halfcactus

I made so many JitD fanworks while watching the show and then moved on so fast that I forgot to post this here. 😂 Which I am doing now because I need to archive my notes. (Did this back in June, which feels like such a long time ago now.)

(At some point I'm going to have to compile all of my JitD vids/edits + Modu-related fanwork but also nah lol)

Justice in the Dark fanvid - 以沫 Yi Mo (or, as I call it on AO3, to be the foam on the waves, the breath in your lungs)

DESCRIPTION: In which Luo Weizhao follows Pei Su into the abyss. Clips from this video were taken from various episodes of the entire series; music from the Mo Du audio drama (Luo Wenzhou and Fei Du duet).

Also on tumblr

I worked so hard on this, mainly the audio editing which drove me bonkers because I was just winging everything and hoping it would come together. The resulting output was 5 different parts (from 3 versions of the song) Frankensteined together:

VERSE 1

pre-chorus from VERSE 2

backing track (instrumental-only no vocals) of the lyrics I couldn't be bothered to translate

以沫 (Life & Death version) of chorus with the audio adjusted two semi-tones up to match the pitch

LAST 2 LINES of original song

And then there were the dialogue clips (one advantage of making GIFs as you watch is that you mostly already know the timestamps AND you've already translated the dialogue, which made this part easy), which were an entire journey of volume adjustment— had to figure out the right balance so none of it was too loud or too soft. I played everything over and over again with and without earphones to make sure everything sounded "right" and I really am so pleased with how seamless the finished output is because I was honestly about to discard the whole WIP for how "wrong" it all sounded.

Translation notes

- 朝夕如昨: "Day and night" + "like yesterday"—To me, this feels like a haunting memory remembered as clearly as it was yesterday.

- 你眼中飛蛾撲火: "In your eyes, self-destruction"—where "self-destruction" is expressed by the image "a moth darting into the flame". I wanted to keep the image but didn't know how to do it elegantly. :(

- 為何選擇 沈默: "Why choose silence?" = This is a perfectly ambivalent line that can refer to both Fei Du (keeping his secrets from LWZ) and Luo Wenzhou (seeing the signs but choosing not to say anything). Ordinarily I read it as the former, but IDK, I felt like going the other way this week.

- 是誰輕聲誦讀著: "Who is softly reading"—I used to assume this meant the Reader in the radio station, but having just seen eps 28–29 I'm beginning to think it could be Fei Du's mom too.

- 地獄之門大開著 眼前愈發渾濁: "The gates of hell are wide open / My vision gets cloudier/murkier": Probably because the conspiracies are going even deeper than imagined? I just went with "shrouded with darkness".

- 默念惡魔的名冊 奄奄壹息是我: "The one silently reading out names from the list of demons and is on their last breath is me"

- 這人間萬家燈火 /值不值得 / 靠岸停泊: "The thousands of lights of this world / are they worth / docking for"—referring to all the houses that are lit up at night. Fei Du is looking at other homes, families, ordinary lives, and wondering if that world is worth it. This is one of my fav lines, which I think was represented very well in JitD and the warm lights in LWZ's home VS the cold emo villa; I took it from the second verse and moved it up.

- 也無悔 深淵 同往: "No regrets / into the abyss together"

Related links:

llonkrebboj's translation (with notes) of the same song

Other translations compiled here


PS. I still need to post my May journal + media + vocabulary log, it's just that the prospect of writing about Detective Chinatown 1900 is demoralizing...

Added Burning Houses & Hush Harbor by Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta to my reading rotation because I realized I could acquire it through Shopee. \o/ I've only gone through a few of the poems, which made me starkly feel that I was not smart or literary enough, but Temper/7 Down has sat in my brain for days and days and maybe that's enough. It's part of a section that's formatted as a series of crossword puzzle hints, so I guess it makes sense for me to still be trying to follow the emotional threads.

Here's the full poem, which I worked hard to format with html.

Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, "Temper/7 Down"

Hellions in your novels balled fists Inside trouser pockets. You never let A belt lick welts on a child's thigh.
	Barroom rakes, at the slightest libel Dream of triggers and knives. You never put a wife in place
With a shake or a sharp word. Stones were paperweights for Memos. Knives were cameos
	Mounted on walls or tucked In a safe. And pity the man You would not hate, him you'd
Consecrate with your indifference. Best was how you taught a child To spit her rage like a catcher
	To his mitt, and hurl with all Her bile and length, Neither glass nor stone,
Only the brittle shells Of eggs her throw Broke against the wall.
	Temper: to see in red, To lose control. But also This: to curb, to hold.

I made a Justice in the Dark gifset based on the last three lines:

+5 more gifs

Also on tumblr

Creation notes:

I used a ripped paper texture for the big paper background, but for the paper strips—I was playing around and found that Resolve has a Paper Edges effect omggggggg

For the fonts—I was looking for a suitably distressed font and suddenly remembered Eduardo Recife's Misprinted Type. I wondered if his website was still up and it is! :D I've never really been able to incorporate his fonts/textures into my fanwork, but for this I used his Misproject font.

*shoves failed Rubik's cube illustration to a corner* Affinity practice—Designer for the vector shapes and Photo for everything else, though technically I think I could have done everything on Photo:

Based on the following journal doodles:

I guess I'm warming up a little to Affinity... Photo feels closer to AI and ID than PS, which means it does have a lot of features if you adjust your expectations of its controls, but also that it's not exactly a PS substitute. I'm really struggling with placing images/objects (typically I only use Place when I'm using InDesign; most of the time I drag objects around from canvas to canvas because that's how my brain works) + gradients... I kind of get it conceptually, but for some reason I get a prompt asking for screenrecording permissions which I deny on instinct lol.

Paintbrush works pretty smoothly if you set the hardness to 99% (instead of 100%)~ There's a built-in line stabilizer that you can toggle on and off.

Type tools work well. Same shortcuts as PS + has opentype features, but doesn't take into account other languages yet, I think? No vertical text orientation button that I can see.

In this latest episode of "tools I can't figure out", I don't know yet if Affinity has a blend tool or more customizable stroke brushes, which is what I'd want to try for the fishbones? (They'd still be tricky to control, but at least I don't have to manually align anything haha.)

Inexplicably, Affinity also has a cat tool:


Which can only generate one kind of cat shape:


All of this may be an exercise in futility considering the Canva acquisition, but idk, I presume we'll be able to keep the non-subscription version... So far Photo is less laggy than my half-broken Photoshop ahaha.

Can't believe I've churned out enough ZXC things that my Dreamwidth can't keep up, but it looks like I never posted my 曾經我也想過一了百了 (Who's the Murderer 7 concert version) subs/translation here?! It's my first and best attempt at translating a full song, and it's been killing me that Youtube keeps blocking my video for copyright. Turns out it was blocking the video, not the audio, and the solution was simply to... make a lyric video... SO!!!!!!! Here are the original softsubbed video I did for Vimeo, the ~English lyrics video~ I did for Youtube, and yjthecat/fwoopersongs's translation for reference and comparison.

曾經我也想過一了百了 (Who's the Murderer 7 concert performance)

Back in February I made a ~Zhang Xincheng performance cut~ from the Who's the Murderer 7 Spring Festival 2022 concert. Official subs have since come out, but I have very strong feelings about the song.

曾經我也想過一了百了 (Who's the Murderer 7 concert) [LYRIC VIDEO]

Here's the lyric video I created today by importing the subtitle file and freezing the frames from the original video. And then adding, because I could, ~*extra effects*~ including some tacky falling petals, to give the stills a sense of motion. I also applied a gradient layer so the video is darker at the bottom and the subs (in plain white text) are actually readable.

Extra footage and effects are from Videezy (free, with attribution) and Pixabay (free, no attribution required). Some GIFs because unnecessary labor begets more unnecessary promotional labor, you have to milk these things:



I also typed up my translation here on Tumblr so it's all in text form.

Other Notes:

I initially mistranslated 荧幕 (TV screen) as "computer screen" (the original JP the word was パソコン, which does mean computer, and I assumed the Chinese would be the same); I have corrected this with the help of fwoopersongs's translation and detailed translation notes of the same song—you can read it all here on Tumblr, or watch their subbed video here (which also has the Chinese lyrics and pinyin):

Watch on YouTube

泪光中微笑的你: fwoopersongs and I have very different readings of this line haha. I’m not sure if it’s grammatically sensible to read the tears as belonging to the narrator, but this is an assumption I made from context: 1) the last 3 lines felt like they were all pertaining to an outsider reaching in, 2) I thought it was a callback to the first chorus, where the narrator was talking about unstoppable tears.

I translated it as It was your smile that I could see through my tears while YJ/fwoopersongs translated it as You, in that vast sea of people, you smile through your tears, which also makes sense emotionally, especially for Zhang Xincheng’s character in that Who’s the Murderer case, so I’m leaving both options here. (I trust YJ way more than I trust me though, haha)

Found out while doing the thumbnail for the lyric video that I lost most of my fonts during my 6+ months of computer issues (which are still ongoing, but I've rolled back and bandaided my problem). Now I'm sad. :((((((((((

I feel like I should have stopped after the first chorus and maybe not animated the lyrics too much but I really want to play with Da Vinci Resolve's type tools? I haven't figured out how to merge text layers or how fusion compositions work. ;___; I also set an imaginary deadline of having to finish before the weekend because I got too caught up working on this that I couldn't get myself to do anything else at night or listen to my friend's new album.


Notes:

Started Wednesday, finished Sunday. My nights have been free since I quit my part-time job, so I didn't have to lose sleep over this. XD

I'm mildly annoyed because this wasn't the thing I wanted to work on, but the song came out of shuffle and I had a flashback to the gifset I made based on it in 2018.

1 fanvid ago I couldn't even figure out how to get the dropshadow to appear. Now I have mastered it. XD

Just as I started this, my brain was like "but WHAT IF FFXV VERSION". I did end up mentally outlining what an FFXV version would look like before I realized that doing a vid to the same song I've had on repeat would drive me crazy actually!

I have discovered!!! The coloring panel!!! I'm not much of a coloring person but it's useful to be able to brighten up dark scenes.

I feel like I discovered a lot of other things but I'm presently too sick of thinking about this hahaha.

For nirvanainfirefest Challenge #3: DVD Commentary, I'm gonna try to walk through the process of creating the multimedia NiF x Persona 5 fusion that I created for swanfrost for NiF Exchange 2018 [best viewed on carrd]. I've always wanted to document it because it went through so many phases, I just never knew how to begin.

For the prompt: ensemble cast | persona 5 au, feel free to follow the plot of p5 or to use the setting/lore as inspiration! notes: bonus points for character study-esque writing and using the mcs/linshu naming conventions cleverly; happy ending please

At the time I was creating it, I was also doing a lot of tedious work at night, and I was working on NiF Exchange in bits and pieces to give myself a break. I mostly remember the backaches and basically had to avoid being on the computer on my downtime for like 2 years. :)) I have an office chair now, though, and life has been better (and more productive) because of it. Can't believe I waited til 2021 to get one. /o\

tl;dr - summary of the process:

Coming up with the concept (in which I decided I wanted to do a fanvid/lyric vid)

Outlining what I wanted to include in the vid

Initial studies and visual development

Learning to vid and do basic motion effects on AE ajs;afjda;fja;

Tracing selected characters into lines and vector shapes on AI (I just needed 5, enough for the Phantom Thieves deck)

Designing the cards on PS (again, I only needed 5 of each design)

Putting the illustrated and animated elements in the vid

Realizing I could do the rest of the tarot deck, actually???

Presentation: gifs, carrd

WARNING: Mega-long and image-heavy post ahead!
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Also on AO3

Second attempt at vidding--the first one was in 2018, and it took me an entire month to put out something that was barely over a minute long. I used a trial version of Adobe Aftereffects last time, learning as I went, but I can uhhh no longer get AE to work for me? So I downloaded Davinci Resolve 15 (free) and I like it! I don't vid so I don't really have any basis of comparison, but for simple vidding with typesetting (like in the video) I found it pretty intuitive to use. I guess it helps that I've used AfterEffects that one time so I have a rough idea of keyframing basics so I can get the type to behave how I want it to.

I'm not very sure what other features it has. I still don't know how color grading works (took me forever to desaturate the Dear Missy clips--if I had to replicate a type of coloring, I wouldn't be able to do it), and if I can do any kind of masking in it. There's a fancier paid version that has more bells and whistles and motion graphics functionality, but I probably don't need those?

Anyway I'm trying to be better at documenting my process, so:

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