#this anon seems friendly no meanness detected btw

[rotanawrites]

What do you use to gif if you don’t use photoshop?

Thank you for the question, anon!

Because I’m a broke bitch, I don’t use PS. I use a free open source application called instagiffer instead. I download videos mostly from YouTube, but some of the websites I use to watch international TV shows are easy to download from as well. Idk how to gif from streaming platforms yet and I’m scared to torrent 💀

Anyway!

I put the video file into instagiffer and I move the time toggle as I make the gifs. I typically set them to gif 4 seconds of footage at once, 10 frames per second, and I trim off a few frames as needed. You can’t adjust the coloring or sharpen the gifs unfortunately, so I know why people say my gifs aren’t HQ enough or whatever, but I find as long as the lighting in the OG footage isn’t bad, if you use the brightness toggle and adjust it once on either side of darker or lighter, depending on the lighting, it does make the FC you’re giffing clearer.

Sometimes I’ll edit 8 seconds of footage at once if the FC is in one position and camera angle for that long and use the “delete even number frames” option to make a gif of them make several expressions while they talk. Sometimes the gif looks good as is, other times you’ll need to slow it down by one speed.

You can adjust brightness, size, crop, FPS, and frame speed with Instagiffer. If anybody has suggestions for free programs where I CAN color and sharpen gifs I’d love to hear them. But I like Instagiffer because it’s very easy to crank out gifs quickly. This is a hobby. I don’t take commissions (largely bc I don’t feel my gifs are HQ enough to OFFER commissions, and my turnaround time would suck), and nobody has ever donated to my kofi for my gifs, which is fine!!! But this is a free hobby! I have a full time job, I’m autistic and have adhd so even HAVING FUN can be hard for me to want to do because of burnout from working full time. I’m hopefully to go finish my degree this time next year too. Instagiffer is free and fast and to ME what’s fun isn’t sharpening and coloring gifs painstakingly. To ME sharing tons of cool FCs I giffed is fun hence my numerous 25-50 count gif packs.

If anybody likes a fc I gif but hates my gifs they’re welcome to pay someone who takes commissions to make really pretty ones or to find the time and PS skills to make their own, I’ll stick with free programs 😂

[lackaroses]

Hi! Anon with the Sadie Churchill Oc! I have more lore! First, she ends up at Lackadaisy. I feel like she'd fit in better there. Plus, with her on their team, they have magick power. Just like how Marigold does with Nico and Serafine! How she ends up there or what she does, I don't know. Second, Walter or the Wraith only heavily influences Sadie. Meaning, he doesn't possess her, just gives her powers to do the killing. Unless he's really really pissed off. Which usually happens when Roscoe's present. Other than that, it's kind of like a Venom type of situation, without the who alien goo thingy and way more detached. Now, onto the lore which, is just a new Oc! Nicolas Seals. Once again, don't have a picture, but I can describe him. He's a Russian blue cat and a freelancing private detective that's tracking down what he dubs as "The Siren Killer". Which is Sadie, btw. He gave her this nickname, because her victims, when they aren't all over the place, have their ear drums busted out and their brains are turned into mush. Almost like they've been exposed to some kind of harmful frequencies.

He's a nice and friendly guy, but a bit of a stickler, hardass about the law. So much so that he lives up to his last name, Seals. Because every case he's ever been on, is a case closed. A serial killer on the loose? He'd have the identity of the murder within a year, tops. Robbers and Bootleggers that keep getting away? Behind bars, no time flat. While, those cases are well and good, catching speakeasies in the act is where he shines! Any Speakeasy he walks into, you might as well count it as closed when he leaves. Doesn't even matter if you hide the alcohol in the floorboards, he will find it. There is no, "Bribing him to turn the other cheek" like a lower paid officer in 1920s. He does his job and he does it well. Sometimes, a little too well.

He's only like this though, because his parents were murdered when he was young. And the police never found out who did. So, he vowed he'd be the best detective he could be so, no criminals, like the ones that killed his parents, would get away, like that, again.

He is also supposed to be Sadie's love interest in the present day.

🌹That’s awesome dude! Have you ever considered making like an actual fanfic about these characters? You’ve seemed to put quite the bit of time into this.🥀

🌹Also just a tiny side note, in the comic Marigold doesn’t really have any powers from the savoys (in cannon). It’s implied that most don’t really believe in their spirits, though, it is an OC story, so you can change this if you want🥀

[sol1056]

hey im the anon who asked about how you knew the stuff, sorry i wasn't too clear on what. i just read the post explaining EPs and how the behind the scene stuff worked and i wanted to know how you knew all that, like are you involved in the industry? or just a nerd?

gotcha! Well, remember how back in S1/S2, people kept pointing out Hunk could be… awfully nosy? always getting into things, asking questions?

I was over here going, YES HUNK IS MY PEOPLE. 

It’s a hallmark of a certain type of engineer: insatiable curiosity, and never satisfied with only one answer, always sure there’s more to discover. Okay, we’re not all engineers — a lot of us are Russian Lit majors — but the key is our drive to discover. We take apart, put back together, connect dots close and far, turn things around and study them from a new direction. We’re those people who randomly show up in your part of the building, poke our heads in the room and say, “so, what do all y’all do here? what’s this do? hey, what’s that?”

Despite the fact that most of us seem to be (strangely) strong introverts, that doesn’t stop us. We’ve got questions for everyone. We’ll talk to total strangers all day if we’re on the trail of a particularly interesting idea. In a nutshell, we’re utterly shameless.

I did post-production back when NLE was relatively new and the compositing applications required massive nearly-mainframe computing power. I was mostly in the sfx/cg areas, but I weaseled my way into the color suite pretty regularly. I sat in on editing sessions and was a happy lunch-fetching lackey if it got me a chance to watch the compositing team. Any lull meant a chance to chat up directors, cinematographers, producers, etc. I totally took advantage. 

It’s been awhile since I did that – and since then I’ve been a roady, a mental health & substance abuse admin, a doorman, and even owned a bookstore, before going corporate. But for every wacky thing I’ve done, I’ve also kept in touch with people I met. Frex: the friend who got me the post-production job is now an executive producer. Yes, I do call him with questions. He’s used to it. If he doesn’t know an answer, he sends me to someone who does. (Another reason we’ve been friends for so long.) One answer is never sufficient, never a reason to stop there.

Meet one novelist, get introduced to six more, and three of them write for TV. Oh, that’s handy. Should save that contact, could be useful someday. It’s actually rare for someone to say no, come to think of it. idk, as long as I can get access, I can usually get the person to tell me something I can use. 

However, since my actual area of expertise applies across many industries, I’ve worked all kinds of places. A lot of it’s client-facing, and if you think that means I’m not wandering around the client site poking my head into rooms and cheerfully interviewing people on the spot, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Now that I work at a multinational corporation, I have literally thousands of people in my network, including everyone who’s moved on to a new place. You might be surprised how many people are fine with, “hey, I work at X with Y, and Y told me you’d know this.” Of course, everyone has a bias and a view limited to their own experience, so you can’t stop there. You can’t really understand a situation without knowing the agendas of all the players. You gotta ask a bunch of people, make sure you’re getting the most rounded sense of things. 

Not really a hardship for me. It’s kinda the whole point. 

People are people everywhere (outside cultural quirks), and it’s rare I’m ever researching a single person (I’m not an investigative journalist, if you were wondering). Most of the time, I’m looking for the industry-based cultural expectations. As in, “given X and Y, what would someone who does A generally think is a reasonable action, in this situation?”  

The key is to have a believable reason for asking, and being a writer definitely qualifies. “I’m researching for a story, and I have a character who do X. I wanted to know if it’s realistic for them to know Y. Who do you think would be the best person to ask?” I frequently cold-call, and I never ask “is there someone there,” I ask who they think is the best person. A lot of times it ends up being someone that the phone operator knows (personally or by reputation) who’s full of bizarre trivia and enjoys a chance to show it off. (Plus, it’s amazing what you can learn about a person from all the other subtle cues people are unaware they’re telling, when they’re focused on their area of expertise.)

That’s how I ended up interviewing the Director of the DEA about whether a non-US-university degree would satisfy the education requirement. His letter of introduction got me monthly lunches for awhile with the DEA director in my city. (Oh, the stories I heard.) It’s how I learned about sheep subsidies from one of the top execs at the USDA, and that there’s a single surviving Civil War widow still getting a VA pension. Going in person is even more fun. You could wind up talking to one of the very few artists in the world whose speciality is touching up pre-Renaissance books so the repairs aren’t visible. Or the art historian whose job is going through the nation’s attic and identifying century-old fakes. 

I’ve talked to embassy officials from five different countries, NASA biophysicists and astrophysicists, OSHA inspectors, Nobel prize-winning economists, police detectives, celebrity chefs, environmental lawyers, arena-level sound-people, race-car drivers, potters, opera singers, patent examiners, train mechanics, fire marshals, foley artists, and club DJs. I’ve interviewed fashion photographers, farriers, puppeteers, lighting designers, Catholic bishops, bioethicists, rabbis, fighter pilots, public radio personalities, newspaper editors, chemists, club organizers, war correspondents, Episcopalian nuns (yes they exist), textile artists, prison architects, midwives, cabinetmakers, tall ship sailors, haute couture seamstresses, and civil engineers. On and on and on. 

Don’t neglect official avenues, either. The Department of Labor, the International Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, the Screen Writers’ Guild, the list is nearly endless — any organization, union, or federal/state dept that sets or guides policy. Everyone has a bias, so what people consider normal is sometimes… not. Or they just didn’t know (or saw no need to know, the fools) the reason for A over B. You have to check the rules, because a discrepancy between what you’re told should be done versus what people tell you is actually done… is also useful to know. 

(Labor practices are definitely one of those areas, since federal labor policy is something every company must observe. It’s the law. So when a workplace seems to be violating the law, it raises a lot of interesting questions.) 

And finally, of course, there’s traditional research. Textbooks written by people in an industry can be particularly interesting, especially if it’s a book meant for readers outside that industry (which usually means a lot of firsthand anecdotes to round out the gaps). Popular articles, academic essays, post-mortem white papers, TED talks, interviews. You need to do your basic homework, because there’s no waste of someone’s time quite like asking them a question that’s patently absurd once you get past common assumptions. 

I once explained the plot of a popular SF show to a NASA astrophysicist, and his response was simply, “Every word you used was English, but those words in that order make absolutely no sense at all.” Kind of a dead-end, there. You can’t come at a top-level expert with intro-level questions. 

Since I don’t always know who I’ll stumble over next, being an information sponge means I at least have a whole encyclopedia of analogies. If I can find  common ground (cars and houses are two of the best), I can at least get a basic idea of the person’s meaning. “Oh, so it’s like when you turn the key in the ignition, and the lights don’t come on because the battery is dead?” 

It’s asking the right questions, using an open and friendly approach, and having the right timing. Remember: there is no such thing as unskilled labor; there is only undervalued labor. That is, their time is also valuable, so be brief, open, and sincere. Treat every person as if they’re an authority in something, even if you haven’t figured out what that is. 

The world is a massively complex place, and contains more things than are dreamt of in our philosophies, all of it waiting to be discovered.

Or, the shorter version:

btw: I don’t actually recommend going in person to the Dept of the Interior, though. You’ll get lost. Like, instantly. That place is MASSIVE.