#this isn't my best work I think I'll always prefer cereal box

[khaotunq]

GGWM - Get Giffy With Me

I am not professing to be anything even remotely resembling good at giffing, but I got a little message from @thisautistic (hope you don't mind the @, bb! I'll remove if you prefer) asking about how I did my Jay Does Corporate Pride bold gays Ayan set. We quickly realised I can't do anything concisely, and so was born this idea.

All my secrets laid bare. Not that I consider anything here a secret. Go ahead and steal my methods. Steal them. Run with them. They're yours now.

Specifically, I'm going to talk about background isolation and boosting, here, but I'm gonna start a new gif from scratch and show the steps to getting there.

So, I have Photoshop 2020. Or 21. I don't really know. That's the only tool I'll be using, other than the empty cereal box I call a brain.

We're going from this to this. (These are very, very quick and dirty, but they're for demonstrative purposes.)

And this to this.

Annoyingly, I think I prefer the "bad" example, but anyway.

Fair warning: this post is exactly as chaotic as you'd expect it to be, considering it's me writing it and I wrote it in an hour... which includes the time spent making the gifs.

Are there easier ways? Probably.

Let's go!

1. CAP SELECTION.

I have the entirety of The Eclipse capped already, but you'll want to cap your scenes if you haven't already. I prefer working with caps rather than video clips - they both have pros and cons, and I can talk about that some other time if anyone wants me to.

I'm doing two gifs for this little tutorial-turned-dissertation - one that's easy peasy to colour for the purposes of Corporate Pride, and one that makes me want to consume my own elbows. For comparison, or something.

First thing to consider, is if the background is a feature, you want your subject to stay fucking still Kanaphan I swear to god.

You also want to pick something with fairly good contrast. I hate black/white and otherwise relatively neutral backgrounds because they're so difficult to make look natural, but something already predominantly coloured? Lemon squeezy, baby.

2. IDENTIFY COLOURS.

I've taken the easy route and picked green, which is almost always going to contrast nicely with skin tones and makes my life easier, and purple which I have many many issues with, but also contrasts.

Also, this step isn't massively important, it just helps. For example, I didn't know I was going to use green for the First gif until I boosted a bunch of colours and realised how green that rock face behind him is.

I tend to use my beloveds Selective Colour and Colour Balance rather than curves. I don't understand curves. I only use it if I have to lighten something.

3. QUICK AND DIRTY BASIC GIF TUTORIAL ft. my boy Pawin:

Timeline> Video Timeline> Add Media> put in your frames, change your frame delay. Boom, basic gif. Or, to get particularly meta... gif gif tutorial!

What a babe. 🥰 (Disclaimer: this was made before it came to light Pawin's a bit of a cunt :) )

And no, I can't explain why he's here. I have two perfectly fucked up gifs to fuck up, but I chose to spend 60 seconds of my life making a Pawin gif just for this.

4. COLOURING!!!

Go nuts. But here's my process for the Akk gif in specific.

This tells you precisely nothing, but it was fun to make.

I have no idea how to share the specific settings other than to give you the .psd. So as soon as I figure that out, you can have it. I don't recommend using the psd for any and all gifs, because my approach to colouring is interpretive at best, but I really don't care all that much so. Do what you like. S'what I do.

Not included in this: cropping/resizing, my sharpening action, swearing about First, apologising to First, laughing at the fact I changed his shirt colour entirely, swearing at First some more, shrugging and saying, "That'll do."

5. COLOUR FILL / BRUSH / OVERLAY

So, all of this is for this one step.

Here I will demonstrate why white/neutral backgrounds can suck unless you're looking for that particular effect.

For something like the gifset I made, I wanted to punch people in the face with colour, so I had to use scenes with backgrounds I could lean on. In the Akk gif, I noticed the green after fucking around with the colour balance (I tend to boost shadows blue or red, then highlights cyans, but I've been known to go wacky. I leave mid tones alone... for the most part.) so that's what I decided to lean into. When I started this little ramble 500 years ago, I was originally planning on orange. How fickle fate is.

Anyway! I prefer using brushes rather than a full colour-fill layer, because I feel like it gives me greater control. I also prefer adding colour gradually rather than starting with a block. So, I use either a large soft brush at 50% opacity, or a watercolour brush at 100% because it's semi transparent anyway.

I'll use broad strokes - I ain't here for detail work. Set it to Overlay or Soft Light, whichever floats ya boat. And then rather than erase anything, I'll create a layer mask and, using the same brush, splodge it around til nobody's face is green.

And then on the off chance things are eye-burningly saturated by the time I finish other colouring things, I'll just go kill the opacity on the overall colour layer. Like seu~

You have no idea the strength it's taking to not go back and redo this entire tutorial because I've taken too much yellow out of his skin and it's bugging the shit out of me.

This is a fake tutorial, Jay. Breathe.

TO KHAOTUNG!

I am man enough to admit I stole my own damn .psd for the other gif. I literally used the same settings other than futzing about with the neutral balance to try and get some kind of colour undertone.

This is the second gif with just the colouring, no additional fill or overlay:

Isn't he pretty? Don't we love him? I love him. He's so asjdkfhg. Ugh.

Anyway. I figured there was sort of a blue/purple tone. Knowing what I do, I know it's gonna be way too pale for what I want, and he also moves quite far across the frame, so it's gonna be a pain in the arse if I want to go SUPER saturated with any colour background,but this is a demonstration and nothing more.

I could use Linear Burn instead of Overlay but I always get annoyed at it. Because I am a deeply rational person.

Anyway, the point of the above is to kind of show that sometimes u just gotta leave a massive puddle of colourlessness around someone's head if they're moving a lot. I've gotten away with it in this case because it's pale, but if I tried to put any further boost to the saturation, it'd look insane:

I HOPE THIS HELPS

I apologise for my incoherence. It makes sense to me. Which should worry us all.

Anyway, final gifs:

+

Rejects of my War On Purple, because I promised those. Notice how they're all white, black or neutral (dark brown/red) backgrounds? Rage.

[shooklynn-blog]

Thrift Shop (Chapter 1)

so this is something I started a while ago (like the actual first fanfic i wrote, i think it’s from the beginning of april) but kind of stopped writing and i’m not sure i like how it turned out very much but I just wanted to put this out there in case anybody ended up liking it, then i’d be happy to write more! i have a chapter 2 totally done and ready, so if you like this, let me know and i’ll put it up and continue to write it (maybe?) but it was just a little thing i wanted to do and, if people like it, it’ll be my first chaptered fic! any feedback is appreciated! oh, it’s also my first AU fic! really hope you enjoy :)

summary (kinda spoilery for the future lol): Dan goes into a thrift shop downtown for the first time and meets the only employee there, a boy named Phil. He makes a fool out of himself and, when cleaning up his mess, talks to Phil. Phil is outgoing and Dan thinks he talks too much and leaves without buying anything, but interactions that take place between them end up giving Phil major self-confidence issues and lead him to develop selective mutism over the year that they’re apart. They meet up again and Dan realizes the effects of his words, and maybe the boy isn’t so bad after all and Dan was all too quick to judge.

au: i wrote this imagining that it took place somewhere in their teenaged years, where they are roughly the same age. also: pastel!Dan and pastel!Phil because i love them so much omg. later there’s gonna be mute!Phil but not in this chapter. 

word count: 1,641

genre: fluff and a little angst

warning: Dan is kind of a jerk lol, rated G for a little bit of gay later

Dan’s POV:

I had no idea why I’d never been to the thrift store downtown. I’d gazed into the windows occasionally before, but it never was a good time to go in. The clothes were tasteful, I’d just never really gone in. I decided that it was time to check the store out, if only to never return again, just so I could say that I went in. Really, it was a cute shop with a nice window display, in an alley just off of the main street.

I walked in and was pleasantly surprised. Unlike most thrift stores, I wasn’t bombarded with the smell of old people and musk, but rather the shop smelled of a sweet cotton candy. Some soft, upbeat music played in the background, a tune I didn’t fully recognize, but that seemed vaguely familiar. I looked around and was frankly shocked by the size of the shop. It was far larger than it had appeared from the outside, filled with seemingly endless racks of clothes. The walls were painted a pastel blue. It was really a beautiful shop.

“Hello! How can I help you?” I heard a voice coming from the back room and turned my head. I jumped a little, not realizing that somebody else was there. It was a boy, a little older than myself, holding boxes of clothes piled almost to his chin. Of course, I assumed they were filled with clothes or something, but it was nearly impossible to tell. I smiled curtly at him and began to sort through one of the racks. It was filled with t-shirts in various sizes, most had been washed so much that the cotton had worn thin. I pulled a faded teal shirt off of its wooden hanger.

“Excuse me, do you have any fitting rooms?” I hated having to bother the clerk, but I really didn’t want to buy the top without knowing if it would fit.

“I’m sorry, we don’t really have one. If you’d like, you could try it on in the back room if you don’t mind all the boxes of donated junk.” I smiled and walked to the small room from where the boy had first emerged. It was small and nearly filled to the ceiling with boxes stacked on top of eachother. There wasn’t a lot of space that I could change in, but I thought it would be rude to walk out after I’d just come in, so I pulled the door shut behind me. I tugged my jumper off and slipped on the t-shirt. It fit pretty nicely and the material was very soft on my skin. I was checking myself out in the mirror when I heard a soft knocking on the door.

“Sorry, I think I left my phone in here,” I opened the door to let the boy in, “Wow! That shirt really suits you. It’s a very nice color. Really brings out your eyes.” I blushed and mumbled thanks while he grabbed his phone and let me be. It wasn’t that I didn’t get complimented, it’s just that a majority of the nice things people said to me came from my relatives or close friends. The opinion of some random thrift shop employee shouldn’t matter so much to me, but I guess sometimes it’s nice to be recognised. Plus, I didn’t really like my eyes. Of all the things anybody could point out, my eyes were generally not the topic of compliments I received. They were plain and brown and boring. They were definitely nothing special.

I tugged the shirt off, apparently a little too excitedly. While I was free from the grip of the teal shirt, pulling it off had cause my elbow to sail into one of the boxes of junk, shoving it away and causing all of the boxes to fall onto me. I groaned. Of course of all things, I’d ruin all of the sorted boxes of donations. The door burst open.

“Oh my, are you alright?” the boy looked down at me, concerned. I laughed half heartedly, “Yeah, I’m great, just, you know, buried in boxes.” He reached his hand out to me and pulled me out of the boxes sitting atop me. At that moment, I realized that I wasn’t wearing a shirt and quickly turned around and looked for my jumper under the boxes. I pulled it over my head and over my torso to cover myself up. My face was flushed, I’d messed up pretty badly.

“I’m really sorry, I’ll help you get everything cleaned up. I’m such a clutz,” I sighed, bending down to put stuff back in the boxes. The boy giggled, “It’s fine, I can clean up here. We don’t get many customers anyhow, now I’ll have something to do for the rest of the day.” I felt so bad for him. It didn’t seem like there were any other workers to help him. It was my mess, it was only fair if I helped him clean up.

“Really, I insist. I’ll be here to help you keep company. I owe you one, I should’ve kept better track of my elbow.” There was that giggle again, the boy’s tongue poking out a little as he smiled at me. It was clear that he was the exact opposite of me, at least personality wise. He seemed very friendly and outgoing, whilst I tended to recoil at the idea of any social interaction. He sure did like to laugh, and, while I was pretty sure he was laughing with me, I still couldn’t help but feel that he was teasing me for knocking everything down. I felt really bad for having inconvenienced him, but he didn’t have to try and make conversation while trying to repack boxes. I just wanted to help him and go.

“So, do you always pull your shirt off so violently?” Did he just wink at me? Maybe he just blinked. Was I seeing things? This boy did love to talk. He told me stories about his mum, who had taken a photo where her hand looked like a claw, and joked about her being a lobster. He said that he worked in the shop every day because his mum owned the place and paid him to help keep it running. While the way he babbled on was undeniably adorable, I didn’t come to the shop to hear his life story. Still, I couldn’t be rude and ask him to shut up, so I just grinned and nodded while he continued to chat. I felt very bad about knocking all of the boxes over, after all. Slowly but steadily, we managed to return everything to its proper box.

“Thanks for helping. This would have taken ages if I were alone. We make a good team, huh?” the boy gave me a small smile. I grinned tightly back at him. I was ready to go back to the safety of my bed where I wouldn’t have to face the social humiliation I had to when I inevitably messed something up because I was a clutz. Honestly, I’d have rather been anywhere else other than that stupid shop with that extroverted employee trying to converse with me.

“Yeah, we sure did make a good team. See you round then,” I made a beeline for the door, not leaving quick enough to avoid seeing the boy’s face fall as I quickly escaped from the shop. Thank god that was over. As I looked back in one last time, I saw the boy sitting at the checkout, looking sadly down at the register. What was his problem? I was just a customer, I was sure he saw loads, right? It wasn’t my job to babysit him while he worked.

Phil’s POV:

What did I do to scare him away? I thought I’d acted more than friendly towards the curly-headed customer. I’d shared some funny anecdotes with him and tried to engage with him. He seemed like a nice guy, a bit reserved, yeah, but he did stay back to help pack up the boxes after he’d knocked them down. I just didn’t understand why he left so abruptly, like he couldn’t even face me. Had I done something wrong?

I knew it was silly, but it got lonely in the shop. We hardly saw any customers at all in the shop, and those we see are usually old people or those donating. I rarely saw anybody my age in and, well, it was nice that the boy made me feel a little less alone. Of course, it was silly. He'd just been shopping downtown and I was just another employee. He stayed back because he was polite. That’s all. I just wish he could have stayed. I couldn’t help but wonder what his life was like, as I’d shared so many parts of mine with him. All things considered, he hardly shared anything at all with me, and I talked most of the time.

I hated how I’d just shoot off at the mouth. That was probably it. That’s why most people tended to avoid me. I was just too clingy and easily attached. I read too much into things. He thought I was gross and obnoxious and arrogant because I talked too much. That made sense. I just wanted to make him feel comfortable, you know? Not everybody was as outgoing as me, and some people just weren’t comfortable sharing their life with a stranger. Oh god. I must have seemed so strange. Why am I so stupid? Of course he didn’t care about my life. He was just polite. Just polite, nothing else. That’s why he stayed. That’s why he smiled and talked a bit with me and left. I just wanted someone to care about me. I just wanted a friend.