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!

Character Development

What's up blog readers school is now back in session. Were starting our 4th quarter back from Spring Break with a new project. We will have picture of our self where we will be warping the cut out of ourself in photoshop, I think. So to start off this blog post I will be talking about me. I am a funny, craving excitement, and sometimes insecure about myself kind of girl. I am loud and crazy and in my opinion an overall fun person to be with! (If you can handle my energy...) Some imperfections I feel I have is that I get mad if things don't go my way and when people just don't to something right or something I don't like. [insert laughing emojis}] Another imperfection about myself is that I feel nervous if I'm in front of a large crowd and everyone is looking at me like if I am speaking in front of the class or doing some kind of public speaking or on a stage. I don't feel comfortable doing this if it's just me, but I feel fine if I'm up with a group of people in front of the crowd. That's what I feel is imperfect with myself because I feel I should be able to be confident by myself.

The character traits I listed about myself in the first paragraph I will try to exaggerate some of them when animating myself. The ones that I plan to exaggerate is crazy and fun because when I use the puppet warp I can manipulate my body that looks out of this world and it looks very crazy. But I want to try to do this in a way where it flows together and makes sense so it's entertaining to look at and someone could look at it and say "oh that looks really cool and fun!"

To make our character GIF first of all we need a picture of ourself. Mr. Sanderl took the pictures of our front, back, and side view of us, we had to make sure all our limbs weren't touching each other. We chose a photo to work with and we cut it out in photoshop using the magic wand tool (I chose my front.) Then refined the edge. We then named the file blah blah blah then immediately cropped the image height: 720 px Width: 640 px Res: 300 px/in. Then we hanged our workspace to animation so we had the appropriate setting to make and animation. Then we were pretty much free to make any kind of gif we desired by going to edit, and puppet warp. We had to make sure the animation frames related with the photoshop layers in right way. When we felt like we finished our animation, we went to File, Save for web and devices and picked how many colors we wanted and changed the percentage size.

This is my finished puppet warped GIF.

This is my green screen portrait.                                             This is my photoshop cut-out.

Spring Break 2016

Hey guys so it's that time of year again...I'm going on a ski trip again to Colorado for spring break!!! Normally I would go to Keystone, but I will we going to Steam Boat, Colorado with my family. Last year I said I would post stuff on my blog from my spring break but I didn't really get to that, I made one post from least year that you can read about under the tab Lani's Reality but didn't have anymore. So this year if anyone wants to see what I'm doing this spring break they can add me on snap chat @lanisurfs and if I accept follow requests, you can probably see on my Instagram @laannnii. Anywhere I made an edit from my ski trip last year and you can watch it below! Hope y'all like it.

.MOV Film Festival

(Because our video isn't on vimeo yet)

What up blog readers! We finished our Spherical Pano's project last week and we are starting our new project! For this new project we are trying to make some kind of story either a sitcom, movie trailer, or something like that and the best three from our class will be entered for the Island School student .MOV film festival! Our story is about a super star (Kimchee Kartrashian) going shopping with her very goofy and idiotic bodyguard Kurly. Kurly gets distracted with shopping and loses track of time and later finds out Kimchee has been kidnapped. He comes to conclusion that Kimchee has been kidnapped and now it's all up to Kurly to find her. This is gonna be a comedic film because we want the movie trailer to focus more on the goofy adventure Kurly goes on to try and find Kimchee. Our keywords are Adventurous, Funny, Creative, Lighthearted, Amusing and we are also coming up with more as we along with our plan. Our keywords connect wth our audience by...

In our movie trailer Kurly rescues Kim, our overall message we want the audience to get from it in the end is to show how anyone can accomplish anything if they just set their mind to it and believe that they can succeed. This is because in our trailer Kurly may be a little cuckoo, clumsy, blonde, etc... but he is determined to find Kimchee and sets his mind to it. We also learned from our message that no matter how crazy the situation you can come up with some sort of solution or a way to at least make the situation better.

During our whole project we encountered many problems mostly when we were filming. But for me I think the biggest problem for us was when we had a shot of Asha saying "she's been kidnapped" but when we were editing Asha thought she looked weird and din't want anyone to see it. We didn't have any back up videos and it was already Monday when we were supposed to be done with our filming. For a couple days we didn't know what to do because we didn't want to use a medium shot of her doing it because the whole movie led up to that one shot and having her right in front of the camera gave more of a dramatic effect. But we couldn't use that one. In the end we tried to re-film even though it was late but we ended up not using the re-take because it wasn't good so instead we deleted the close up and used a medium. It works, but I feel it could've been much better with the close. At least we came up with some kind of solution instead of giving up and cutting the whole scene.

We took these photos during the paparazzi scene.

Tiny Spherical Worlds

These are my Polar Pano's from 6th grade, take a look at how my Polar worlds turned out now!
REDEMPTION.

Whats up Lani's Amazing Blog readers! So we just finished our 3rd quarter mid-quarter and I just came back from my 3 day weekend so now we are starting a new project! But before I get into that, I noticed my grades for mid quarter and got a 10/12 and barely made the cut for a A! The reason why is because I forgot to post some photo challenges, (I posted 13/16) so oops, I'll do better from now on that I know the consequences hehe. Anyway, let get into the new/old project we are getting it to!

Sooo, lets talk composite images. If you don't know already, composite images is a picture made from a combination of multiple images to go beyond the limitations of a camera. I feel the point of composite images instead of just one regular photo is to show a wider view of just a regular photo showing more of a 180 view. Also in my opinion they look much more interesting than a regular images, the visuals seem to stand out more and I feel like there is more meaning. Lastly, it gives you a better understanding of the situation and setting in the photos. When making tiny worlds we don't have the freedom to tilt our images, but it's still much more interesting than regular image. Going back to our last project, when taking our photomontages we could take our photos with tilt and we had mmore freedom combining it how we like so it makes a big difference in what the point is for composite images, summarizing it basically makes it way more interesting.


For this project we are making and working with both Spherical and Polar panoramas and worlds. Polar panoramas and Spherical panoramas are almost the same the only difference is when you edit them together in photoshop and either leave out a small step or do it. Polar and Spherical worlds both start out my taking photos all around you with equal amounts of sky in the top half and land in the other half. Then you edit them and load them into a stack in photoshop and most of the time get a pretty good rough edged pano. You then CROP, turn in into a square and if you want to make a Polar world, rotate it 180 degrees if making a Spherical, skip that step. The difference is a polar world has the bottom half of the land formed into a circular world with the sky surrounding it. A sphere world has the sky on the inside formed into a circular world with the land surrounding.

My finished tiny worlds that were all taken at Kealia beach are convincing because the way I warped and skewed the cut out of myself seems really convincing because I am out of this world in the polar and the proportions for my spherical seem right. and I feel like I did a good job placing the shadow doing it in the last 5 minutes. Also when I blurred the middle lined it turned out so much better than the ones I did in 6th grade. I definitely feel like a improved. It's almost unnoticeable ish but I can agree I could still make it better. Lastly, I think I placed myself okay but my shadow on my second one is on the ocean but there wasn't a spot on my image that would make more sense so I did what I could. Thanks that's it! But look at the project below...

These are my Polar World 1, and Polar World 2 with a cut out of myself! 

Below are my Sphere World 1, and Sphere World 2 with a cut out of myself! 

CHECK OUT MY PANO'S BELOW! 

(for you non GT students its how the photo looked before it was formed into a tiny world)

Pretty awesome aight?

Hockney Style Joiners

Hey hey hey! Our GT class are getting into a new/old project, Photomontages. We did this a couple years back but now we are doing it again except we are doing it more with people! If you don't know already David Hockney is one of the most influential pop artist of the 20th century known for creating photomontages. I think David Hockney's photomontages are different from my own because for one, he has been doing things like this for all his life so he has more experience on how to take pictures of something more interesting, and he has more knowledge on rearranging the photos that looks more pleasing to the eye. Also David Hockney's photomontages are different from mine because in most of his "joiners" he has a lot of photos more than the 15 we are required to take, he also takes pictures of something that is hard to capture like when it's moving.

Images can send either positive or negative messages. One way they can is if you include something that is negative in the photo like violence or inappropriate words that can send the wrong message. Also, if you take a picture of someone the message can depend on their emotions they show like if they are smiling or frowning, or crying, or jumping!  They could also send good or bad messages by the content they have in their photo. For example, if there is blue tint or cool colors that the most time are saddening colors then it can send a message using colors. Also it depends what you take a picture of, it you took a picture of the sun maybe you feel happy, or if you take a picture of the rain or a storm it can sometimes be associated with sad and depressing emotions. That's it!

For my final photomontage I am doing it of my driveway because it's where I grew up. Also it has some meaning to me because it is made of cement and on it I have my last name imprinted on it and also my hand prints from when I was younger, and I was there when we had it done in our little neighborhood. The message I want my audience to see in my final photomontage is a sense of wonder and be left a little curious. This is because I took a picture of my driveway and it's sort of like a pathway starting from your point of view (you can see my feet at the bottom) but at the end you don't know where it lead too, it just gets smaller and smaller until you couldn't see. I also want my audience to see the message where my feet start is where I'm at now and at the end it's where I hope to be in the the future, all I have to do is follow a path, and things are unpredictable at the end. YOLO thanks for reading my blog post! We will be starting a new blog post/project very soon. Peace.

This is my finished School Photomontage of Asha.

This is my finished Photomontage of my driveway, I chose to do this for my joiner because this is the place where I spent most of my childhood so far!