Music Video Finale

Welcome Lani's Amazing blog readers to anther one of my GT projects that I write about. Sadly this will be my last blog entry and our last big project of the year. There is less than a month left of our middle school life and it is something that is both exciting but sad. So......hope you enjoyed my blog throughout the year because I probably won't be on it as much when I'm in high school. So to start things off, every year at the end of our school year we have been doing Music Video projects and I have been doing it since I was here in 6th grade. This year my teammates are Talia Washington, Kyler Arruda-Sukehira, and Asha McGinnis, and we decided to make a music video for the song Stay by Rhianna. We chose this because we wanted to try and do more of a serious slow song and we felt it was an emotional song that we could make a story out of. Mr. Sanderl told us we had to choose the best 2 minutes of the song but our team is a savage so we chose the best 2:30 of the song. Our storyline for this music video is about Kyler in love with all three of us girls and how he wants us to stay but he has to learn he can't have all three of us. In the end, he ends up loosing all of us and the lesson is not to have more than one girlfriend...I guess. Kyler can't stay committed to any of them and keeps going out with a new girl. Talia, Asha, and I all find out and that's how he loses us even though he loves us all. They relate to the lyrics because the lyrics are about Rhianna and this guy (Mikky Ekko) and they go into an argument and Rhianna is very sad because she wants him to stay. The lyrics are also self-explanatory for example the chorus is all "I want you to stay..." or "Makes me feel like I can't live without you."

So far during our editing process I think my favorite fast-edit montage sequence is one in the very beginning with me in Kyler lip-syncing to the words "I want you to Stay." This is my favorite fast-edit montage sequence because I took two different clips when we were lip-syncing and I alternated them each to have about .05 seconds then it would switch to the next shot and it would have .05 seconds and I would just repeat it for that line. It's a fast-edit but it looks kind of weird when it's going with a slow song but it's a music video and music videos have fast clips so I guess it will have to do. Another edited sequence I like isn't edited super fast but I really like it because two of the shots were taken without a tripod so it looks really cool because I rotated the camera around Kyler and made him glow. The sunlight made the shot really pretty and after adding the stabilizer to the shot it was very smooth and I was incredibly happy with it. These were some of my favorite fast-edit montage shot, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, watch the music video above starting at 0:01 seconds, and around 1.2 minutes.

Our music video showcases our best work by showing how much we have improved if you watch our old videos from 6th grade. It showcases our best work also because this class we do a lot of video editing/filming, and in this project, it shows what we've learned in editing/filming from almost any other project we have done before. Were hoping when someones sees our music video they can see how we got better since just the beginning of the 8th grade year and how other projects before contributed to our growth. It also showcases our best work by showing the types of camera techniques we have learned. The shots in our music video show the creative angles and ways we shoot action from what we learned in other video projects.

Behind the Scenes: Getting into the lip-sync moment

Behind the Scenes: With Talia's sandy foot

Behind the Scenes: Lani and Kyler editing, Talia working on PSD, and Asha keeping loved.

"Stay" by Rhianna ft. Mikky Ekko
2:30 min of Song Lyrics used:

I want you to stay

It's not much of a life you're living
It's not just something you take, it's given
Round and around, and around, and around we go
Oh now tell me, now tell me, now tell me, now you know

Not really sure how to feel about it
Something in the way you move
Makes me feel like I can't live without you
It takes me all the way
I want you to stay

Oh the reason I hold on
Oh 'cause I need this hole gone
Funny you're the broken one but I'm the only one who needed saving
'Cause when you never see the light, it's hard to know which one of us is caving

Not really sure how to feel about it
Something in the way you move
Makes me feel like I can't live without you
It takes me all the way
I want you to stay, stay
I want you to stay, oh

Animated Life Lessons

Hey! Amazing blog readers we are starting our new animation project and its gonna be good! My teammates for this project are Timmy Blum and Kalani Young. For this project, our focus statement is "Lani Loses Friend." We have to use each of our teammates' character cutout and we must exaggerate their personal traits & idiosyncrasies while telling a relatable story with embedded life lessons that is easy for an audience of your peers to understand. Basically. My teammate Timmy has a wild personality but acts very innocent and quiet when he's by teachers or people he doesn't know well, but he's faking it because Timmy is a sneaky raccoon. My other teammate Kalani is very quiet but can be quite rebellious that sometimes drives me crazy! But overall a pretty good friend. In our animation, their characters are a little different than they're true personal character traits. Kalani in our animation is a problem solver and Timmy is picky and is bad at accepting people for who they are, (but in the end he learns.)

STORYBOARD

So our story is about Lani loses her friend because she is too clingy and huggy around Tim. Kalani sorts out their problems. Lani learns about personal space and Tim learns to accept people for who they are. We are showing humor through my craziness around being clingy around Tim and Tim is kind of sassy in the animation because he won't talk to me when we "breakup". It is also very humorous because when you use the puppet warp tool to animate you can do pretty funny things with it by warping your body into un-realistic shapes. Unfortunately, we didn't do much of this but the way we used puppet warp was still pretty funny. Our class still thought it was funny but I think we could have done a better job at showing our personality traits considering it was one of our main goals. At the end, I showed humor through what I call "creative thinking/writing" by saying "Lani Alo and Tim Alo 5eva" (If you don't get this I used my last name for the guy instead of usually using the guy's last name) It's not that funny but oh well!

Our team's level of productivity was pretty good considering we haven't worked together and probably never would have until Mr. Sanderl asked us to work with people we never worked with before. Our biggestc hallenge was that not everyone on our team could complete making 2 animated scenes in the time given so we had to use photoshop pictures and stuff like that. Also the work divided between our teammates weren't spreaded equally so some people had to do more work than others. To add on, it was our first time working with animation using the puppet warp tool so none of us were experts. We all admitted to eachother that we were bad using the puppet warp but I think as we got further into our animation project we learned how to use it more correctly and our story turned out being pretty good. Our biggest problem was when the project was first due and we only had about 3 scenes completely finished with movement and animation and another scene which was somewhat of an animation. Our storyboard consisted of 6 scenes so 2 of them we had to use photoshop pictures that we drew so this was a pretty stressful moment knowing our project was being tried in with not the highest quality of work. Our best moment during production I think was when we had the extra days to make it better and when we all agreed it was a good project to be turned in. The day we turned it in was a good moment for our team and we were all happy with the project.

Behind the Scenes

Our animation ended up getting 2nd best overall in the class!