#anyway i decided to remake my first gifset so here it is | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

highwarlockkareena · 3 years

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From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES: When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!

Thank you ali for the tag on this collaboration with @nyx4, ali! @wendashanren

tagging: (I mostly talk about collaboration for this one but if you check #showyourprocess most people talk about how they made their creations or check my first post about giffing here!)

@elysean for this set @timothyolyphant for this set @sugardaddyahxu for this set @jun-hee for this set @bloominflowers for this art

I wanted to collaborate with Jackie on a set. We’d talked about it anyway, and thought about what we could work on. So when I saw this request on mdzsnet, i knew this was the one for us.

wei wuxian, black/red, cql, yp!wwx/sunshot campaign scenes/nightless city scenes, the lyrics from "the war" by syml

I knew Jackie loved Syml, so she’d want to make this request, so I put both our names down to claim it, then when Jackie was online checked if she’d prefer to do this one solo, or shared. She loved the idea of a collab, so we got to work.

First we listened to the song a couple of times, thinking about how it worked for wei wuxian. then we broke down which lyrics we wanted to use and the general scenes for them.

We split them out across a number of gifs (originally it was 4 but I don’t have a screenshot of that) with a general idea of scenes we’d work from for each. As you can see, I do plan but my notes tend to be sparse reminders rather than detailed. jackie wanted to dig the angst knife in deep and wanted the ‘my war is over’ to coincide with wei wuxian falling off the cliff, so we worked back from that for our scene choices.

Jackie:

Originally it was going to be 4 gifs, all of them with the lyrics that made it to the final set, but it would have been too much text on each gif so first we decided on a gif without text in the middle before deciding on spreading out the song a bit more which led to the 7 gif set.

We started making gifs 1 and 3. in my usual fashion i made about 10 gifs to pick which scenes i wanted to work with & jackie made 1 because she isn’t an idiot.

Jackie:

Kareena does make a ton of gifs just to choose one or two, which is both amusing and amazing. I have proof!

Luckily we’re both admins on WoHDaily, so we used the drafts in there to share a post we could both edit gifs in & out of.

I’d wanted to do a silhouette edit similar to one in @lan-xichens lovely overlay tutorial, but it wasn’t coming out the way i’d liked, so I had to keep trying different things until it worked as I’d envisioned.

I finished a touch before Jackie who had taken time to pick emotionally devastating scenes for her gif, so we used my red throughout both, but then tweaked each gif with feedback from each other.

Jackie:

When we first decided on the scenes, I waited for her to do the first gif so I could match her colors. Once she made the first one, I showed her this template I made so we could visualize how it’d look.

Then we moved on to the next gifs. This was harder, because we didn’t want to overload the set by making every single gif super fancy, so we tried out a variety of things to see what would hang together nicely.

Above is an example of one idea of mine that got discarded. I think i had 3 iterations before we got to the gif below.

Jackie:

I then moved on to gif #6 and I made a gif which Kareena completely shut down. She said, Jackie, this is really ugly. I accepted it, because she is the one with the skills here, and because she was right. (KAREENA: this is a lie - the gif is *gorgeous* but it just has a lot going on in an already busy gifset.)

There was too much going on in that gif and it didn’t really fit with the set we were making. The gif we ended up with fit much better and I’m glad she said something. For the last gif, I showed her a few shots and we both agreed on those two (wwx crying, walking backwards on the cliff). I made a couple of gifs that Kareena was nice enough to say were gorgeous, but I thought they sucked. Third one is what we ended up with.

For me, most of the work was in getting the scenes to fit the lyrics and to work with the color scheme that the requester gave us.

We continued to work this way, making ideas and sharing them, tweaking or discarding or remaking as necessary until we were both happy with the gifs. It wasn’t too hard to get them to work as a set, it was mostly about communication and honesty. jackie and i get on well enough to crit each others gifs without worry, so we both liked what was created. We pushed each other, Jackie knows I’m very lazy & she didn’t let me slack. I pushed her in other areas so that we both tried out new skills.

Once the seven gifs were made, it was time for typography! We spent a little time discussing our love of simple fonts, sharing a few examples, before I handed over to jackie as the typography queen.

Now, fonts:

Yup, I like simple fonts and for the typography not to take over the whole set. Luckily, Kareena feels the same way, so early on we decided on two fonts, one of them to highlight a word here or there. I showered her some fonts samples, we agreed on a style, and then I got to work.

The fonts used were:

Ostrich Sans https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/ostrich-sans

Memories https://www.dafont.com/memories-2.font

I kept it simple, just looking where the text would look best. I didn’t know how to wrap text around a shape before, which is what I wanted for gif #3. Turns out it’s very easy and people probably know this already but I’m a ps noob (lie). Still putting this here just in case anyone wants to know.

Using the Ellipse Tool/Custom Shape Tool, I made a circle 2px bigger than the bw gif i wanted to wrap the text around. I didn’t want the shape to be visible, so I chose Path there. (If you choose shape, the actual shape will be visible in whatever color you have chosen)

With the Type Tool, just hover over the line of the shape and a squiggly thing will appear. Click and start typing. I then dragged the text and fit it over the bw gif. I made the shape on the side so I could see it clearly, but you can make it over the actual shape you want the text to wrap around. Listen, this is the best I can describe it ✌

We discussed how to post the set. Since it was a group effort, should one of us post it or should we post it via the net? Since we’ve also got another request lined up to collaborate on, we decided that I would post this set & Jackie would post the next one.

TLDR:

It was fun, it was about communication and compromise. Pushing each other in our weak spots, nitpicking at each gif to make them the best we could, agreeing why one gif might not work in this set. It was about mixing two styles but still creating something we both liked! It was enough fun we have two more collaborations planned, just to keep having fun and to keep learning.

#showyourprocess #collaboration #my stuff #nyx4

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evakuality · 4 years

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2019 - my (first) year of Druck

This year has been ... well, it’s been. There have been some fairly awful things in my life this year, which have compounded a decade of some really awful things. But there has been one thing that has brought me a lot of joy, often during times when those awful things were happening. And that one thing, of course, is Druck.

When I think of 2019, I know one of the things that will stick out will be that this is the year I decided to give it a chance. I first heard of Druck during a time when I was really pissed by the idea of the remakes at all. I’d tried to watch some of them (specifically France and Austin but lowkey bits of anything that was around) and I was turned off by all of it. It was too similar but also too different and I couldn’t enjoy any of it. Unfortunately for Druck, and for me, it entered my consciousness at a time when I wasn’t in any sort of mood to give any remake a chance after my experiences. And so I blocked the tag and ignored it. Sadly, I missed out on Hanna’s season because of it. I adore her now and I’m sad I didn’t follow her in real time.

Anyway, enter 2019 and people somehow managed to slip past my defences and get Druck onto my dash ... and they got it onto my dash with the one thing that would make me consider taking a chance on it. They were talking about a potential for a trans Even. A change! Something new! It’s not the exact same story again! Trans rep!!! So I unblocked the tag sometime in early March and I honestly thought I’d politely watch the episodes at the end of the week, clap with respect and leave it be. When David was introduced and it started to seem likely that he might be trans I caught that buzz, reblogged a gifset or two, but still didn’t watch the episode til the end of the week. Then I properly met Matteo.

I thought I was coming to Druck for the David side, but in the end while I fell deeply in love with him, it was Matteo who cemented this as ‘it’ for me. In the same way that Isak has always been my touchstone in Skam, Matteo became that for me in Druck. If it wasn’t for David existing, I would never have reconsidered the show, but if it wasn’t for Matteo I would never have fallen in love. And now here I am, with love for all the Druck characters (some more than others, but all of them in my heart), and having actually enjoyed all the seasons I’ve seen (still refuse to see s2; I was so revolted by s2 of Skam that I won’t watch any version again). Back when I was first trying out the remakes, I was sure none could ever draw me in for real; none of the ones I watched vibed for me. But I’m so glad I was wrong. I’m so glad Druck introduced David and I’m so glad that it was Druck that did that, because it ‘feels’ like my show in the way it’s made. I’m glad the show that vibed with me is the show that did something to alert me to itself. Otherwise I’d never have found it and never have known it was exactly perfect for me.

And at the end of 2019 this is where things stand: this show means the world to me and I can’t believe I didn’t let it into my life before this (thank you, David!!!), it’s going to continue which gives me a lot of joy, I have found a whole group of loving and sweet people who also love this show. While there’s been turbulence in my personal life this year, the big constant has been this fandom and the lovely people I’ve met in it. I’ve gone on blocking sprees for all sorts of reasons, but the core of the people who are here are passionate, caring, friendly and welcoming. So I’d just like to send a whole bunch of love to you all. To those who keep the tag alive and filled with positivity and hope, I love you. To my friends in the gc: you’re all wonderful people and I’m so glad I got to know you this year.

Here’s to a great 2020 with more love, more fun and more Druck!

#druck

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sometimesrosy · 5 years

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I'm having a stupid dilemma. There's this girl on tumblr that makes super cool gifs of games and some tv shows. She has this kind of "technique" where she grabs a gif and cuts it in two, in the middle, and so the character of the game shows up on one of the sides and the rest of the scenery shows in the other. I don't recall if I saw anybody else do this, but yesterday I was editing some game footage and ended up doing that. It's really pretty and I'm proud of it, BUT I feel like I'm copying +

+ her. I was thinking of sending her an ask to know if it’s ok to use the same layout, and if yes if she wants me to credit her, etc. Problem is, we have the same tumblr theme! I’ll be honest, I saw the theme for the first time on her tumblr, but the themes are public (other people have it too) and I had mine in black so it was different. But now I came back to tumblr and put it in white… it’s equal to hers. I’ve been trying to change themes but I don’t like any, I love this one to death. +

+ What do I do? Do I send her the message anyways and ignore the fact that the tumblr theme is the same? (I feel like that way I’m copying her too much, and yesterday I sent her an ask on public about another thing so she probably saw the theme.) Do I not send a message and post the edited gif anyway? (She doesn’t follow me so she’ll only see if she searches for the tags, or if someone she is following reblogs it, or if someone sends it to her.) Or do I remake the edit with a different layout?

Tricky problem. Tricky.

It is not, however, unusual. Part of being a creator is being open to how art is being done around you. None of us are islands who create without being influenced by the others. And nothing new is created under the sun. We’re all doing different versions of the same stories and have been for millennia. Now you’ve got yourself a new medium, but that medium is built on the visual language that comes before it, so it’s still not “new.”

Being an artist means you are always being inspired by things and people and creators around you. And they are in turn inspired back. Sometimes, people in the same community, who are consuming the same kind of content, start having the same sort of ideas at that same time. They have the same tastes and preferences because it is, kind of a sign of the times. The zeitgeist has similar ideas popping up all over the place at the same time. You coincidentally having the same theme sounds like that. You share the same taste, you are using the same platform and preferred the same available theme. That’s not a problem.

Plagiarizing is taking what someone did and saying it’s yours. You don’t seem to be doing that. Good. Because that’s a no no. Don’t steal.

Copying is taking what someone did, and repeating it, doing what they did on another project, using their style or their techniques. Your theme isn’t copying, but your gifs might be. Now, copying isn’t actually necessarily a bad thing. It’s kind of how we learn and grow and develop. Taking techniques or styles we appreciate and then trying to reproduce them with our own work. It’s how we learn facility with the medium we use and ALSO how we develop our own style. ONLY copying her might be questionable, but taking the technique of one gif and using it to develop your own style, is not a bad thing imo.

This is moving into “inspiration.” Her work inspires you to create your own work, and ideally, expand beyond what she did into your own original creativity. This is part of the creative process and not a problem.

OR it might be part of that zeitgeist I was talking about. OR perhaps you’re both in the same school of thought about gifsets. You’re both working with the same material, right? Seeing the same things. Inspired by the same content.

However, there is something I can’t speak to and that’s the culture of your creative community. Every community has their own culture around etiquette and what is expected and the way you treat each other. And I just don’t know what that is with your gifmakers and such. I do know that tumblr creators can be very sensitive and possessive about their content. I remember a big fandom argument when one person said she’d started the discussion of a show’s allusion to a greek myth, and then some other blogger came out of nowhere offended that that HER idea of this greek myth allusion had been stolen. Everyone yapping about stolen ideas, and I was over here going, “none of y’all invented this greek myth and if the show is actually USING this allusion, then it’s the actual show creators who came up with it and noticing it is not any of our ideas, but just analysis of a text. but okay go off on how you ‘own’ an idea in someone else’s content because you pointed out their use of it.” *

So, your use of her style might be fair use, but because of personality or culture, it might feel like an offense to her. There’s really no way to know, so I’d talk to her directly about it. Send a message and see what she thinks and if she’s sensitive about it, then I’d be more careful and I would try to come up with my OWN version of this thing you see as similar to hers. Take it farther. Make it your own.

*actually i was on the outside of this argument and i don’t remember if it was greek or biblical, but i’ve heard other arguments, too, in the same vein as people start to get possessive of entire media or identities or characters. Like, once it was someone who analyzed music who got offended that someone else analyzed music and decided they’d stolen the analysis from them. IDK. How do you own music you didn’t write? How do you own an idea so no one else can think it or build on the thoughts? IDK. So you do have to navigate the social landscape of the social media and recognize that even if you are being ethical, other people may not understand the full scope of the ethics and STILL think you’re copying, evil, or ignorant. The internet is like the wild west and someone might always challenge you to a gunslinging duel at sundown. It seems to be the nature of the beast.

#the creative process #inspiration #social media #ethics

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