#mishaquotes

[cassammydean]

[mymindisaforestfire-blog]

- Misha Collins, someone who is indeed worthy and very deserving of admiration

[compassionatedragon]

I went to school at the University of Chicago. Which is—it was a very dark and dismal place, at the time that I was a student there. It's a very good school, and a lot of smart people go there —we have a lot of Nobel prize winners— but it's not a very fun place to attend. It's on the south side of Chicago, it's very cold and very wintery. And at the time that I was there, we didn't even have a student center. There was a study that was commissioned by a group at Harvard, of the top 300 universities in the country, and they rated them according to various different criteria, like academic standards, and campus quality and social life. And we ranked 300 out of 300, right under the Naval Academy. It was just—the only social life occurred in the basement of the Regenstein library. And then we had this one thing every year, which was the University of Chicago scavenger hunt, which was amazing. Everyone on campus participated for four days, in this thing, and they came out of their caves, and had an amazing time. And there were some great items on the scavenger hunt list for the University of Chicago. My girlfriend at the time was on another team —she was also a student there, she's now my wife— and she came into my room one night and said "hey, hey Mi—" I was one of the few kids at school who had a car, and she said, "hey, can I borrow your car?" And I said, "why do you wanna borrow my car?" And she said, "well, I found a place up in Wisconsin that's got some sheep." Because one of the items on the scavenger hunt list was three live sheep. And I said, "oh, no, you cannot borrow my car to go pick up—" you know, it was a sedan, with upholstered seats, I don't want her going to pick up sheep in it. She did end up waiting until I fell asleep and stealing the keys and taking my car anyway. And then the sheep spent the day in my car, unbeknownst to me. They didn't even bother to lay newspaper down. They were just, uh, grinding their own feces into the seats, and chewing on the upholstery. Other items on that scavenger hunt list that year were a Hooters waitress. So a team would have to acquire a Hooters waitress and bring them to the event. But my wife went and got a job at Hooters, got hired, got the wardrobe, and then, you know, showed up herself. She was good at this. So anyway, I had a great time doing those scavenger hunts at school. And then I got on a TV show, and I built up something of a Twitter following, and found that people would kind of, strangely, do whatever I said. It gave me this incredible sense of power, and I think that I started to take advantage of it, and I combined these two things —people doing what I say and my love of scavenger hunts— and started this little experiment, which totally took off. We now have three Guinness World Records under our belt in two years, which is pretty good.

Misha on the origins of GISHWHES, during the Nerdist podcast

[compassionatedragon]

Destiel does mean something to me. I know exactly what it is. Destiel is— Dean is one of the characters on the show, and Castiel is my character on the show, and Destiel is the fusion of the two. [...] It's quite controversial, for some reason, in the fandom. I think the people who are writing slash fiction really want it to become canonised, a lot of them. And I do think that the writers, um... they kind of play on the edge of it? And I think that we as actors are also, even if it's at times unconsciously, also toying on that line. But it's also something that I didn't even know about before starting on [Supernatural]. I mean, this is a phenomenon that's occurred for, now, thirty, forty years. It started with Spock and Captain Kirk, way way back in the day, writing slash fiction. Apparently that was its origin. And at the time, it was in little magazines that were circulated, you know, 200 or 300 copies, privately. And now it's something that occurs, you know, on Tumblr and other sites, like LiveJournal and things like that.

Misha on Destiel and slash, during The Nerdist podcast

(Q: "Does the word Destiel mean anything to you? [...] Are the writers writing this in, now? What's your take on it?")

[compassionatedragon]

When I was six years old, Doctor Who was airing in the US. This was like, 1980... I don't know, however old I was... '81, or something? Or '80... How old am I?! That's very complicated math, subtraction and addition, which I am not skilled enough to do.

Misha struggling with math (x)

[compassionatedragon]

I love your hat! Are you very hot, in the hat? Are you sweating? 'Cause I would be too hot if I was wearing that. [audience oohs] Not in that sense!

Misha, talking to a fan in a sock monkey hat (x)

[compassionatedragon]

Step-by-step GIF tutorial

Okay, obviously this isn't going to be the end-all guide to making GIFs, but I'm going to give you a complete rundown of how I do this.

Here's my typical setup:

1. Your video

2. Photoshop

3. A screencapping tool

4. Notepad

5. Cute Destiel desktop wallpaper (optional)

Some additional notes on each:

1. You want to have a copy of whatever video you're trying to GIF on your hard drive. Don't try to grab your frames straight off the Youtube player or some other stream, because even if you hit play-and-pause-again as quickly as possible, the jump will be way too long. 

If you're doing an episode, use your DVD or Bluray or whatever, um, alternative method you have of downloading these episodes. Note that higher quality is better, obviously, so if you can get 720p logo-less Bluray, awesome. If you want to GIF an online video (a convention panel, sneak peek, etc.) you can use KeepVid to download Youtube and Vimeo videos. (For Twitvids and such, it's slightly more complicated, so if you ever need a guide for that let me know.)

You'll want to open your video file in a media player that offers the option to go through the video frame by frame. I like VLC Media Player, but Windows Movie Maker (that's the movie editor, not just the default player) has this option as well, for instance.

2. I'm using CS5. Pretty much any version of Photoshop ever has the ability to make GIFs, but if you're using one of the rather old (pre-CS) ones, it may involve switching to a separate application (ImageReady), and things will look pretty different from my screencaps.

3. I guess you don't absolutely need to use this if you don't want to install a separate program, but it'll make your life about 348% easier. I'm using Greenshot, which is simple and free.

4. This is totally optional, but I tend to have a Notepad window open so I can quickly write down timestamps, lines of dialogue, etc.

Once you've got all of that, it's time to get started! First, if you haven't used Greenshot before, right-click it's little icon in your system tray and under "Screenshot Destination", make sure "Copy to clipboard" is the ONLY selected option. 

You don't want to have it open it's image viewer thing each time or end up with a whole bunch of single screencaps all over your hard drive. You may also want to turn off its sound (under "Effects") while you're at it, or risk getting annoyed very quickly.

Next, go to the correct time in your video (where you want your first GIF to start), and hit the printscreen key on your keyboard. Instead of just capturing your entire screen, this will now give you the option to select the region you want to capture by clicking and dragging a box over it.

Use this to select the area you want to GIF (either your entire video, but without the surrounding windows, desktop etc., or only a certain part of it). You will only need to do this once, for your first frame, and it'll save you the trouble of cropping your screencaps in Photoshop later (compared to just using your printscreen key traditionally).

Once your selection is done, open a new file in Photoshop (it should automatically adjust to the dimensions of your captured region), and hit paste/ctrl-v. There's your first frame.

Now, go to the next frame in your video player. In VLC, this is done by pressing the "e" key. Windows Movie Maker has previous/next frame buttons underneath the video. What's important here is that you generally don't want to capture every single frame, or you'll end up with a huge GIF; at the same time, you don't want to skip TOO many frames either, or it'll look all jumpy and jerky. (Remember, this is why you wanted to download and have the frame-by-frame option in the first place. :P)

So honestly, this is a bit of a trial-and-error thing, where you just kinda have to develop a feel for how many frames to skip, and which particular frames you DO want to copy and use for your GIF. This doesn't have to be the same number each time, either! Sometimes I use three subsequent frames in a row, sometimes I'll skip 2 frames, 3, occasionally even up to 5-6 frames if it's a very "static" moment. 

As soon as you do arrive at the next frame you want to use, hit shift+printscreen on your keyboard. This will copy that same area you selected previously to your clipboard. Paste it into your PSD and there's your second frame!

Keep doing this until you've got all your frames in the PSD. You'll want to aim for a maximum of about 20-25 frames per GIF to stay within Tumblr filesize limits, generally. Now it's time to make the thing actually animated:

Make sure your animation pane is on. If it isn't, turn it on under "Window" in the menu bar. Then click the little options button in the top right corner of the animation timeline, and select "Make frames from layers".

You can hit the play button on your newly created animation to see what it's like, but it's almost certainly going to run a little fast.

So, select all of your frames (click the first one, and then the final one while holding down shift), click on the "0 sec." text underneath any frame, and pick a delay. Which one you need will depend on how many frames you ended up skipping during the previous part. Delays anywhere from 0.05 to 0.2sec tend to work best for me. Note that you'll need to pick "Other" and type in your delay manually if you want to use something shorter than 0.1sec.

Next, you can alter the colours, contrast, vibrance, etc. of your GIF any way you like. I have a separate tutorial on some of the adjustment layers I like to use up here. Just fiddle with a bunch of them until you get the look you desire.

Then select all of your new layers (using the shift key again, like with the frames), and from that menu button on the animation pane, select "Match layer across frames". This ensures that your new adjustments are made to each of your frames.

Resize your GIF to whatever size you want it to be, using Image > Image Size. A full-width image on Tumblr is 500px wide; half-width is 245px, and one-third is 160px.

If you want to add any text to the GIF, put it in using the Type tool. Adding a "Stroke" effects layer (under the "FX" button on the Layers menu) will generally make the text easier to read. Then use the "Match layer across frames" option from above on your new text layer to ensure the text is visible on every frame.

Save your GIF using "Save for web", selecting the GIF option, obviously, and you're done!

[kaiijus]

hopes for season 9?

For Cas to not be treated as useless and worthless all because he's human