#elym13

This is awesome!  Frozen X Tomb Raider (please, please can they were the Lara Croft shorts)

I can 100% see Anna rocking the OG Lara Croft look. Meanwhile I’d probably prefer Elsa with the 2013 Lara look

Thank you so much! 

Generally I find and cut out the clips in Adobe Premiere, but when it comes to giffing all that does happen in Photoshop. 

First I make sure it’s 520px width by whatever-height. Then if you move ‘Lossy’ to 1 that can often bring the size down a fair amount, if that’s still not enough, I usually then go to ‘Dither’ and bring it down to 99%. Sometimes bringing Lossy up even further can be the answer, depending on how much that affect the gif, but then, like with the below example, the gif was simply too long, so I went to the frames in the Timeline and cut a bunch off. 

Now, bringing the width down can often work, even all the way down to 400, it honestly doesn’t make a big difference, but I like to avoid that for whatever reason. Luckily, with this gif, there aren’t TOO many colours, so I can bring the number of colours down to what eventually worked, 120. 

And then bam, we’ve got a gif under 2mb. 

Now I could probably bring some of the colours up then put some more lossy in there to make the cheek look better, but y’know, this is just an example. 

Actually, screw it, out of curiosity, I’m gonna do it again with more colours but with more lossy. 

So yeah, that looks better. That’s really what it comes down to, experimentation. Just messing with the sliders and stuff is what it is in a nutshell. 

Other things that might help, bringing down the dither past 99% usually does little to nothing to the file size, lossy’s usually the better one to go to. But depending on the image, anything past 15 Lossy is probably too much, but it varies pretty heavily on what you’re working with. 

Just keep experimenting mainly with Lossy, Dither, the Colour Count, and if you need to take frames out or even crop it, you should be good. 

It was meant just to be a one-shot delving a little bit into Elsa’s past and the type of relationship she may have had with her father. I sort of wanted to explore Agdar’s character just because I never saw him as a bad guy like some other people do. To me he is just a father who wants what is best for his little girls and is somewhat caught between a rock and a hard place. He wants Elsa to be happy and knows that shutting herself away from the world and never letting anyone close to her is not good for her, but at the same time can’t think of any other ways to get her to step out of her comfort zone. And we must remember what it was like for royalty, female royalty at that in the 1800s, Elsa would be expected to marry. Agdar would never have forced his daughter into marrying someone she didn’t love, but sometimes people need that push to start looking. 

Chapter 12, "Both Foul and Fair," Scene 2. (The scene right after Elsa discovers the chicken hearts in her chocolate box.)

Spoilers abound, so beware.

I think that one is my favorite because we see real character growth out of Elsa in that scene. It's one of the first times she's forced herself to talk about the attack on the ice palace to someone who isn't automatically one of her sympathizers. Heck, she's talking about it to someone who she thinks will sympathize with the Duke's men.

But then Nick goes and sympathizes with her. Tells her she's not a monster, that what she did was natural and justifiable. (So what if he's acting as a mouthpiece for the author?) And for the first time (in forever), Elsa starts to believe that she isn't monster. It prefigures her telling Hans in Chapter 27 that she isn't the monster, he is.

Not to mention there was a lot going on in that scene. Some pretty intense choreography/blocking (Nick's by the window, on the couch across from Elsa, on the couch with Elsa -- mostly my conversation scenes don't include that much moving around), sexual tension, the almost-kiss that Anna interrupted. And there's the flashback. But somehow I pulled it off (more-or-less). Pretty proud of that.

My only regret is that I came up with a fun line for Anna that it didn't feel right to use:

I really hope this thing doesn’t have a character limit, because this is going to one long answer. But I’ll give you the TL;DR version up front:

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Ok, now for the real answers.

Why Winter of Discontent?

I was fascinated with Elsa’s character when I first saw Frozen. Fascinated. Here’s a Disney princess with powerful magic! Not a one-trick pony like Rapunzel who gets de-powered at the end of the movie! And she’s a queen, not a princess.

So what happens when you mix intense magical power with a lot of political power, and you give all of that to a person whose #1 desire is not to hurt anyone?

That was the seed of the idea. What is Elsa going to do when she has to face opposition, to face her own people not being happy with her? How is she going to react when people are trying to hurt her? We’ve seen how lethal she can be, but we also know how lethal she doesn’t want to be. How is she going to fulfill her responsibilities as a monarch and still be able to sleep at night?

If you’re asking about the title, well, that came last. I swear half the reason I didn’t start posting until I was 12 chapters in is because I couldn’t figure out what to call the dang thing. I don’t remember when or how the idea came to me, but when it did, it just seemed … well … perfect. (And I always like Richard III.)

Why internal strife plus Hans …. OK, Hans had to go … but why internal strife?

I’m answering this one first because the main conflict — internal strife + Hans — came before Nick did in my planning process.

In fact I think it was Hans who came first of all. I like courtroom dramas (show me Law & Order and I will stop flipping through channels), and I wanted to have some fun playing with that genre. I’ve done it before but I can always do it again. So there is the catalyst to the main plot: Hans is sent back from the Southern Isles, and Elsa has to deal with him in a way that is fair and just, while making sure he doesn’t hurt Anna (or anybody else) again.

So that got me to thinking about Hans. He’s a charismatic fellow, and while Elsa was off letting it go and Anna was haring after Elsa, he was the one making sure everyone had enough blankets and hot glogg. Seems to me that the man might have a few fans, especially if everything that happened out on the ice was a bit unclear or ambiguous to the man on the street. Hell, everyone in the Frozen fandom knows what happened out on the ice (and in that locked library), and Hans still has a ton of fans. So some people might be upset with Elsa putting him on trial.

Plus, to be quite blunt, internal strife hurts more. It hits Elsa right in the self-esteem. Also, the way I saw Hans … none of what he did was really all that personal. He attacked Arendelle, Anna, and Elsa because they were convenient. When it comes to Roahl, Knut, and the rest of the rebels, everything they did to Elsa was quite, quite personal.

However, I wanted to give the rebels another impetus, plus give the opportunity to show fault lines and divisions among them. That led to Weselton. As much as we (ok, I) cheered when that nasty Duke got kicked right in the wallet, realistically, cutting off trade with your biggest trading partner is going to have repercussions on your economy. In my story I had Elsa call on her closest allies (Corona & Andalasia) to try to make up the deficit, but there’s only so much she can do in 6 months. People are going to get hurt, and those people might be angry — especially since they can lay virtually all of the blame for their situation at Elsa’s feet.

Mix those things together, and you get one hell of a winter of discontent.

Why Nick? Why from Weselton?

I gave Elsa a love interest because I’m a hopeless romantic. As much as I like the fact that she remains unattached (and perhaps not interested in romance at the moment) in the movie, this was my fanfiction and I like love interests so I gave her a love interest. Plus, I think having Nick around gave Elsa a much-needed confidence boost. By virtue of his position, he was able to get Elsa to believe things that she wouldn’t have necessarily believed coming from someone else.

As for “why from Weselton,” well, first I decided that Elsa should have a love interest. When the plot was more Hans-centric, I thought maybe the love interest should be one of his brothers. He’s only got 12 of them. But I was reading fanfiction as I was developing Winter, and I realized that quite a few other writers had done the Elsa + Hans’s brother thing. I wanted to do something a bit different, so I went in the other direction.

Nick was basically designed from the ground up to be a good love interest for Elsa. Elsa has had to deal with a lot of people fearing her powers, so I decided to make Nick fascinated by and curious about them. Giving him scientific interests went hand-in-hand with that. I also created his background in a way that would somewhat mirror Elsa’s, though Nick’s background ended up shaping and affecting him in a way that is very, very different than how Elsa’s background worked out for her.

But of course, once I got the idea of him, Nick did begin to take on a life of his own. :)

Everyone could have written that better. And Anna is made of much sterner stuff than Helga.

Oh HELL yes, everybody could have written that better.