#but my lovely photoshop corrupted 2 of my gifs!

[tomakeitbeautifultolive]

Tagged by the brilliant @thousandeyesand-one  ! ♥

1. What is that one moment or situation in asoiaf or GOT TV show that inspires you positively?

The friendship between Jon and Sam. They were two kindred spirits destined to become great friends.

2. YOUR ONE TRUE SHIP?

Jonerys (Would you believe it?!)

3. Who is your favorite, ride or die character? (CHOOSE ONE, ONLY ONE!)

FINE! Jon Snow.

4. If you were to be the Ruler of Westeros & name Seven fighters to your Kingsguard who would they be? (They can be from the current generation of asoiaf or any fighter from any era, choice is all yours!)

Before I rattle a list off, please know that my Crownsguard has no celibacy requirement (lmfao):

1. Brienne of Fucking Tarth

2. Arya Stark

3. Ser Barristan Selmy (Yep, keepin' this one)

4. Ser Duncan the Tall

5. Sandor Clegane

6. Oberyn Martell

7. Arthur Dayne (real surprising I know, but YOU know I love the Daynes!)

I wanted to say someone like Visenya Targaryen, but in my head that's like hiring Drogon, a little too OP. Wait... do I need to restructure my whole damned list?!

6. Your own House sigil, house color(s) & house words?

I'll refrain from saying hippo, and go with something Westerosi. My house sigil is a burnt orange otter on a sea green background. My house words are “Just Stay Afloat” (Yeah, I just photoshopped this. You’re welcome.)

5. What are your views about Robert's Rebellion?

You know what Robert’s Rebellion is? The shitty shocking and unsatisfying GoT ending no one actually wants. Like, just imagine for a minute we instead had followed the charming broody Prince Rhaegar on his quest to overthrow his father and restore peace and prosperity alongside his two wives - and then Robert’s Rebellion was our fucking finale. Anyway. Despite what Rhaegar haters want to think, the Rebellion was 100% Aerys’ fault. 🙄

7. Which is that one character you wish had more screen time on the show (or) had a POV in the books?

Meera Reed or Viserys Targaryen for screen time (okay look, Harry Lloyd was incredible). POV I need: Benjen Stark.

8. Imagine Red Keep School of Witchcraft & Wizardry, which houses would the sorting hat sort these characters into? (listed below)

Gryffindor!:   Sam, Jon, Arya, Brienne, Robb, Rickon, Sandor, Tormund

Hufflepuff!:  Gendry, Gilly, Grey Worm, Podrick

Ravenclaw!:  Missandei, Bran (I mean...), Tyrion

Slytherin!:  Daenerys, Margaery, Jaime, Joffrey, Cersei, Sansa, Bronn

9. How do you prefer to watch the Final season?

I watch them with the husband, then watch some sort of livestream discussion to recover (SmokeScreen usually), and then re-watch the episode again after that.

10. Nobody knows for sure how this story ends, but what is your ideal end to this story?

Warning: I'm a pacifist, so y'all don't want to read this probably. 😂 

Jon and Daenerys use their mediation powers along with Bran and Sam's insights and guidance to ultimately make peace with the Night King and spare the Others from extinction, striking some sort of pact agreeing to territory terms (without a fucking wall). Shocked by the outcome of the War for the Dawn, Cersei steps down as queen, and her life is spared (sorry but, slightly more shocking than everyone dying or betraying each other).

Understanding the corruption the throne causes and no longer using the ambition thrust upon her as a crutch for her lifelong loneliness, Daenerys embraces family with Jon at Dragonstone - and the iron throne is destroyed. Arya and Gendry marry and go to Storm's End. Sansa retains Winterfell after it's restored and has a matrilineal marriage to Tyrion (show) or Sandor (books) who take on the Stark name so that it doesn't die out. Bran lives, his personality restored after the loss of his powers. He takes on the Reed name for all Howland and Jojen sacrificed for him and his family. Those remaining band together to devise a constitutional monarchy or... something similar, and a new leader is elected. Something like that, eh?

"When your enemies defy you, you must serve them steel and fire. When they go to their knees, however, you must help them back to their feet." —(Unfortunately) Tywin Lannister, A Storm of Swords

Aaaand here are my questions for my tagees:

@farrison-hord @smoldany @jalenmara @iane-casey @callmedewitt @rone-of-house-targaryen @beautifuloutkasts @mmazzeroo @mamadragon-daenerys @through-my-shadow @minmeemaw @spideygxrl @soleilpirate @northernlights37 @ellimomo @frostbitepandaaaaa & @daenerys1417 ♥  (I’m tagging a ton of people in shit lately, I know... fill these out only if they interest you!)

1. What answers are you looking forward to the most in the final season?

2. Which reunion are you most anticipating in season 8?

3. Any predictions on what the "final twist" might be?

4. Which is your favorite season?

5. Whose death did you find most shocking?

6. If you could re-cast any character, who would it be?

7. What did the show do better than the books? (If you haven't read them, what does the show do well?)

8. Have any of your favorite characters done something you'd have done differently?

9. Favorite GoT theory?

10. Post a gif of your favorite scene.

#tag games #got tag

[dominicvail]

Dunno if you've ever talked about/answered this, but may I ask what you use to make your beautiful gifs?! I'm about to pull my hair out trying to prep my sets for "Densi-mber" so that they all actually move like they're supposed to without looking like completely awful quality. (I obviously do not want to take away from the amazing work you do, but yearn to make them as pretty-ful as you do!) BTW --- all your comments on every episode totally crack me up ! Love em!

I use photoshop CS5 portable, an old crappy version that honestly doesn’t have all the working features, but it does the job just fine (i got a copy of it off my friend who was doing gameart design in uni, lol). 

As for the gifs themselves, i’m not sure what you mean by looking awful quality, but here’s a few things i normally consider (i apologize if this gets super wordy, i’m not great at explaining things and some of this involves a lot of nonsensical numbers);

1) If you mean how your gifs look uploaded onto tumblr, the sizes of the gifs in pixels make a massive difference on how a set looks once uploaded. Tumblr’s image layout is 540px across, and gifs will only look their optimum quality if they are exactly 540px across the entire picture window. If your gif is 450 across, tumblr will stretch it to be 540 and the quality will visibly diminish. Likewise, if your gif is 600px, tumblr will shrink it and it will also diminish it’s quality on your dash. If you have more than one gif in a line, your set still needs to come to 540px together, each gif needs to be 268px wide to display at the optimum quality. Three gifs in a row needs two sized at 177px and the third 178px to come up to 540px across, any pixel number that doesn’t add up to 540 total will make tumblr adjust the gif size and it will corrupt the gif quality. 

One single gif (a 540px one designed to sit on it’s own) can be up to 3mb large, anything bigger and it won’t play). If you have two 268px gifs next to each other, they also cannot exceed the 3mb limit, each gif can be whatever mb size you want, but together they cannot exceed the 3mb. 

(if that made zero sense to anybody, i suggest google image searching ‘tumblr image dimensions’ b/c people have made visual guides). 

2) Colouring on your gifs makes a massive difference, and this show is /awful/ to colour. I have 4 different types of colouring for opps alone because the lighting is different from every filming angle in the room. I can’t really go into specifics literally just because i don’t have specific examples, but in general, having it too bright pixelates darkened areas horribly, sometimes it’s better to just make a gif look super shadowy by keeping dark parts dark than it is to brighten it so much it looks like a pixel storm. The higher quality screencaps you have to make gifs from, the more you can brighten them/edit them in general before they become pixelated, over-colouring low quality content next to never ends well. (but i do all this on photoshop, idk how to colour using anything else). If you’re using PS, i recommend finding a ps resources blog, downloading a couple of psd’s that people have made for free use that you like and learning how they work from those. I started off using free ones and once i’d figured out what did what I made up my own ones. 

3) what do you use to get screencaps for your gifs?? I personally use UMplayer because it’s the only program i found that will automatically take gif quality screencaps from DVD’s (supposedly vlc and kmplayer will also do this for people, but it never worked on my laptop when i tried, so umplayer it is). I just play the scene in the window while i set the program to cap it enough times a second as it plays, so that when i gif from the caps, the movement isn’t choppy, even if you craft the perfect colouring and sharpening and timing when making the gif, if you don’t have enough screencaps per second of footage, it’s still going to be choppy. 

4) But also, some scenes just aren’t very giffable? Like, i really want to gif that scene where Eric calls Nell ‘Nellverine’ but when the camera is on his face as he says it, he’s in motion the entire time, if what you want to gif doesn't have a single screencap that’s not blurry, your gif is just gonna be a blur. Can’t really fix that, i mean, maybe people super amazing at giffing can, but i’ve never managed it. 

5) sharpening. I personally like definition on my gifs, so i tend to sharpen a lot, but some people prefer smooth gifs, it’s each to their own. But, also, very low quality screencaps will not sharpen, they will only make the gif grainy. The higher pixel size your individual caps are, the more you can afford to sharpen, but it is literally on a case by case basis, i will sharpen 2 different scenes from one episode differently depending on how it looks, it’s entirely personal judgement/taste tbh, but attempting to sharpen something that is tiny in quality will only make it look worse. 

6) frame speed. I am a lazy ass who will only set my frames at 0.1 or 0.2 depending on a scene because they’re presets and i don’t have to take the time to type in speeds like 0.18 or something equally fiddly, but you have to judge what works best for the gif you’re making. Conversation scenes i normally set at 0.2 but like, action scenes i normally set at 0.1. But that’s not a solid rule, it’s just my personal norm. 

7) there are specific dimensions for gifsets that look more attractive on this site, if i’m doing say, an 8 gif set 2x2, i will make my gifs 268x180px, which is about what i think looks best on this format. Personally anything shorter than 170px high in that situation looks a little weird (unless you’re deliberately trying to do a panorama type gif). 

anyway that’s all i could think of from the top of my head (and also probably too detailed of an explanation, i do that a lot i’m sorry), but i think those are probably what things that will most of the time disrupt gifs. And thank you!!!! but feel free to ask anything, i’m not a graphc making how-to hoarder, i don’t understand people refusing to help other people making them under the guise of creator secrets? It just seems weird and like a weird form of gatekeeping to me, the more the merrier right? So i’m open to trying to help anytime :D 

#text #i'm so bad at explaining things #tho i can't give anybody my psd's b/c i have no clue how the hell to do that anyway #plus i adapt them every use so it'd be moot #mashmaiden