halfcactus

Digitized a journal doodle from September. It’s been ages since I made any kind of art, especially since I haven’t been listening to music/reading books/watching movies/etc lately, and I’ve been feeling so empty and soulless. :(



Based on “Come to Your Senses” from tick, tick... BOOM!

You're on the air,
I'm underground
Signal's fading,
Can't be found
I finally open up
For you I would do anything
But you've turned off the volume
Just when I've begun to sing

Come to your senses
Defenses are not the way to go
And you know,
Or at least you knew

Everything's strange,
You've changed and I don't know what to do
To get through
I don't know what to do

I have to laugh
We sure put on a show
Love is passe in this day and age
How can we expect it to grow?

You as the knight
Me as the queen
All I've got tonight
Is static on a screen

---

Have also been slightly obsessed with Jay Chou's recent music video of Cold Hearted, an unexpected (...to me) collaboration with JABBAWOCKEEZ. The MV was the first time I actually parsed the lyrics, and I'm pleased to report that Nirvana in Fire book club has been helping my Jay Chou/Vincent Fang lyrical literacy because I now recognize the referenced 鳳求凰 XD


As luck would have it, my favorite celebrity Zhang Xincheng covered it in his latest stream a week and a half later ♥♥♥ (I say "as luck would have it", but I truly felt it in my bones that he'd cover it the moment I saw the MV, but I thought he'd post a little dance cover instead. XD)

It's weird to think that I used to be glued to Adobe software to the point that I felt fused to them, and now I can go half a year without creating something new--in this case, it's not really by choice, because ongoing tech issues... But I do spend every successive year trying to chase the drive and hyperfocus of my younger self, which I guess is my version of romanticizing my youth! A lot of the stuff I used to make were really ugly LOL but at least I was adventurous and knew how to do a lot of things. These days I feel like I'm restarting from zero.

Dreamwidth was originally planned to be a casual low-pressure art/fanworks blog but guess what sometimes life gets away from you and suddenly you're a Zhang Xincheng bot. I really wanted to get my life together and hustle but here I am, wrestling with technology and losing gracefully by making my favorite celebrity a means for content creation.

Anyway here's some stuff I did this week (...in a span of 4 days), either because I was testing my problematic computer or because I'm trying to learn to do stuff without a computer (ie. video editing on my tablet and my newly acquired pink wireless keyboard that I bought off a friend). Desktop computer is still my battleground of choice though, as unwieldy as it is. I'm just not hip enough to learn mobile/tablet technology. :(



a Nobuta wo Produce (now on Netflix!) throwback ♥

( +3 process photos, from an unrelated journal sketch to Photoshop )

Zhang Xincheng things (all done on mobile/tablet!)

Subbed: 仟 Qian, a Zhang Xincheng original song (you can download an mp3 rip here)

Subbed: Zhang Xincheng's performance of an original song that then transitions to Jay Chou's Chrysanthemum Bed: This is a much older video, during his My Huckleberry Friends days. Vocals start out a bit flat, and his piano chord choices in the last bit sound debatable to me... but Chrysanthemum Bed is my favorite Jay Chou (+ Vincent Fang) song ever, so just hearing my favorite actor sing it makes me happy. XD He certainly deserves bonus points for basically remixing the song and having the original verse tie into the feeling of the chorus. And it really is a joy to know that he's improved so much vocally since this video, which was a solid performance featuring piano-playing and catchy composition. ♥

Subbed: Zhang Xincheng's douyin where he has to uphold his reputation of being a Jay Chou fan.

I kind of feel like I've been transitioning to video-based fanworks since last year, and maybe I should do a post for... apps (desktop and iOS)... because I've tried quite a few, with needs that are both too specific and casual haha. I've been really impressed with how technology has advanced enough that I can do basic editing + subbing on my phone (even though it makes my phone get hot), and I'm fascinated with the features in mobile apps. A lot of them annoy me because they're more cosmetic effects than function, especially when it comes to captioning/typesetting features... I can see why, and I even think it's cool that they exist, it's just surprising to me that subtitle tracks aren't a thing in iMovie (iOS) and Adobe Premiere Rush (iOS)... though I suppose I haven't used either of those even in desktop form, so I'm not sure if you could have done that on desktop. I did all the editing and captioning in last year's fanvids in Da Vinci Resolve... which sadly does not have a mobile version. Its features were pretty ideal to me. :(

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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