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Cheerful Tumblr nonsense
Recently I made:
• A gifset of Babylon 5 hugs
• A Londo & G'Kar text/image collage
Obviously these are wildly full of spoilers.
I haven't made gifs in ages - in fact I'm not sure if I've done it at all on my current laptop, and it's just. So much easier. I remember when I first started doing this in the mid-2010s, it was achingly slow - I do it by importing Photoshop's "video frames to layers", deleting the ones I don't want and doing some quick'n'dirty color-correcting, and yeah, I've gotten faster over the years because I've figured out a lot of things not to do. (Don't: color-correct every layer when a correction layer will do them all at once!)
But also, I remember how I'd import a video clip and the computer would just draggggg, or it would take forever to resize or export, and sometimes it would run out of memory in the middle and I'd have to quit and restart to force it to clear its scratch disks. Can't even tell you how much of a problem this isn't with a 2Tb hard drive!
Doing gifs/images for B5 does make it a bit frustrating that the whole show appears to have been lit through a potato, though.
• A gifset of Babylon 5 hugs
• A Londo & G'Kar text/image collage
Obviously these are wildly full of spoilers.
I haven't made gifs in ages - in fact I'm not sure if I've done it at all on my current laptop, and it's just. So much easier. I remember when I first started doing this in the mid-2010s, it was achingly slow - I do it by importing Photoshop's "video frames to layers", deleting the ones I don't want and doing some quick'n'dirty color-correcting, and yeah, I've gotten faster over the years because I've figured out a lot of things not to do. (Don't: color-correct every layer when a correction layer will do them all at once!)
But also, I remember how I'd import a video clip and the computer would just draggggg, or it would take forever to resize or export, and sometimes it would run out of memory in the middle and I'd have to quit and restart to force it to clear its scratch disks. Can't even tell you how much of a problem this isn't with a 2Tb hard drive!
Doing gifs/images for B5 does make it a bit frustrating that the whole show appears to have been lit through a potato, though.
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It is impressive how many of those hugs are obliteratingly sad.
Doing gifs/images for B5 does make it a bit frustrating that the whole show appears to have been lit through a potato, though.
I am having to assimilate this statement because I always think of it as looking really good especially for the fact that much of its budget was "and the part of Centauri Prime will be played by a wall of drapes."
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Yeah, I don't think of the show as being particularly sad overall, but it certainly does specialize in sneaking up on the viewer's heart with a knife hidden behind its back!
I am having to assimilate this statement because I always think of it as looking really good especially for the fact that much of its budget was "and the part of Centauri Prime will be played by a wall of drapes."
Fair, fair! I do think it's pretty, and I love looking at it, but it is so weirdly difficult to make it cooperate with looking nice in gifs and vids. I feel like it's a different problem from the dark/murky issue with media from the last ten years or so (I feel like things are getting brighter again now, but media in the 2010s was just shot so incredibly dark, I really noticed it when I was able to go from vidding things completely uncorrected in the 2000s, to *having* to lighten the video or you couldn't really see what was happening out of context). And with B5, it's not really that, but it's also just so hard to get things to show up properly whenever I'm manipulating anything!
(But I do really love looking at it.)
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It isn't a sad show! If anything it is fiercely and obstinately optimistic! It just stabs the viewer a remarkable amount along the way!
And with B5, it's not really that, but it's also just so hard to get things to show up properly whenever I'm manipulating anything!
I wonder what causes that. Your vids have all looked great.
(Did it end up on YouTube? It stopped being available on Tubi for me.)
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It's not!! Yet another thing I keep meaning to write about, in which this show feels rare to me in genre fiction, is that its big-picture optimism combined with individual tragedy isn't something I feel like I see all that often. (I mean, they don't *all* end up tragically, but things don't go great for most of them.) Small-scale tragedy plus big-picture optimism is pretty rare, fictionally speaking. I can think of a lot more examples of the reverse - the world is fucked, or at least your own choices aren't going to do much to change it, but Our Characters carve out a little space for hope and light, and manage to have a happy ending in defiance of the odds. And of course you have a lot of narratives where either Our Characters *and* the world are fucked, or everything turns out great for everybody (or we win a battle at great cost but *most* people turn out okay). For whatever it's worth, I love a lot of examples of all of these.
This particular type of thing, though, I feel like I mostly see in war movies and historical fiction (where everyone is mostly fucked because of circumstances, but we know that things turn out more or less all right because we know the actual history they don't). I can think of occasional examples from genre fiction - Rogue One is like that. But the actual level of optimism in Babylon 5 (that individuals can enact real, meaningful change on a big-scale level) is something that I think is pretty rare for an author to hold onto while also resisting the urge to give all or even most of their characters a happy ending.
Your vids have all looked great.
Thank you! <333 (I really do appreciate that! I'm probably pickier than people watching them are.)
(Did it end up on YouTube? It stopped being available on Tubi for me.)
Yeah, it seems to be off Tubi. What I heard is that while it's not on Youtube in its entirety yet (or at all, yet?) the plan is to release it on a weekly(?) basis to build up a viewership. I hope it works.
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You have mentioned this and I think you should definitely write about it. It's a kind of long view of the arc of history that you would think more science fiction would take the deep time for.
What I heard is that while it's not on Youtube in its entirety yet (or at all, yet?) the plan is to release it on a weekly(?) basis to build up a viewership. I hope it works.
I hope it happens! Tubi was region-limited, but handily accessible without having to borrow several DVD box sets.
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Huh, yeah, good point, me either.
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the whole show appears to have been lit through a potato
fdk,gjdksjgksj OH NO
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