Playing with words

Too many social obligations this week combined with deadlines. ://// I'm not sure I'll be able to finish my triple trope_bingo  because my husband volunteered us to host a BBQ this weekend too, after a week of surprise birthday lunches and appointments. WTFDUDE I'D RATHER BE WRITING *glares at the back of his head passive-aggressively* Plus now there's a DW code push on Sunday that cuts off more precious hours to submit.

Naturally I'm here whining about it instead of being productive! LOL

No reaction posts this week so just *muffled screaming* over AoS and Jane the Virgin! Haven't watched iZombie yet, and I'll wait on Grey's and TO too until I get sh*t done. I'll try to comment on reaction posts on my reading page later too- so happy to see other people enjoying the same stuff I'm enjoying on the reading page again! :DDDD

So I just had a conversation with a new-to-tumblr person who reposted a bunch of my GIFs. And they were absolutely baffled as to why I was contacting them because they "just found them on Google Search" and had noooo clue that they weren't supposed to re-upload them. :/ 

Making GIFs takes work. It usually takes me an afternoon or morning to make one set, i.e. several hours.

Here's what goes into making a single GIF:


1. Download file off Youtube or rip it from DVD etc. The higher the quality, the better your GIF will look.

2. Cap relevant scene. I usually watch it a bunch of times so I can remember exactly what they're saying and then get around 30-60 caps of the relevant part. You don't want to cap every frame because then your GIF file size will be massive and you'll only get them saying like, two words. So you skip-skip-cap, skip-skip-cap, until you get what you need.

3. Make and name a folder so you can find the caps easily. Place caps in it.

4. Boot up Photoshop. Make a Frame Animation from your folder.

5. Reverse order of frames. Choose the fraction of seconds you want each frame to play. Set replay to forever.

6. Cut your GIF down to size. (optional) I usually make square GIFs now because a) you can cut out background stuff you don't need b) most icons are square c) people steal them less.

7. Sharpen each frame one by one. Do this by matching the frame selected with the original image down the side, then clicking Ctrl-F. THIS IS THE PART I HATE THE MOST. But otherwise your GIF looks fuzzy instead of sharp and crisp.

8. Color your GIF. Highly recommended because most shows shoot everything fairly dark. I usually color each GIF one by one by adjusting Curves, Vibrance and Brightness, although some people just slap a PSD on. Make sure your changes affect the layers you want.

9. Add text (optional). This can be finicky, frame by frame work if you want text to appear only part-way through a GIF instead of through the whole thing.

10. Add other effects. (Fading, Merging two sets of frames, etc.)

11. Save it. Adjust number of colors and image quality to make sure filesize of each GIF is less than 2999kb. (It used to be 1999kb until very recently.)


Rinse and repeat for each part of your set, then

12. Upload to tumblr, adjusting the positions of each GIF in the set and adding a caption and tags.


I hope that makes it a little clearer. I think plagiarism of written work is understood to be clearly wrong because people understand (and even revere) the process of writing more than art or graphics. We study how to make references to source materials when we write papers or essays. But if you wouldn't copy/paste somebody's fic and pass it off as your own, PLEASE DON'T REPOST OTHER PEOPLE'S GIFs OR ARTWORK. It takes less than a second to attribute a source with a link or to reblog the original.

ETA: It's VERY EASY to find the original source of any image, because Google is awesome and powerful. I usually credit in a blog post like this:
Also, please don't reblog sets that proudly proclaim "GIFs not mine!", the same way you would avoid copy/pasting anything verbatim with a disclaimer like, "Reprinted whole sections of this without permission or references! :DDDD"


*grumbles*