Amber | 30 | Any pronouns | I reblog things. I also make gifs (though I usually don't post them) and I draw. I also have a few sideblogs, including my simblr. Talk to me about mermaids and pufferfish! I speak English and Dutch. You can also talk to me in German or French, but I will reply in English if you do.
please please please be aware that if you and your friends get addicted to saying YIPPEEE like fortnite und cola yippee it will have an intoxicating effect and you might accidentally say it in a really important business meeting to a bunch of men you don't know
Nav: Presentation // Intro // Southern Song 南宋 // Yuan 蒙元 // Early Ming 明初 // Mid-Early Ming 明中前 // Mid-Late Ming 明中後 // Late Ming 晚明 // Fabrics Pt 1 // Fabrics Pt 2 // Misc Fun Facts // Conclusion
If you thought this was gonna be a short conclusion you were WRONG I am doing REFLECTIONS(tm) There will be two parts: (1) Things That Were Good and (2) Things That Were Bad! The second part will be significantly longer than the first part because it is more detailed but overall it was a good experience I promise!!!!!!!
(This is probably not as fun to read for people but it is mostly an exercise in reflection. Also if you want to see the sheer amount of ways things like this can go wrong and feel better about yourself, this is a good place to look)
As viewer tax here is @/qiuqiuchinese's instagram reel on the behind the scenes of the project (the person she's interviewing is my older sister Yulan, I'm the one that pops in for like 2 seconds at 1:14 with a mask on cuz I'm shy) (also the captions say 姐姐 but I am Yulan's younger sibling by 6 years, so it should be 妹妹)
Things That Were Good
Massive coincidence while we were looking for videographers: a few days before deciding, Rachel (@/qiuqiuchinese) reached out to us looking to collab because she was going to be in Southern Cal (she lives there now but she used to be based in Boston). She mentioned that her husband happens to be a videographer by trade, and it turned out that they were in town and free at the exact right time to shoot this video with us, so it ended up being a collab!
Videography was a 100% new thing for me; I'd never done a project anything like this. To come up with the idea almost a year and a half before doing this project, and step-by-step bring it to life, is a really rewarding process, though it was very rocky and frustrating most of the time. I learned a lot from going through all the grueling parts of the project, and even though a bunch of stuff went wrong and it took SO much of my time and energy over the past year, I'm glad I did it and I'm happy with the results.
Chef's kiss to the models; they were absolutely perfect for their looks. Having modeled myself I really admire their tenacity—I start twitching thirty minutes into being in the makeup chair; these two had to sit for upwards of two hours a look, over and over and over again. Even when they weren't the ones being styled, they were off-stage on steaming and organizing duty, which were a huge help to keeping things running smoothly. My personal favorites were Tiona in the mid-early Ming look and Emily in the Song look.
Yulan's makeup skills keep getting better every time—she was unsure about being able to pull off a more classical makeup look at first, because her makeup work usually leans more modern, but she pulled it off beautifully following the notes I gave her and the end result looks fantastic. Because she was involved in both the styling and the detail shot maneuvering parts of the shoot, she was the only person on set who had practically zero breaks over the course of each ten-hour day, and I'm astonished at how energetic she was able to stay (I got the chill directing job sitting on the side yelling at people for most of the time and I was still dead by the end of each day).
Lizi from Lizi Studio was also a godsend; she sponsored a bunch of stuff for us including the studio and a bunch of props, and her hairstyling skills are unparalleled. We 100% couldn't have pulled this off without her and it was wonderful to get to know someone else in Cali seriously pursuing hanfu.
Kevin (Yulan's bf) did so much driving back and forth for us, I'm super grateful that he was able to come. Everyone was busy on set and we sent him to get food, drinks, forgotten keys, forgotten items, etc. like fifty times over the course of the day; even though he was rarely on set we still managed to keep him busy most of the time.
I think I can add Premiere Pro to my resume skills now, given that I basically learned the program from zero over the course of the editing shenanigans
Things That Were Bad
Design & Manufacturing (Tops)
Switched fabrics halfway through because the lighter teal was too bright and didn't match the outside well enough (had to remake 3-4 garments)
Made the earlier time period tops ~10-20cm too long for the effect that I wanted, had to remake (had to remake 4-5 garments)
One of the garments got messed up and the wrong fabric was used in the wrong place (remade 1 garment)
Changed a bunch of trims on the Song beizi like three times cuz it didn't look right
Buzi was wider than most machines had the capability of weaving without repeats, took forever to get one that could do it
Design & Manufacturing (Skirts)
In the process of trying to figure out how to manufacture woven-on-demand mamianqun fabric, reached out to like 50+ workshops, actually went through and tried 6 different ones, and ended up with 3 viable ones (aka spent SO MUCH money)
Initial teal color was too dark, had to exchange for a different thread color
Typically two kinds of gold filaments can be used for the fabric: round or flat, flat looked better initially on early fabric samples but the machine of the fabric workshop we went with could only handle round so we had to switch to round again
Warehouse that I was storing fabric in was unfamiliar with how mamianqun fabric worked and kept cutting the roll at the wrong place when distributing fabric to the tailors x-x
Last-minute added an extra gold outline to the design of the longma mane and tail to help add a bit of detail in, had to get all three of the patterned skirt digitizations updated, it was a huge hassle and huge cost and I lowkey regret doing it because tbh you can barely see the outline anyway
The damask from one factory was different from another, so the black damask parts of the Late Ming skirt used for the video looks different from the rest because it was woven with a different technique (I had a replacement made but it didn't get here in time)
Shooting (Transportation)
The BART got rerouted on my way to the airport—I think it was something about construction or power outages, but they diverted in a different direction and told people to get out and wait for the next train which was half an hour away. I had to get out in Oakland and call a Lyft, but the traffic was really bad and I still didn’t make it on time and had to reschedule my flight for later in the day. I did get there eventually thankfully
So much airplane trouble on Yulan's end... she was supposed to get here at 5pm, she didn't end up getting to the airbnb until like 2am that night
At the end of the second day, we left the studio and went to drop off Emily at her house first, then went home to our airbnb. Except, instead of the airbnb's address, Kevin accidentally put the address of the studio into the GPS again so we drove all the way back to the studio and didn't realize until we pulled into the parking lot. And then had to drive all the way back again
Shooting (Set & Lighting)
Time mismanagement on two days on set: We had two days for this, 12/21 and 12/22. We originally had three days planned, but it would have required me to go straight from taking my last midterm to the airport, and it would’ve been really really tight with very little wiggle room, and flights get canceled all the time; we decided not to test our luck, but it resulted in things getting really really tight during shooting
Like 3/4 of the first day was spent setting up the set. Partially because I was picky, partially because we hadn’t done this before. We had originally planned to do three looks on day one and three looks on day two, but we had to make it 2+4 instead because we’d been on set for more than ten hours at that point
I hadn’t brought any fishing line and the studio lost theirs, so I resorted to using an elastic cord I usually use for hair. This was an extremely non-ideal material to use: it sagged under weight (duh) and made it nearly impossible to position the scrolls accurately. I spent like two hours on a ladder trying to make it work. We eventually found the fishing line but it was too late by then lol
The power cut out like three times in the middle of filming—the lights were consuming a lot of energy and the circuit breaker must’ve gotten tripped. Unfortunately it was in a big office building and the circuit breaker was elsewhere in the building where we didn’t have access, so we had to call people to come reset it; we ended up connecting the lights to a separate power generator of their own
On the first day we had an iPad that mirrored the camera so that we could see how everything looked while being elsewhere in the room. On the second day we forgot to bring it so we were Blind (we tried with Yulan's phone but it was way too small)
Closeup shots ended up kinda blurry :(
Shooting (Actual Shooting)
Yulan forgot to bring black leggings so she was in a skirt (originally we wanted all non-models in all black so we wouldn't distract) and therefore had a knee cameo in the skirt shots for some of them lol
On the first day we literally didn't know wtf we were doing and didn't get enough detail shots, ended up having to manipulate a lot in editing to make up for it
A lot of the closeup shots ended up out of focus but there wasn't enough time to reshoot
The spinning shots (affectionately termed "rotisserie chicken shots," i shit you not that's just what we called it the whole time while on set like "okay time to do the rotisserie shot") were done on a turntable that could only go really really slowly, so the models had to do the mannequin challenge while spinning
^ they did a good job but their eyeballs could only move in twitches and not completely smoothly (normal ofc) so it can be a little distracting on screen
Tiona accidentally knocked over the screen walking behind it while recording once, had to reposition everything else as closely as possible
Models had never done hanfu bows before, the first few especially on day 1 were really really awkward looking (they got a lot better as time progressed though)
On the second day while we were shooting the Early Ming makeup sequence, Emily suddenly got dizzy and almost passed out. We lowkey still don't know what happened, but she completely recovered after lying down for a few minutes and getting some water, and she was completely fine the rest of the day (we were super worried and constantly asking).
Shooting (Styling)
Emily's hair ended up being too short to do the swallowtail hairstyle on so we had to improvise and finish off the back of her hair in a different way for her looks
Yuan Dynasty ribbon was way too long, should've gotten something like half the length to get the look right
For Song, initially had pants tucked into the socks (bc that's more traditional), but then I decided that was ugly and untucked them for the subsequent ones, which resulted in a really weird inconsistency but it was too late to go back and refilm the Song Dynasty one
Couldn't find a matte highlighter on the first day, everything people had was sparkly (which doesn't look very historical). I ended up bringing my personal palette on the second day and they used that for the later looks
Tiona was lowkey like half sick the whole time (like almost recovered but not quite) (it's ok she still looked beautiful though)
The sponsored hair accessories had to keep their price tags on so we did our best to hide them in the hair but they still showed up in some parts
The beads kept falling off my diy deerskin crown lmaooo (we glued em back on with hot glue though)
Editing
Getting the footage was a Hassle because there was So Much, had to get everything onto a hard drive and wait for it to be shipped over
Editing software mismatch, not everyone was using the same one x-x there were like 4 different programs involved, so much work went down the drain
Lots of communication errors because... isn't there always?
Had to drop a lot of money to bring in a last-minute editor to help smooth a bunch of things out in the span of like 24 hours (she did awesome though and stayed up till like 4/5am with us to get it right)
Still ended up having to do SO much ourselves over Premiere
Music was lowkey not figured out until the last second (thats lowkey on me rip but there was a lot of other stuff going on and it just kind of wasnt a priority. Until it was. Oops) We ended up using free music which... I'll be honest I don't really like it very much but it was the best that we could get that was non-AI
All of this made our post deadline move like 5 times (it was supposed to be release on LNY eve, then LNY, then Lantern Festival, then we gave up on doing it on a holiday and went a day over, and then since it wasn't a holiday anyway we went another day over... etc etc etc)
Took us three days to upload the final video because Yulan was in the middle of the goddamn ocean with shitty wifi
List of things that I was going to include but ended up nixing because there wasn't enough time/it got lost in the rush
Kept forgetting to switch out the scrolls in the background, nixed two of the paintings (I had each one matched up with significance and time period and everything hhh)
Forgot to put the earrings on for mid-late Ming ;-; Switched out the sequence because of that, unfortunately didn't match up quite as well chronologically as we hoped but oh well
Was originally going to put a petticoat under the mid-early Ming skirt for the rotisserie shot to show what the horse-hair skirt might have looked like, but ran out of time
More detail shots, especially for the first two looks
Beauty shots (of the makeup after it was finished) after the first two time periods
Fur stole as accessory on Late Ming to represent the onset of the Little Ice Age
Different shoes for each look (scrapped this one early on because the shoe selection is already so limited)
Different pants from different eras for each look (also scrapped this one early on because almost nobody knows how to make the Jiajing and Qianshi pants that would've represented the other eras, and anyway the structure of the Dingling pants did exist throughout all of Ming anyway so it wasn't worth the extra trouble since the pants weren't the point anyway)
We were gonna try to fit in a music collab but it didn't work out because the timing was too late
(bonus pic of me and my sister hiding behind Tiona's late ming sleeves to finish out the series)
May or may not add an extra behind the scenes post to the end of this, but otherwise consider this project background series finished :)
on tiktok people will quit their jobs after going viral once but on here not only can any post get 50k notes, but if it does theres nothing you can do with it. theres no monetization or any transferable skills at all. you just made a funny post and people liked it and thats the start and end of your career
you could say "i left the stove on" with no context and it might break containment on here and people start tagging it with ships and kins and theres no way to delete it forever unless staff gets involved. your mistake will never go away but your claim to fame will instantly
its like yes im the pineapple werewolf guy but no one outside of here and like 5 posts on reddit will ever know what that sentence means. i could jump on tiktok and no one would know me. no one on youtube or facebook. this is my little corner of the internet and i will die here before i give up that title and when i do know i lost nothing in the process
I saw the photo in my feed and went ohh, dude, no, we do not handle yellow rocks with our bare hands until we know for sure what they are. And I know that orange...
In comments, they continue:
and that's where I started cussing at the computer monitor. But someone else had got there first:
So just as a reminder, folks. If you don't know what it is, don't put it in your fucking mouth!
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it is kind of stupid that content creators have to justify playing games on “easy mode”. hell im tired of having to justify why I am playing on easy. its because i like to have fun. its because i like enjoying games instead of struggling with them and being stressed out. so obviously when a video game gives me the choice for a stress-free gameplay experience of course i’m going to fucking play the stress free gameplay experience are you stupid?
