,” or you might have “the dog of my friends.” Even though in English that sounds like a possessive, that’s where you could put the plural in these languages.

Gretchen: Oh, so “the dog of my friends” is actually, like, several dogs belonging to my friend?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Which is sort of like “Helen of Troy’s party” or something like that. That S is actually possessed by “Helen” not possessed by “Troy.”

Lauren: Yeah. It’s a bit more free-floating than the affix that has to go on a number. So, you go, “Well, maybe it’s a word,” but it can’t be a word either because words have tone in Yolmo and many Tibetan languages. These plural markers don’t have tone. You go, “Well, it’s not an affix because it’s more free floating. And it’s not a word, so it doesn’t have tone. It’s a clitic!”

Gretchen: Yay! We have this third category.

Lauren: Thank goodness I have more than two coloured pens because for this part of this grammar using the term “clitic” became incredibly helpful.

Gretchen: That’s such a good example of how the diagnostic criteria is really language specific because you’re like, “Okay, well, it doesn’t have tone, so it can’t be a word.” I assume that there’s an entire chain of logic for why all words have tone. But in English, this is like, okay, this is not the diagnostic criteria you’re gonna use.

Lauren: Absolutely. Some of the criteria in English around weak forms or reduced pronunciation doesn’t work in these languages. Coming at it from a language-specific perspective is really helpful.

Gretchen: Sometimes, also, coming at it from a language-specific perspective will be influenced by the history of the writing system for that language and how the language was written down because, you know, if people are used to writing something as the full form, even though the speech sometimes for quite a long time has been reducing it more and more, there’ll still be this tendency sometimes to be like, okay, we’re gonna write out the full form. That’s why it feels so recoverable. Or we’re going to – okay, yeah, but no one actually says it that way, but there’s still all this written stuff that can influence what people are thinking about.

Lauren: I sometimes wonder if English “a” and “the” would be more likely to be treated as clitics if they were physically attached to the words they were in front of.

Gretchen: Yeah, if they were written there with a little apostrophe or something. When I was looking at this, I was surprised to find that some people think that “n’t,” (like “isn’t,” “can’t,”) isn’t actually a clitic in English. It’s just an affix – it’s on the whole word. Because I was like, “But this is so clearly related to ‘not’” – but also it affects the vowels of the thing it’s attached to. You have stuff like “won’t,” which isn’t really transparently “willn’t.” Maybe these are some reasons to say, “Actually, this is an affix now. It just happens to resemble the negative thing.”

Lauren: I do wonder if English cycles of things becoming attached and becoming more like an affix have been arrested a little bit because of that tradition of writing.

Gretchen: There’s this really fun one that I’ve noticed in English that really trips up people who speak languages with fewer vowels than English. This is the “can/can’t” distinction. In English, in unstressed words, if you have a T or D after an N, it often gets deleted. This is why you see “fish ‘n chips” with that N there. It happens all over the place. It happens constantly – place names, people say Toronto (toronno) /təɹɑnoʊ/ without the second T because it’s something you say a lot. This is super common in English – super normal. It happens in all of these negative words. Like, “don’t” becomes /dən/, which is fine because it’s not contrasting with another /dən/.

Lauren: But if you remove the /t/ in “can’t,” you get “can,” which is confusing.

Gretchen: Which is the positive form. But no, it’s not actually confusing in practice for speakers of English who have all of the vowels that English is used to, because there’s also a reduced form of “can,” which is /kən/. Most English speakers most of the time actually make the distinction between /kən/ and /kæn/ where /kən/ is positive and /kæn/ is negative. It’s just got a full vowel.

Lauren: It’s absolutely one of those things that I will have to go find examples in my own speech before I believe that I do this, but I am open to being shown.

Gretchen: I have witnessed this in conversations where you have one native English speaker and one second language English speaker. The native English speaker will be like, “No, no, no, I /kæn/ do it.” And the non-native English speaker will be like, “You’re saying you can, but it seems from the context like you can’t.” They’ll be hyper-articulating the /kæn/ with even more emphasis on the vowel and still not putting the T in that would actually let you figure out what was going on because the T is just so far gone. There’s a fun example in the musical Hamilton where there’s a line about the young Alexander Hamilton who’s poor and has no money and is working at his first job. The line is “Trading sugarcane and rum and all the things he /kæn/ afford.” The way that the performer gives the real stress on /kæn/, like, it’s not even a reduced form anymore because he’s putting this real stress on it, but there’s no T. It’s extremely clear from context that he can’t afford them. It’s very distinctly articulated. There is no T there anywhere.

Lauren: But as long as we have this writing system, people are gonna hallucinate that T.

Gretchen: If we were sensible, we could just spell them with different vowel symbols and actually just do the thing that we think we’re doing, but we’re not gonna do that.

Lauren: I feel pretty safe to say.

Gretchen: Another place where you see this real, real effect of orthography is in French. I came across, a number of years ago, a Reddit post that, alas, I cannot find anymore where somebody had posted, “Hey, guys, I have this new conlang. It’s got subject prefixes. It’s got object prefixes. You could put negation as a prefix. You can do all this stuff as a thing.” It was like, “Here’s this conlang that’s got these very long words that have all these different prefixes and so on stacked on them. What do you think of my new conlang?” If you read it out loud, it was actually French written phonetically.

Lauren: [Laughs] What a sneaky joke.

Gretchen: It’s really interesting. I know it was a joke, and I think that there are still arguments why French is not a massively agglutinative language with all these subject prefixes and so on. But ever since that joke post, I have never been entirely certain anymore.

Lauren: Again, you need something that’s the equivalent of CGEL for French to do the hard work of picking it apart.

Gretchen: Not just CGEL for French, but it would have to be CGEL for spoken French. Because written French comes from this tradition where it’s not, but modern day spoken French is quite divergent from written French. There’s even more of an aspect in learning how to read where you learn a bunch of stuff that used to be true, and then you have to unlearn that to talk to people. A really interesting example is there’re a lot of languages where you change the form of the verb, and then you can tell what the subject is. This is still true in a bunch of other Romance languages. Spanish and Italian, you change the verb, and you can tell if it’s me or if it’s you. In French, you do change this in the writing, but what you actually do is you have to have the pronoun. So, if you have something like, “Je prends les crêpes. Tu prends l'omelette,” which is what you might say at a restaurant – “I’ll take the crepes. You can have the omelette.”

Lauren: Thanks for ordering for me. I hate making choices. [Laughter]

Gretchen: You have the “je” and the “tu” that’s telling the different there. But these are, in French, clitic pronouns. They’re definitely at least clitics because you really have to put them, and you have to put them leaning on the verb. You can’t say them in isolation.

Lauren: That’s a really good diagnostic criterion.

Gretchen: You could, in English, say, “Who ordered the crepes?” You could say, “Me.” You could say, “It is I,” if you wanna sound kind of formal. Both of these are sort of okay. In French, you cannot say, “je.” Like, “Who ordered the crepes?” “Je.” No. No, no, no, no, no, no. You need to use this whole other form of the pronoun, which is the only one that can happen by itself, which is “moi.” Then, if you wanna be emphatic about it, you can say, “Moi je prends les crêpes,” which is often translated sort of like, “Me, I’ll have the crepes.” But it actually shows up in the same context as in a language like Spanish or Italian where you would actually just put in the normal subject pronoun because you don’t normally need it because the verb at the end tells you.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: I really kind of wanna make the case that this is actually – it’s not even a clitic anymore. It’s actually fully glommed onto the verb. But, you know, the Académie Française is gonna completely disagree with me.

Lauren: It is a good demonstration that something – and a lot of the examples we’ve discussed in this episode start as words and then, in English, we’ve seen those weak forms of words, allow them to become clitics. With the literal etymology of “enclitic” in Latin being “to lean” – so begin to lean on words. They’re not fully attached. They’re just leaning on them. Which I get a very cosy visual image with that etymology. Then, once they’ve been leaning on words for long enough, they become dependent and really attach to them as affixes. This process of going from being an independent word, especially in these functional categories, through to being a fully-attached part of the grammar is something that happens repeatedly within a single language across time and across all of our spoken and signed human languages – this process of grammaticalising through from being words to affixes and occasionally stopping off as clitics in between.

Gretchen: Sometimes a clitic is this pathway. If you think of “n’t” in English where it’s like, okay, maybe that’s a clitic, but maybe there’s actually good reasons to say that it’s part of the whole word by now. Sometimes, something can stay clitic-y, like maybe that apostrophe S in English. There’s all sorts of stuff along the way. I mean, you could also see, in Romance languages, it’s so well-established and has long been talked about historically that the pronouns are clitics that maybe some of them are actually not becoming clitics. Like in French or in Spanish, you can do both the pronoun and the full noun in some contexts, like “Le di un regalo a mi madre,” which is literally like, “To her, I gave a gift to my mother.” In English, you can’t do this.

Lauren: Really doubling down there.

Gretchen: You’re doing both. In Spanish you can. You can make the argument that maybe this is the beginning of just marking the object on the verb, which lots of languages do. Then they do have you put the full noun as well. This is a pathway to making it more grammatical than the same thing in English where they’re competing for the same position.

Lauren: It just happens so frequently in this direction and, incredibly rarely, in the other direction that something will break free from a word. We’ve talked about “ish” as a – something’s grammatical-ish. It can break away and become its own thing, ish, now. But the reason we keep bringing up that one example is because it’s so unusual and that the tide just flows in the other direction overwhelmingly.

Gretchen: The normal thing is for stuff to get smaller and shorter, especially when it’s said a lot, and then gradually start merging with the words around it. It’s such an interesting experience to me thinking of yourself in the middle of a language’s history rather than at some sort of end point, like everything that was going on was building up to this, and to say, no, the stuff that we do now that’s slang-y or casual or seems like it’s just reduced effort is gonna be like, oh, yeah, no, here’s this really grammatical thing that happens in another dozen generations.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get kiki bouba scarves, “What the fricative” t-shirts, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. 

Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to 54 bonus Episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards, as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include backchannelling, speaking under the influence, and an interview with Emily Gref from Planet Word. Remember, you can get a special pack of four Lingthusiasm stickers by becoming a Ling-phabet patron before November 3rd, 2021. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Managing Producer is Liz McCullough, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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