Recycled Trash

I’m going home to see my mother

Was wondering why this wasn’t getting too many notes until I found out that apparently people think this is just a FUCKING PHOTO??? IT’S A DRAWING??

And then there comes this game where the entire point is to be as horrible and irritating as humanly (goosely?) possible. The game creates to-do lists based on annoying the human residents of the town; you are rewarded for making a nuisance of yourself in entertaining ways. These to-do lists are filled with 100% pointless tasks that don’t put any good into the world and exist solely to entertain the player, and the only way to advance in the game is to complete them. The game prioritizes the goose’s interests, and therefore the player’s, over absolutely everything else, and requires that the player do the same even when there isn’t a “good reason” to. Like, do I need to make that guy spit out his tea? No. But I’m going to anyway because it’s on my to-do list and it’s funny. I don’t think anything else in the world has encouraged me to put myself first like that.

And the other thing is, this game demonstrates that even if you make it your life’s mission to be as much of a minor nuisance to those around you as humanly possible, at the end of the day, it’s going to be alright. The woman will reset the bell. The man will pour himself another cup of tea. Life will go on for the entire village, even with an annoying goose running around ruining everybody’s day. And like, as frustrated as the villagers get, none of them are ever really sincerely mad at you. They yell sometimes, and they’ll chase you down to get their stuff back, but then once they’ve restored their personal equilibrium, they pretty much just leave you alone to go about your Important Goose Business. You’re a goose, after all. Geese being annoying is, at the end of the day, part of what reassures us that the world is still turning on its axis as it should.

I’m not saying that we should all go out and start messing with each other for no reason. What I am saying is that maybe it’s not such a huge deal if we annoy each other a little bit now and again, in the course of going about our own days. Maybe it doesn’t make us bad people if we are occasionally inconvenient for those around us. For a lot of folks that may seem obvious, but for some of us, it’s really not.

LOTR’s special effects are stylized in a very careful, deliberate, and beautiful way.

In a behind-the-scenes video,  the films’ visual effects supervisor explained:

We wanted the look of the film to have this storybook look to it. This is one of the things that Peter Jackson would impress upon the post-grader. He would literally sit there with watercolor (paintings) and say: THIS is what I want it to look like.”

Compare Alan Lee’s watercolor painting (its texture, its limited and unreal color palette, and the careful use of bright highlights in specific places that “frame” the characters/create an interesting composition)–

To the very similar look of the final film:

Because the goal wasn’t to create a perfectly realistic version of Moria. It was to create a version of Moria that looked like a watercolor painting. 

And this “watercolor painting” effect isn’t just epic fantasy moments either. Even many of the non-fantastical backgrounds in Lord of the Rings don’t look “fully realistic.” They look very high-contrast and painterly, with dramatic unreal shafts of light bursting through the clouds:

And again, this is by design:

“We wanted to nudge it sideways from reality. New Zealand is a lovely country but it’s still New Zealand, still a real country….and I wanted to nudge it slightly to Middle Earth, which is an ancient world….a world of myth, and legend.”

And the watercolor storybook-inspired colors and lighting isn’t just in the environments either. It was also used in very basic dialogue scenes, to make you really feel like the entire movie was taking place in a fantasy world:

I’d also add that yes, they pushed the look of the whole film into “unreal” territory, but they also were very selective and deliberate about where they used CG versus practical effects. Or practical everything, really. In every single possible instance that something could be shot using real elements, it is. The costumes and sets and props are nearly all real, the forced perspective shots are real. As often as possible hobbit actors are just on their knees or the other actors are on appleboxes or replaced with larger/smaller actors from behind instead of being digitally shrunken down or up. The sets were largely built by hand or on location, and the only greenscreen factors in once you get to the far distance. They built the frickin chainmail by hand, even. 

Which is the OTHER reason that it holds up. Your eye knowns when you’re looking at a real thing, even if your brain can’t quite articulate why. 

Which is why an image like this:

Or this: 

Or this:

Which are all effects shots! Feel more real than this:

Or this: 

Or this:

(This is honestly the main reason why I had trouble watching MCU films for so many years. It just don’t look real, guys. I can’t think of anything but how you’re shooting this in a studio somewhere.) 

Marvel and LotR are using the same tools, including set extensions, CG, color grading, all of it, but Marvel tends to use CG and greenscreen on almost every element. LotR is real in every possible way that it can be. 

Marvel films are stylized and made to look unreal just like LotR - but they also largely ARE unreal. LotR is mostly real but faked, and there’s a big difference between those things. 

Like this image: 

The boats, the water, the cliffs, the actors are real. And the statues were real too - just small models, probably smaller than a person, shot separately in similar lighting, then comped onto this shot to look thousands of times larger than they actually are. Then the whole image is graded and blended together so that the colors are seamless, the cliff edges are extended so that you can’t see the edges, add a little digital mist in the far background there to really sell it - and boom. Feels real.

Your gut knows when something is real - which is why it holds up when you rewatch it. No matter how advanced CG gets, and it’s pretty damn advanced at this point, it’s still little pixels on a screen. But real chainmail on a real person standing in a real forest with a little CG far in the back? Two actors of roughly the same size looking like they’re two different sizes just because of where they’re sitting? It feels real because it mostly is. 

It’s not just color grading and blending, it’s knowing when and where and how to use things, and then actually taking the time (and the expense) to do it right even when most people won’t be able to tell - or, in a lot of cases, even care.

This is an amazing addition!!!

Yeah the reason LOTR’s visuals have held up so well is the combination of careful stylization AND using practical effects whenever possible.

As a result, the things that look unrealistic, look unrealistic on purpose. It’s wasn’t “the visual effects artists weren’t given enough time to finish the shots” (which was actually the case for Black Panther)  it was “they were deliberately and carefully trying to get that very specific storybook-illustration effect.”

The dance used in the vast number of 2d anime-esque caramelldansen vids has nothing to do with Caramell; it came from a gif on 4chan referred to as “Popotan dance” that started as fanart of an adult visual novel because of course it did. Speedycake was making his remixes at the same time as people were making popotan dance gifs of everything, and the memes converged into a compound supermeme that swept the internet.

The video above is yet another fan-made video, using 12 characters from the iDOLM@STER series. (Hint: the band that created the song is Swedish, so anything obviously Japanese did not come from them).

The first official video released by Caramell was this version, six years after the song was first released and two years after it started to spread as a meme:

Inktober Day 1 

i hope you dont mind that i put some of my headcanons in it

i saw that his right arm is slightly short compared to the left one so i added my headcanon for it