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!

2016 Aspirations

Happy New Year everyone! It's 2016 and we are kicking off the new year with photo challenges in our GT class. First I will start my blog off with 5 different goals I will attain in 2016. First of all, during the end of 2016 my goal is to have around $300 for Black Friday so I can buy food and a go pro! My second goal is to make it on the junior lifeguard nationals team in the summer. Thirdly, my goal is to do do my homework at least everyday and not procrastinate when I get home! Next, I would like to win the argumentative debate I have with my parents to un-ban me from Queens Bath and let me go there. Lastly, my goal is too get abs and muscles everywhere and be really fit haha also with that eat better and have a healthier diet and body!

To me, I think the most important goal for me to accomplish is do my homework everyday and not procrastinate and get good grades because in high school it will be extremely important for me to do well so I can get into the college I want. The college I would love to get into is a really good choice for me based on questions I answered and the majors I want to do but it's also a very hard school to get into since Standford and Brown are some of the best in the nation. I must get over 2200 on my SAT's and a 4.0 or higher (NO PRESSURE WHAT SO EVER.) This goal is also very important for me because it will help me have better responsibility and use my time more wisely on things that are important.

Some of the steps I will take to ensure to have success in this goal is to one, make a schedule or routine that I will convince myself to follow when I get home from school like first give myself a half hour break to eat then do my homework with no distractions. I will train myself to put away all of my electronics unless I need it for my homework and do my best to focus on nothing except for my work. My second step would be to make sure I have a good sleep because it's one of the most important things to have if you want to function correctly or else everything can go downhill if you can't focus because your tired. Next, I would take to ensure success is eating more food that is good for my brain and food that is said too make you smarter and has good nutients to keep me focused and up right. Finally, my last step would be try different ways when I do my work to make it interesting to me, for example try to think about how my work could relate to my life or set goals and challenges for myself. Like if I do 10 pages of good work I will get a reward and that way I can try to make it into a fun competition. That's it I hope you enjoyed this blog post!

Scratch Game Design

Chase Game!


Platform Game!


Hey readers! So we finished our scratch games, a basic chase game and we made our own platform game. I think we did pretty good for our first time! Anyway, I think the way the user experience influenced my game is by making sure the movement in my characters was smooth cause I didn't enjoy how I tried to make my sprites move at first because it was really jumpy and it wasn't very pleasing. In both of my games I never really had a good ending, that's also something I want to work on as I get to know Scratch more. Overall I wanted my design of the game not to be too simple and a little complex but I was so confused at first, it ended up being pretty simple. If you want to check out my profile, check out on Scratch @laannnii or look up AloL_Chase or AloL_Platformer !

Ok so for my first game that I created, we were told that we had to make a chase game, something where something was chasing another thing and with a scoreboard. I decided I wanted to do an underwater theme with a shark chasing a diver. I think I did a pretty good job, I got the sprites to move pretty smooth and it was just a basic chase game that if you (the diver) touched the shark you would lose a point, and if you stayed away from the shark every 3 seconds you would get a point. If you got 10 points before the timer got to 0 you win! In my second game we had to create a platform game, meaning you had to jump onto platform thingies until you get to the top or whatever the goal is that designer made. This one was definitely MUCH more of a challenge for me. I missed 2 days of my GT class when our class started it so I was really confused, I had no idea what people were doing, I didn't know how to jump and what kind of math I had to do with velocity and stuff.. I spent most of the first day looking at examples on scratch they were all so confusing but I somewhat understood it and managed completing my game with help remixing a little code. I am pretty proud of my game, I made the goal to get the food move back and forth to make it a little harder for players, I had a countdown timer, PLUS I managed to last minute add my second level! Both games have smooth moving characters and they met the goals that we needed.

The most difficult code that I had so far for my games are when I was trying to figure out what the velocity and gravity and things like that had to be so I could jump. In the end it wasn't perfect but I made th character jump a little just in a unatural way... I also had trouble trying to figure out the code to make my up arrow work and jump. Some of the difficult bug fixes I had was when I first tried to make the bananas move back and forth there were a lot of glitches and it would teleport from one end of my game to another but a friend helped me figure out how to move it back and forth. I still have some bug fixes  for example I still don't really end my game but I tried to by using things like the speech bubbles.

Freedom Game!