GT Music Video Finale

P1T7 Oui from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

It's officially the end of our 2015-2016 school year! (Last blog post of middle school, Cheeee!) Through out the year we've done multiple projects and it's the last one. Our storyline is about two people who never thought they'd end up together but end up "together'. The song is about how there's no Oui without U and I. I know, that's not how you spell "we" but I think he did it just for the song. Theres no we without W and E makes no sense so he changed to the french word "Oui"

We didn't have any fast edit sequences. So that's going to drop our grade. The reason we didn't have a fast edit montage is because it's kinda a slow song and slow songs don't really have places to put a fast paced edit. Since we didn't have a fast pace edit my favorite part would have to be the part where I run and hug my friend Glenn. It was the  fastest part of the video so it'll be like our fast pace edit lol. Sorry Mr. Sanderl if you see this. We meant to put a fast paced edit but it didn't work out :3.

I've been in the G.T program for 2 years of middle school. It's a lot of work, but our class has learned so many tips and tricks on how to make not only our photography projects great, but also our video projects. In this project, we're obviously showcasing our best video skills. We're showing fast pace editing, filters, text layovers, transitions, green screen, and etc. Pretty much everything I've learned. One of the requirements was fast pace editing montage, since I learned how to do that I can show how well I know how to do it. Also, we filmed using a green screen and we learned how to put that in the background and etc.

Music: "Oui" by Jeremih

Animated Life Lessons

P1T4 Raiden Commentates Dance Battle from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

In our recent animation project, my teammates are Raiden Kurisu and Talia Washington. Our teams personal character traits are weirdness, coolness (lol), and our nerdy selves. In our  video Talia is the nerd and I'm the bully. Raiden is like the announcer cause he's kewl (yup he's so cool it's spelled different haha). Anyways, since Talia is the nerdy one it represents her inner smartness (I'm not sure if that makes sense). Since I'm the bully I'm the one who thinks their top dog and is cooler than Talia (I don't have much nerd in me lol). Raiden is a combination of all in this video.

Our whole story has a couple life lessons. Don't underestimate people, don't bully anyone, except eveyone for who they are, and to not judge anyone by their looks. The life lessons in our story relate to us (especially now since we're middle schoolers) there's lot s of bullying because people don't like each other for who they are. Whether it's something someone wears, eats, who they hangout with, they just hate which i think is really dumb. I'm pretty sure whoever is reading this has been bullied at one point in their life. Nobody's perfect, everyone has flaws. We placed humor in our stories by making it like a fight but instead of having punching and hitting it's a dance battle. Since using puppet warp is kinda hard, our dance moves turned out pretty funny *insert laughing emoji*.

Our work productivity was pretty good. I'm not so good at animating so Talia and Raiden did most of the animation. I made some backgrounds and tried animating. The biggest challenge we faced was using the puppet warp tool. It was the first time we ever used this tool and well.. It was hard to use. If you wanted an arm to move it would make your shoulder weird and the rest of your body would turn with it so you had to remember to put a pin on your body. The best moment of the whole production was listening to our voice over for the first time. Since Talia and I were both absent on the day we needed to film Raiden recorded it.

Character Development

Ever wonder what type of person you were? Like, is there anything strange about you, like me, I'm VERY weird. Like the good kind of weird. Basically an imperfection about you. My weirdness is usually really funny. I'm full of craziness lol. Like while I was typing this I was cracking myself up lol. Anyways, not only am I weird, I'm like EXRTREMELY shy. Which kinda really sucks because I get kinda insecure about myself then I get anti-social and I have a hard time making friends. One last imperfection I have is that I have a hard time being alone. Yeah, I know I just said that I had a hard time making  friends but when I do make friends it's hard for me to be by myself. Like when I was younger I would have to have people over all the time because I didn't know how to play by myself. I had cousins over all the time which is why I had that problem. All together I'm just weird, quiet, and kind of a social butterfly!

We all have many different character traits and we're supposed to apply some to our animation. The character trait I plan on exaggerating the most is my weirdness. I honestly love everything that's weird about me except for when I get REALLY weird. I'm going to exaggerate my weirdness in my animation by make my sprite thingy do the hit dance moves of the 21st century (Whip, Dab, Drop, etc). Another way I plan on exaggerating my weirdness in my animation is that I'm going to make my person weird is that I'm gonna make it fly. I've always wanted to fly but technically it's physically impossible so why not make a gif of me flying? A human flying, that's weird right?

Making your own .GIF animation character and your own .GIF isn't as easy as you think it is. Making your own .GIF is easier than making your character (if your using a different character). Starting with your character, you need to take pictures of your subject,  we used ourselves. Mr. Sanderl took pictures of us in three different ways, Front, Back, and Side. Next, we went in to photoshop and cut ourselves out using the quick selection tool then copying and pasting the cut out in to a new layer. He wanted it to fit in our blogs so we had to crop it, 640 pixels by 720 pixels. Then we had to save it as a JPEG file. Then we used the puppet warp tool to morph our character to the way we wanted it and turned it in to a .gif. Honestly, I didn't really like mine. It was super basic, I jump a few times then I jump really high then I come back down and it re-loops. I could've done alot better but I ran out of time.

.MOV Film Festival

Our keywords mostly relate to people that are in high school or are really stressed out. The keywords we have are High school, Fail, Graduate, Stressed, and music. High school relates to the students who are in well, high school and get really stressed out. Especially the seniors who have SAT's, College applications, and senior projects. Next is music. Music helps relieve stress, anger, sadness, or just keeps you in happy mood. 

Our overall lesson is like... Reality. Our film is a spoof on High School Musical and we wanna prove how different high school musical is from high school in real-life (it's obviously really different haha). Like in high school musical 3 (The main movie we're focusing on) they breakout in song when happy, or sad, or mad, whatever they're feeling. Where in real life, when were happy we smile and laugh or whatever,  when we're sad we ignore people or cry, and when we're mad... that's another story, but we don't breakout usually breakout in song. Basically, our message is on how high school isn't what you see in movies.  #Reality.

My team faced multiple challenges like not being able to come up with an idea, but I think the BIGGEST challenge we faced was actually filming. It's easy to set up, get things focused, and prepare our actors but the hardest challenge was getting permission to film at the high school and being available to film. We missed our edit and filming check and lost a point because, well the high school wouldn't allow us to film. We tried to go and film but they said we needed to call ahead of time which made our trip to the high school a bust. I didn't really enjoy this project. Sadly we didn't get anything in our project done.

Hockney Style Joiners

Aloha fellow blog readers, it's 2016 and we are kicking off the new year with a new project. Photomontages! Inspired by the amazing David Hockney, we are doing our own photomontage. Everyone's different, which means our photomontages aren't the same as David Hockney's. His photomontages mainly focus on landscaping. Our photomontages represent a symbol in our life or something with meaning to us.

Pictures, 483 photos are posted on instagram every second, 7,091 tweets are sent per second, info provided by: this website. Each image online tells a different story or message. Some messages could be positive and some can be negative. For example, someones post could be about something depressing, or an image that contains profanity or body language that could be hurtful in a way, that's some examples are negative. There could also be something positive like a happy, insperational quote, or a selfie that contains a big bright smile, that's an example of a positive message.

Everything has a message. Whether it's a soccer ball, a t-shirt, or even a piece of paper, EVERYTHING has a message. My photomontage also has a message and my intended message I wanna send to the audience with my final project is the beauty of Kaua'i. Kaua'i is one of the oldest islands in the Hawaiian island chain and lots of us are attached to our cell phones so we don't notice the beauty of our home (for the ones who live on Kaua'i).

2016 Aspirations

It's finally 2016! Happy New Year! This year, I wanna attain 5 different goals. My first goal is to pick up my grades. I got my first F these past 2 mid-term grades. My second goal is to become more social and to get out more. I spend most of my time inside locked away in my dark room with some netflix and some food, I wanna get out more, socialize, and make new friends. My third goal is to eat healthier. I usually eat pizza and chips and soda on occasions but I wanna eat less of that stuff. I wanna eat more healthy stuff like salad, or uh fruits, and whatever else is healthy lol. My fourth goal is to procrastinate less. Procrastination is the main reason I'm doing bad in school (also laziness). Finally, my last goal is to play more sports. Almost every single one of my cousins does a sport. I'm pretty much the only one in my family that has done only one sport, and that was soccer. I love soccer, it's just that I'm not motivated by anyone to play. I'm also a really shy person so I'd probably not show up on the first day of practice.

My most important goal would have to be picking up my grades. I wanna pick up my grades because having good grades isn't good. Without good grades, I can't play sports in high school, I won't get accepted in to good colleges, and I might possibly not succeed in life. I don't like knowing I have an F in one of my core classes (social studies). I think my grades are so low cause I'm too attached to my phone. Another reason why picking up my grades is a big goal of mine, is because my brother (currently in 5th grade) gets better grades than I do. He's ALWAYS bragging how his grades are better than mine and I wanna show him what's up and get good grades.

To make sure I get good grades I'm going to create a plan. The first step in my plan is to stop going on my phone 24/7 and to put it down once in a while to finish any missing work or homework assignments. My second part to my plan is to STOP procrastinating. To me, procrastination is one of the biggest problems I have when it comes to major assignments. I recive the assignment and end up doing it days later (sometimes a few days before the deadline). My third step to my plan for success is to pay closer attention and ask for help when I need it. I end up spacing out and not paying attention to the details and the due date so I end up turning it in late or yelling "ARE YOUR SERIOUS?!" when the teacher announces the due date and the requirements. My last step to my plan for success is to turn in my work closer to the due date. I end up turning in everything like 2 weeks over the due date so I can at least get a little bit of credit. Anyways, that's my plan to success I'm really hoping my plan to success works out because I wanna end my last year of middle school on a good note.

Invention Commercial

In G.T this pass week or so, we were told to create an invention and make a commercial out of it. My teams invention was called flava-filter, it was a coffee filter that adds the cream and sugar for you and you don't have to go to the store and buy all that extra coffee creamer and sugar when it convientently comes with the flava-filter. My teams main goal for this project was just to complete it and have fun. To me, this was one of my favorite projects and one of my favorite results.

Working in a team requires getting along with people. Thankfully, my team was with people I'm comfterble with. While working in a team, you experience some funny, weird moments, or sad, irritated moments. Well, lets just forget about those bad moments and think about the good ones.  My team experienced many happy moments, and I think my favorite  moment was when we filmed Chazz the "showgirl". You know how you see those girls modeling with an object in their hand? well, thats exactly what chazz did. Not sure if he liked it or not, but it was super funny. At first he couldn't stay serious, but after a while he got used to it. "Man, I feel bad for all the girls that have to do this. This is some hard work" -Chazz 😂

Once again, my team was Me, Chazz, and Kaz. We all had a part to contribute to this production. I was more to the editing and filming side, chazz was an actor in some parts, and kaz helped with filming and did the voice overs. I did most of the filming because I am kinda self conscious and I absolutley HATE being on camera (I also hate the sound of my voice). Chazz and Kaz both seemed okay with their jobs and being filmed so that happened.