Music Video Finale

P1T5 Live While We're Young from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

Hey guys, this may be my last blog post. Ever, in my life. Background information, it's my last year here in Kapa'a Middle School and in Mr. Sanderl's class and this last project shall be a bang! The original introduction, the people who I'll be working with are Denae, Shaday and Kyllie. So to start off, we already wanted to have a happy song, the songs we had in mind were very sad and stuff and I wanted like a band so it was either 5SOS or One Direction and we chose 1D. Then we listed down songs that we liked from that band and it was Live While We're Young or Story of my Life. Obviously, Story of my Life was too sad and the other song is like an adventure song and we can have fun filming it so we chose that song.

Okay so onto our story. Obviously, it's living while we're young. We are not promoting ditching class, this is just a music video, we shot these at different times (in school and after school) so we really didn't ditch class to go to other places. It starts off with Denae and Shaday bored in math class, all stressed out and stuff so they decide to "sneak" out and go to me and Kyllie's class to ditch class to go do things such as going to the beach or mall. Some sort of place where kids are all stress free. That's basically our story, you can clearly tell how it relates to the lyrics. "Come on and let me sneak you out" yup... that's it. AGAIN, we are not promoting ditching class, stay in school, you'll need it in the next few years of your life. Although what we are trying to get out is that don't take school so seriously to the point you want to yknow, do things, let yourself out sometimes. Don't stress yourself out too much, have fun. Don't let school take away your childhood, live it now because you can't turn back the time unless some crazy scientist creates a time machine but bessiiiiddeeeessss the point take a breather.

OH MY GOSH BROOO, honestly I'm glad about all my work this year, except animation but like besides that everything is all good. We had our rough cut critique yesterday and it was like what even. Mr. Sanderl sat down, listened to it all, unplugged his earphones and basically said it was all perfect. He didn't give us a critique like how he did with the other teams he went to, like he had a lot to say to other teams but to us he just listened to it and said it was all good. Thanks to Shaday and her awesome editing skills and precise mind and yknow she needs everything to be perfect, we did the best out of anyone honestly. On our last and final project of the year, I am glad we're ending it with a total bang now we just need wait and see what everyone thinks about it. This showcases all what we learned from different composition techniques to editing. I'm overly happy about this and I feel very positive about everything besides my other classes, I will truly miss this class so much.

Movie Trailer Premier

P1T5_Don't Say It from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

Hello people of the world, I have come back with a new project. So if you remember, we made a movie trailer I don't really remember if it was 6th grade or 7th but we did and that's our new project. Our movie trailer is titled "Don't Say It" and it's like horror/comedy. My teammates are Shaday, Taylor and Makaio, Makaio being the leader. Our teammates worked together one way on another, I made the synopsis and they were there to tell me what they want to put in or not. I also did the character descriptions and the keywords. We are currently doing the storyboard at the moment, we have our own scenes and I a doing the third and fifth scene. Little insight about our movie trailer, a group of teens (us) did something that we didn't know would bite us back. We stole things from this car in a kind of spooky tree-e place. We don't bring them back, we just keep it and continue on with our lives and throughout what we did there was this dark figure that was watching what we did. That figure is going to be our haunting past, flying an airplane to us which reads "I know what you did last month" and it's been a month since the crime happened. Well, since WE committed the crime that we didn't think was that bad.

Now to the challenges, our biggest challenge honestly right now is editing. Filming wasn't a problem because we got everything done and we were pretty productive and stuck to the script. Putting it together in a way that's mysterious and creepy is hard because of the audio, the synchronizing, transitions, you know, all that. You know when you have the picture in your head and it's so perfect but when you do it, it's not as what you thought? Yeah, that's like me with editing. I have things I want to do but it doesn't turn out the way I want it to. Shaday and Taylor are editors while me and Makaio does the movie poster but Makaio is working on the music. That's another thing, music. We have to achieve the creepy, empty music that matches our movie trailer. What we're so off on is the movie poster, we have to take the pictures in the green screen room but we keep forgetting to get our clothes so it's the same and it happens everyday so like we can't get it so we're currently sticking to a screenshot which isn't the highest quality and not leaning to the creepy side. Filming was the easy part, now the rest isn't.

As you can see from the results, we won first place and tied with Focused, 9-9 votes. I feel very proud of my team, it's great winning first place and knowing the class likes what you've been working so hard on. On the bars thing, we mostly got 4's and a little bit of 3's on each one but it's cool. Knowing the majority of votes is a 4 I'm happy. I learned that after 2 years of being in GT your last year will be your mots accomplishing year ever because I've been always at least like in 3rd+ place. It's literally great, if you work hard, plan well, schedule, communicate that's how things are going to work out for you. Also sticking to the script is the main thing because it's easier when you're editing. You don't have to jump around looking for clips that are all over the place, you can just drag and drop on clip and
the next clip is the continuation of the last clip. Key to success is honestly communication, some teams in our class didn't communicate well that's why they we're slacking and behind with filming. Well that's all, I'm glad we won, we worked hard, it payed off and overall it's just great.

Metamorphosis Animation

P1T8 Metamorphosis from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

Hey guys I'm back, front, side to side... Okay well, that was lame but I'm here to tell you about our NEW project. Since we just finished our Low Poly thank the lord I cannot see another triangle without being put in a bad mood, anyways. Our new project is a Metamorphosis Animation, Mr. Sanderl hasn't done this project in 4 years and now he's bringing it up. So our goal is to make an object or a thing turn to something else while the story delivers a message. Say, one of our ideas is "Butter Finds Fly" and the concept is that the Butter and Fly want to turn to a butterfly and in order to do that they need each other. They travel round to find each other, even through the obstacles in their way they still manage to find each other and they both morph to a butterfly. That whole story is interesting and has a message, well, so I think so. Goal one is to morph your character, goal two is the story shall deliver a message and goal three is that you should use more than 2 animation types. Speaking of animation types, there is a variety of animation you can use. Such as claymation, 3D Animation, Flip Book (honestly that's the coolest and more time consuming), Stop Motion or Motion Graphics. We only have done Photoshop animation, stykz and stop motion, I think we're going to use all three and maybe flip book animation because I want to try something new.

Our focus statement is Butter Finds Fly, if you guys don't get it. It's basically a Butter and Fly morphing together to make a butterfly. In the beginning a fly living in a dump sees its unique friends playing and wants to be different. He sees a big hill and is curious about what is on the other side. In the process of getting the the other side the Fly experiences tough challenges such as strong wind and humans trying to hit it away. In the middle a Butter is sitting around just chilling, hears a noise and gets up to sees a butterfly flying overhead. Butter is inspired and wants to be a butterfly too. Starts walking up this big hill to find a fly so it can turn to a butterfly. In the course of walking up the hill, it suffers from melting bit by bit and animals trying to get a taste of it. In the end the Fly and Butter finally get to the top of the hill. They encounter each other and decide to morph into a butterfly. They touch hands and instantly turn into butter with wings. They didn’t transform quite the way they pictured it but they still accepted the way they are because they are unique and one of a kind. We have 6 scenes all together, one the first scene it's the introduction of the fly. Then the second scene is about the Fly flying away from the dumpster to be unique like his friends. The third scene is the introduction of the Butter. The fourth scene is the Butter jumping out the window to explore the world. Then on the fifth scene, the Fly and Butter meets each other on the top of the hill and last is when they morph into a special butterfly.

We critiqued all our animation yesterday and we got our results. I think we do deserve the grade we got, animation is very hard and whether our quality of work is bad or not, I still think it’s okay. Although, I wish we had more time to animate to produce more of a high quality work. Overall, I’m glad of how ours turned out, I spent a lot of time doing this animation so I HOPE that we will get an A. If you round it, overall we got a 3.5 that would be a 4 and would be an A right? Left.

Geometric Portraits

Hallo people of the world, Kyla's back with another blog post. So we have a new project, yay... We're making low poly geometric thing where we make a self portrait using low polygons in Photoshop. Though, I will be talking about my facial expressions or anyone's because we use it all the time. To me, facial expressions are used when you can't express your feelings through words, me most of the time. You can tell from my face if I'm confused, happy, sad or annoyed or whatever. Everyone uses facial expressions, think of it, whoever doesn't have no emotions and you tell from their expression, haha. Facial expressions are used universal, babies use it, adults use it, teenagers use it because it's natural. We don't learn it, it comes naturally. We all make faces, different faces either to be goofy or to show emotions. It's hard to express emotions through words, trust me. I'd rather do it physically so they know what I'm feeling if ya know what I'm saying.

Okay okay so, since we're doing a low poly project, I want to share with you guys what the steps and how to create a low poly image. So first of all, to point it out that we're only doing half of the image so when we're done with that half, we can just flip it and then we have the other half. It's your choice to use a symmetrical image or do the whole image, step one is that, pick an image. Once you've done that, create a document in Photoshop that is 11x8.5 with the resolution of 300 and you should get a vertical layout. Next is to go to view>show>grid to show the grid which will help you on making your triangles. Then, open your image and drag and drop it in your other document that you made. Resize if necessary, try and only get an image that only shows from your shoulder to your head so it's easier because this will be hard. Next is to get your line tool which makes straight lines so you can make triangles throughout your image. Now start making your triangles and when you're finished then you can merge all those into one layer. Tip for the triangles, if you see a big space that is only one color, then make that huge space into a triangle. Once you're done with that, you go to your Polygon Lasso tool and outline each triangle, then you go to filter>blur>average to blur out that triangle. Repeat doing so till you're all done, use command F to apply the effect you did recently so it's easier and you won't have to keep going to Filter>Blur>Average. After you're done with that, click the eye on the layer with all your triangles then you have your low poly image. It sounds easy but it's a pain when you start blurring out every singe triangle and you made a lot of then so now you have to blur EVERY SINGLE one of them.

Okay so we made our second poly and it's been a rough ride but when you get the hang of it, you'll be good. So the similarities is that they're polygons, we made triangles to create an image. We used the Polygon Lasso Tool, filled it in and yeah. The difference is that one uses a different technique than the other. If you read my second paragraph, I told you about how we made our FIRST low poly. Well for our second poly, Mr. Sanderl made it kind of easier for us to do it so it's not time consuming. We didn't use the blur tool, we used the eyedropper to pick up the color of that area and then we did Command+Delete which filled the triangle with that color you picked up from your eyedropper. The one challenge he gave is that every color shall be different from whatever's next to it. If your hair is totally black, you have to find different shades of black so it's just not all black, it has different shades. Also, we didn't do half of the face and duplicate the layer and flip it next to that to make a symmetrical image. We actually did the whole entire face, from shoulder to the head. Getting into details in necessary spaces like eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows and ears. It's really hard to get the nose to blend in with the skin because it'll have small triangles and the skin has huge triangles so that's a challenge that I'm almost getting to reach. Now we have to do our last Low Poly, shattered effect. Thank the person above that it'll be the last one but I hope it'll be easier because we can gather our skills we learned from Low Poly 1&2 to make our last Low Poly 3.

Our last low poly project, I think it turned out good

Verbal Landscapes

Hello people of the world, Kyla is back with another blog post. YAY! I'm going to be talking about different ways nature impacts my life. Nature is what keeps us alive, it provides us food, water, shelter and air. Which basically means that nature impacts my life A WHOLE LOT. Without it I wouldn't be living, nature can live without us humans but we can't live without nature! Nature is a very beautiful thing that we kinda are destroying, people should start seeing what we're doing to it. We're slowly destroying it over the years and soon we won't have a place to live in. My life is revolved around nature, nature is where I live so my life is affected a lot. Nature is very important since it helps me live. Wow, that barely made sense but bare with me :)

For our new project, we're going to create 3 time lapses and 2 slow mo videos, that's the minimum, you can go over and beyond and make 5 timelapses or 4 slow motions. We're going too create these videos either in our phones where it has an option on the camera to make the video into slow mo or make it into time lapse. Although, if some of us don't have a phone that has those options, we can sign out a camera and take videos, take it back to school and start editing it in Final Cut. Final Cut lets you fasten the video to make it into a time lapse or slow it down, there's an option called retime. Using a computer or a phone won't be a difference since they're both going to make the same aftermath. A cool thing about final cut is that you can put your slow motion at a pace that you'd like it to be. It goes for making it fast too, if you want it REALLY fast because the clouds were moving really slowly, then you can make it REALLY fast. You can customize how slow or fast you want it to be basically.

The hardest part of taking my clips were getting the sunset and sunrise at a good place. My mom is lazy too and doesn't wanna drive so that's a down part. Also getting the angle you want at the right time and not wasting too much time that the sunrise or sunset passes by, that happened like twice for me which was frustrating. Although, I got my sunset and sunrise during the weekend so that's a good thing for me. I am very happy about that because they turned out good. The only bad part was when the camera couldn't detect how bright the sun was so it just made a huge white line and i couldn't do anything about it. My favorite part was watching the sunset and the sunrise, it's a beautiful thing that not everyone can see. How the colors pop out the sky, it's AMAZING! Just witnessing how nature works and admiring it and letting it do it's thing, it's relaxing.

I'm so happy with the results, I never thought I'd get the most votes but I did! :)

Critique Reflection: I agree with the results, the only thing I could've done is take out "Please Our Eyes" because that was just bad. Although, my whole entire video turned out okay I guess :) I like it but now I'm just regretting putting "Please Our Eyes" everything else was good, it's just that part that bothered me. When we were watching mine, I was tossing and putting my head down because I thought everyone would think it was bad but I guess not AND IM HAPPY ABOUT THAT :)

Poetic Personal Statement

HELLO PEOPLE THAT'S READING THIS BLOG POST! Kyla's back with a new blog post for ya'll. Little update, I am finally an 8th Grader with a new blog post. I'm here to tell you guys what I think poetry is and what it's used for. For me, I think poetry is a way to express feelings in a way that is said minimally. Poetry can be made up with rhymes and rhythms although not ALL poetry has those components. If people can't express their feelings to other people, they can write it down anonymously or if he/she wants everyone to know that it's by them. Poetry can be a hobby or that's the way they express their feelings. Poetry can be used for a lot of things but mainly to express their feelings, I know I've said "express their feelings" a lot :) but it does express their feelings. It's another language that is mysterious that when people reads them, either they get it or they have to think about what it's trying to say to the audience and the person that is reading the poetry.

Poetic Statement:
Strive for the best,
and you'll reach success
Weird, crazy, loving and pride,
Strong but soft on the inside
Come along my crazy life,
You'll definitely have a fun ride
Friends and family is what I value,
I'll take good care of you.

For my poetic poem, I used rhythm and rhyme because it was required for the poetic statement to rhyme and make sense so it's not all over the place. It was really hard, like not even kidding. It was hella hard to make a poem because of the rhyming but luckily the internet got our backs and we used rhyme zone to help us find rhyming words with a specific word. I guess my poetic statement is pretty good but could be improved upon. I had a lot of struggle on making my poetic statement because I didn't really get what I was suppose to do due to the lack of understanding. Even taking the pictures and making our photo list, I was confused and still am confused. Although I'm getting the hang of it now, I know what to do and what I'm not suppose to. It's really hard to think of poems and make it relate to who you are because sometimes, you just don't even know who you are or you do but can't put it into words.

Music Video Finale

P3T5 Don't Stop Believin' from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

Nice Denae! 

HAII!!! It's me, Kyla, the person who's running this blog. NEW PROJECT! This new project is a music video. Ringing a bell? YES! We did a music video last year with the song Sugar. Now our song is Don't Stop Believin' by Journey and my fabulous teammates are Denae, Ashley and Jhoanna. Check out their blogs there <----. We used the first 2 minutes of the song and we had to cut it down a bit since there was long instrumental parts. We unfortunately didn't get the don't stop believing parts since there was 4 minutes and we had to choose the best 2 minutes of the song. We wanted to beginning because that starts off the story so we picked the first 2 minutes as I said. More in depth about our music video, our story is about a girl and a boy. They set out to the outside world to pursue their careers. In the process of doing so, they pass and bump into each other. Turns out they have the same career in mind. Through that, they become friends and to tell you guys, I guess this is like a prequel from Sugar. Yes, same characters that led the story from our last years music video. If you know Don't Stop Believin' by heart, it has the same storyline. The lyrics saying a small town girl and a city boy going out to a train that goes anywhere. (I swear I should stop doing stupid introductions like what I just did.)

Art-C much

My favorite fast-edit montage sequence is when it skips through the lip syncs. Lip sync to lip sync, I like it because the different location and the different people on each of then. So one would have me the other me, Denae and Jhoanna then the other is Ashley, it's like that. It varies through 4 of us. It takes about like 3 seconds then it goes to the next video but we can make that shorter so it's a dramatic constant changing. It's my favorite because it's different from the previous lip syncs that passed. It takes you to different places and different people and how they're lip syncing. One might be one of us just standing and the other shot would be 3 of us being playful and you can tell that we enjoyed filming our lip syncs through our expressions. We were smiling and being goofy but we still got things done although we were being goofy. If you add fun into what you're doing through the hardship, you will end up to have a good outcome. If you work efficiently, you will get what you want. I was planning to make one that skips through each video for about 1 second because that would look cool. Although we didn't have enough time and I learned something which is to use your time wisely and not spend it with other people... but that is what we got. (btw you should totally check out my captions because they are totally good captions that will totally blow your mind)

We found a friend!

This music video shows my teammates and my best work through working with cameras and inputting what we learned throughout the year in this music video. We learned composition techniques, shot types, editing and photoshop and things like that. Through our music video we will mix all what we learned to create a video that showcases us and our skills. We are working hard on this project and this is my favorite project we do each year. From Photoshop and editing to make a good intro screen, it is hard. Editing in iMovie is like the hardest, we can include transitions and such, we have to get our lip synced with the audio (fairly hard), we need the whole video to make sense, it's testing us, testing what we know. If we've been paying attention a lot then our work will be awesome. I hope you guys will like it and let me tell you that a DEADLINE IS A DEADLINE. No exceptions and if we didn't have the best video, we still tried. This is because we didn't get the whole class to edit and only half of it so we had to rush. Some of our teammates had to stay after school and do some finishing touches but we got it exported. Yes, we could've done better but A DEADLINE IS A DEADLINE. Next year, our music video will be better than the 2 music videos we have done.