gifs are not witchcraft

The other day I was showing my bff some of the stuff I made with ps and while he was very enthusiastic about it, he also said something that made me think:

I snorted pretty hard at the “five minutes” part, cause I wish, but then it occurred to me that most people are probably like my best friend, and having no idea how we do what we do, take for granted our gifsets (which are indeed not made through witchcraft, though I’m convinced some of us must have sold their soul to the devil).

I’ll forever remember that one person that commented under a colour porn gifset of mine “wow, I didn’t remember this movie was so bright and colourful!”

… That’s cause it wasn’t. I made it that way. Everytime you see a gifset, someone made it that way. Bright, dark, very pink, very red (or in my case very cyan), very colourful.

And it’s not just a matter of choosing all the scenes to gif (and consequently capture all those screencaps, decide where to crop them, resize them and, only after that, beginning the adventure that is colouring).

There’s a huge difference in what a movie/video looks like before we get our hands on it and after, and I think that’s probably one of the things that people who don’t make gifs tend not to realize.

Let me show you!

This is a gif of a scene taken from Iron Man 2. The only thing I did was resize it to 500pixels. This is what the actual movie looks like:

this is the exact same scene after I coloured it and applied my sharpening settings:

Now what you may think is “you just made it bright!” 

It took me 12 layers of careful adjustments to just make it bright (which is not all that I did, btw) while trying not to bring out pixels (impossible with a scene as dark as this one) while at the same time trying my best to keep it under the 2mb limit (over which you can’t upload your gif on tumblr or it won’t move), and trying not to whitewash Rhodey as I lighten everything else. Let me tell you, none of this is particularly easy. It’s not impossible, but it’s not something you learn in five minutes.

Here’s another example:

actual movie:

colour porn:

Now the point of this post is that I’m hoping that people will see and understand that there’s a lot of work and effort on our part to make these gifs, so that everyone can appreciate them. And yet we see that effort easily dismissed every day when our works are stolen and reposted and people have no qualms about rebloging them anyway, cause after all they’re just pretty pictures made with a computer, what’s the fuss. 

It took me two years of almost daily practice to get where I’m at now (and I still have a lot to learn), and that kind of attitude hurts me as a person before it hurts me as a content maker.

Blocking reposters and spreading the word doesn’t help much if things like this keep happening and no one cares.

This website is mostly made of gifsets and graphics (that’s not to undermine the importance of art and fics, I’m just saying that you see more gifs and graphics and photos than those other kind of wonderful content) and it would be a dream come true to see a bit more respect and appreciation for our category. 

Leave nice tags under someone’s gifset you really really liked. Tell them how much you loved how they used that particular song/quote on that particular character. How happy you are they’re making gifs about your favourite ship.

Encourage content makers, you’ll be rewarded with more content.

Be kind. Do not take us for granted, please.