Animated Life Lessons

P3T1 Elijah Understands Mistake from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

Hey guys, I'm here again with another blog post. Here to tell you more of our project and my teammates. My teammates are Kaile and Elijah, check out their blogs on my blog or on this post! I'll give you guys a little insight of who they are. Kaile is a very bright student, she's very smart and pretty young lady. She takes things seriously, joyous and friendly. She takes the roll of the girl who overreacts at everything. Elijah is helpful, smart and a cute fellow. Yes, I find him cute and I'm telling the whole world about it but this is because it is true I won't lie about that. He plays the role of not taking things that seriously while others does. This leads to fights and misunderstanding and you'll know more about that in our animation. From my previous blog post I told y'all about myself. That I'm weird, helpful, etc. Check out my previous blog post to know more about me if y'all haven't yet. I play the role of a friend that will help out with the misunderstanding of Kaile and Elijah.

Honestly, there is ZERO, NADA, 0 humor in our animation. Just relating to real life and in real life, there is no humor. Everything is serious everyone knows that. For example, this project holy cow it's stressful. Everything about it is hard. From animation to editing in iMovie, it's really hard. Animation because of puppet warp and I talked about that already and how hard it is and since were beginners and I never had any experience with puppet warp. Our life lesson is for people to see the other side of another perspective. Sometimes we only see ours and we don't know how it affected the other person. This is really relatable because these kind of things starts fights. Honestly, my friends misunderstood each other leading up to them fighting and now they aren't friends anymore. See how badly it can turn out, I know y'all would be relating tho this because it is true.

Let me be honest with all of you guys. So for this project we had to pick our teams that we NEVER EVER worked before this WHOLE entire school year. I ended up with Kaile and Elijah and honestly they are.... GREAT! I'm not lying, they will be great leaders next year. They get their work done in their best quality. They're easy to work with and we didn't really have any problems with each other, we were all okay. That's what a quality needs to have, a great bond. We had a fun time doing it even though there was a lot of pressure on us. They are great 6th graders, you guys should check out their blogs. I see my friends and they're stressing out because they can't get things done because of their team and my team was doing just fine. Even though we didn't turn it on the first deadline we still got to finish it with our best and highest quality and got to turn it in on time. Their level of productivity is very high, they were on task and I don't see them disagreeing, they're great team players. Their wasn't really a big challenge except for the first deadline. I finished all my scenes and both of them had 1 scene each left to do, they weren't wasting any time. The best moment of this whole production was when we're together and we laugh things off. Even how stressful it is, we get to laugh and not have straight faces. Tip: if you aren't happy with what you're doing, if you don't smile nor laugh, your end product will be like how you were... Bland. Our team had fun, I will admit I absolutely hate animation but Kaile and Elijah made it fun. SHOUTOUT to my teammates, You guys did great! You guys will be great 7th graders, I know it.

(I never knew this would happen, but we got 1st place!!!)

Character Development

HEY GUYS! It's Kyla, back at you with a new blog post. If you don't know me that well, WELL let me tell you more about what kind of person I am and my imperfections that may be humorous or relatable to y'all. Everyone knows me as being a crazy, weird, stubborn, friendly, funny (time to time), energetic, cheerful girl. It's true, if you're my friend, 100% sure that you've seen all of my characteristic. I won't say that I'm normal... probably because I'm not. I'm very special in my own ways which makes me not 'normal'. Honestly, putting yourself into words. I'm Kyla, I'm not perfect, I'm me, I love candy, I love bears, I love food, I love my friends and family, I like teddy bears, I like fooling around, I like messing around, I like to make people happy, I put myself before anybody else, I care about everybody. I'm the type that does anything to make other people happy even if I'm not. They're my top priority, my friends and family. Some imperfections that I have that you may find relatable or humorous is my laugh. My laugh is very bipolar, sometimes I'd sound normal sometimes I'd sound like a witch brewing it's potions. There are in betweens, like my fake laughs and weird laughs and crazy laughs that will sound like I am about to kill someone ":)." How I walk, sometimes I walk like I have 4 legs and act like mobzilla.

From the GIF that I made, I wanted to show the personality of me being wacky and weird by throwing my arms in the air. It's not the best, but... It's my first time doing the puppet warp so I'm a beginner. Honestly, grading myself, I am doing such a bad job. No kidding, it just doesn't look right whenever you're warping it. Which irritates me a lot because it doesn't look right and I want it to look right and not it to appear that it's been edited really badly. I want it to look right honestly and I can't do that because I'm really bad at it... :) To show my personalities through digital animation, all I need to do is to make my animation wacky. It has to be weird and not normal because that is me. I want to show you guys that I'm weird, nice, helpful and my dark side if you know what I mean ;) Oh gosh, I'm such a weirdo. Anyways it's kind of easy to exaggerate being weird. You just have to make it look really wacky, every move so it's convincing that my trait is being weird and crazy.

For my GIF, to create it I needed a cut-out of me and know how to puppet warp. It was fairly easy since I knew how to animated but the hard part was doing the puppet warp. It is very knew to me and I am a beginner and I can't do it right trust me. I'm so bad at puppet warp, I mean look at my GIF it looks so bad and unprofessional. Well since I am a beginner of course it'll look unprofessional. Anyways, after you got some frames done you need to make you character move using puppet warp. Go to edit and puppet warp then start warping yourself to do something. For me I was throwing my hands in the air repeatedly. How you may ask, it's to copy and paster the puppet warp frame and the regular frame and keep pasting until satisfied. Also, you need to make a copy of your character so one is used normally and one is used for puppet warp. Let me tell you that it's really hard to do the puppet warp, just simple actions. It's very hard. After that you can make your character move out of the screen then it's time to turn it into a GIF. First you need to  go File>Save For Web & Devices> then it takes you on from there. You name it however you want then save it then BAM you have a GIF. Honestly, it's goof for a beginning so I'll say I kinda like my finished product. Excuse my spider background, this is because I had to do it last minute so I just picked a random background. How would that simple GIF represent me? Throwing my hands in the air kind of acts like I'm being crazy and that's one of my traits. It might not look good to y'all but I have a valid reason for it to be like that and it's because I am a beginner and I will get good at puppet warp throughout our new project of animating with puppet warp. Anyways, thanks for reading this I hope you have a great day. BYYEE!

.MOV Film Festival

Hey guys! I'm back with a new project we're doing and guess what!?! We're participating in the .MOV Film Festival, how great is that! Anyways, my teammates are Denae, Ashley and Jhoanna. Our film is titled "Jhoanna Discovers Personalities." To make you understand our concept, I will give you guys some keywords we are using. Personality, friends, yourself, adventuring and together. You may ask, "Kyla what? I don't get AnYtHiNg" well you see, our film is about a girl moving into a new neighborhood and has struggle on making friends. She decides to be another person that she isn't then realizes it's better to be yourself than to be someone you aren't. That's where personalities, yourself and friends takes place. They all go in the category of being yourself and being yourself gives you friends that accept you for who you are. Adventuring and together will make more sense because it's about our film. Adventuring into Jhoanna's mind to see her personalities (yup, if you guys are thinking yes. This is inspired by Inside Out.) Together, as the personalities come together to make Jhoanna. A weird, clumsy and overdramatic person. Some people would realize how deep one word can go and some wouldn't. We want you guys to realize by one word, you'd realize something. Some deep thinkers out there, you'll get it if you also watch our soap opera.

If you guys are wondering, "What's your message?" Let me tell you. Our message is to be yourself no matter what. Don't try changing who you are because it won't do any good. We can easily change who we are, but do we like how we turned out? Do we miss our old self? Do we want to turn back time when everything was normal? For being ourself, we create tons of memories. Fun and bad ones but we always look toward fun ones. Being someone else, it's hard to make memories since well, you're someone else. You're not your old self, some people out there that changed wants to go back to the times they didn't. Trust me, being yourself is better than being someone who you aren't. Some people might think, everything will change you throughout your life, You'd change for the better. Some might be true but there's a part of your old self that sticks with you forever. Your friends will notice how you change, even the littlest things they will notice and sometimes they want you to be your old self. Me, I became sassy last year. Like REAL sassy and my friends noticed that and every time I get sassy they tell me, "Kyla what happened to you? Why are you so sassy?" and most of the time "We want the old Kyla back, the non-sassy Kyla." Honestly, me as well wanted the non-sassy Kyla but new year starts. A huge part of my sassiness was left in 2015 and that's good. I'm back to being my old self but more weird and crazy but still are my traits. It just kinda grew since you know, it's me.

For now, the biggest challenge that my team has faced is trying to make Spencer, Duke & Kaimana work with us. No, they aren't part of our team but they are part of our film. They're the group of friends that doesn't accept Jhoanna for being so bland and boring. By the end, Duke disappeared and we had to film only with Spencer and Kaimana. It took long for then to act right and stop fooling around and to stop laughing and to take their part seriously. Spencer, the hard-headed one made us have a hard time for the first couple minutes we decided to start filming. He'll talk, tell us he'll stay there while we're filming, play his guitar on the background and he finally left to go do his work. We were productive on filming even if the people that are acting in our film was hard to film with. Jhoanna had a hard time to deal with Spencer and Kaimana since she didn't know them and that they don't even speak to each other. She kinda refused to act with them which was kinda stressful especially that she's the main character and she needs to act with other people. Now we're facing a problem which is filming the rest of the parts of the scenes we need. Only about 2 parts and that's all and the rest if foley. I know we can do it and it won't be hard for us if we work together, it's just a quick maybe an hour or less filming then we're all done and all we need to do is editing. Our editing is going good, it's funny to me, I hope others find it funny also.

Tiny Spherical Worlds

The point of a composite image is to create an image that is combined with different scenes/elements. With one picture, your whole image wouldn't look as unique as having multiple images merged together. Composite images needs more than one image to be combined. It won't be a composite image if you only have on picture, what are you gonna combine? Nothing. That's why you need more than one image. If you want to create a composite image you need to take multiple pictures to merge together. There are two types of panoramas that is made by compiling images, but in this case you take the images and make it to a circle. Let me tell you more about it. It's all like a panorama, where your device takes more than one picture and compiling them together and making a wide view shot of what you want. In this case, we take the pictures, turn it into a panorama and make it into our own little world.

Polar and spherical panoramas are originally panoramas but they are turned into a circle. No longer a straight boring line of images, but connected end to end to make a circle. The difference between then is how they look, they both are circles but the difference is that one of them is a planet-like image. That is the polar pano, the land is in the middle surrounded by the sky. Spherical is more of an ant view of your surroundings. The sky is trapped in the middle surrounded by nature. They are both circular panos but they have a difference. Even how you make it, there's a step in Photoshop that is not taken for one of them. A added step to one of the images. The little things makes the difference, even though we think it's the same because it kinda is. Recap, polar is surrounded by sky and looks like a planet. Spherical, the sky is trapped in the middle and is surrounded by trees, buildings, etc. Sometimes your polar turns out to be a spherical and your spherical turns out into a polar. It all matters on the angle, if you are working on a polar and you skipped to image rotate to 180° then that'd turn out into a spherical. If you did that step for spherical then you'd get a polar image. Little steps, huge differences.

When we're almost done with making our tiny worlds, there is a huge eye-catching variable that we need to fix. It is a line that meets end to end and how do we fix that let me tell you. We had to use the Cloning Stamp in Photoshop to blend everything together. If we don't blend it together, there'd be a huge line that speaks, "I was edited!" We don't want that do we? Nope. It's the most challenging part on making our tiny worlds. Sometimes they can't even be blended because one side would be trees and the other would be a house. Although, that's no biggie since we have the Clone Stamp. We blend it in our ways, how we want it to look like. The main goal is to get rid of that line and and make the final image convincing and not doubtful to others. It is easy blending everything together but one end is a tree and the other end is a building, koof there's a problem. Since those ends are going to be connected, you'd suspect something... "Why is there a building cutting off a tree?" That is the hard part if you're in this case. It's either you take out the building and make a tree or the other way around. Either way is good, but if you're pro and all and you find a way to make those two different things come together and look realistic, well I clap for you GOOD JOB! If you pass through that, good job and you made your own world.

Polar 1

Sphere 1

                                 

Polar 2

Sphere 2

Hockney Style Joiners

Hello Hello! It's me again, for this new blog post I will be talking about David Hockney's photomontage and my own that we are creating. David Hockney created collages he called "joiners" Check out that link to learn more about joiners. Anyways, let me just tell you about what's really unique about David Hockney's photomontages that makes it different from mine. David Hockney's major aim for making these combined images is to discuss the way a human vision works. Compare mine, it's only random pictures from place to place. No aim but to take as much pictures to recreate an image with multiple pictures.

Social Media... A major key point to everyone's lives. Social media runs the world, tell me about it. Images that can be posted and shown to the whole entire world, isn't that ironic? Although, there are people out there that are cyber bullies and they can bring negative thoughts to your images which will affect you in some type of way, but there are other people that give positive feedback which will make you feel very happy. For example, if you posted a picture that it's your birthday, other people will say "Happy Birthday!" and some would say "So?" You just went on a roller coaster there. Photos that you post can mean so much things to other people, people with different minds. Another example, if you posted a image of a drawing that you made, other people wouldn't see it as good as others. Then you'll go on a ride again with all the positive and negative comments you receive just because of a beaver drawing. Very random I know. There is always a good and a bad side in social media and you'll come across both of them, maybe one by one or at the same time.

For my final photomontage, I want my audience to see my friends. My friends are really important to me, they're always there when I need them that's why I chose friends for my final photomontage. My friends are my family is all I can say. They are very important to me and these three girls are only a portion of all my friends. I have a lot of friends... I'm working on not making anymore friends because I am content with my friends now. They might not seem much but for me they are VERY important. Without friends you wouldn't, or me, wouldn't really be all happy. Who am I without them? Why would I be happy and sad and mad and more without anyone dedicated to it. My point is, is that they have a huge impact on my life. I wouldn't be as happy as I am now.

2016 Aspiration

Hey guys! Happy New Years, I know it's kinda late. I'm back to tell you 5 of my goals for this year. You might think that my goals are weird but here you go. My first one is to stop making too much friends. I make friends easily and that's the problem, I can't balance my time for ALL my friends. My second one is to start paying attention to English. I'm gonna be honest, I DO NOT pay attention in that class, maybe it's because I think it's irrelevant but I actually want to try and start paying more attention to that class. For my third one is to be a little harsh because knowing me I'm nice. If I lie, not saying the truth it gonna bother me. I can't make harsh comebacks it always turns out to be good I don't even know how that's possible but it is. My fourth goal is to learn a new language. I really want to learn either Korean or Japanese, I know some Korean words and I'm learning new words. I know 3 languages already including English. Ha ha Kyla you are so funny (Nope) Anyways, learning a new language is challenging to me and it's also good since I'll learn a new language. Weird I know. For my last and final goal is to get better grades. Back when I was in elementary I had good grades, I always had straight A's but now in middle its mixed with A's and B's and I can't get a consistent A. It's always one B or two and that bothers me so much. I know you might say, "That's a good grade!" but for me I need an A.

The most important goal for me from all those is to stop making friends. WOAH Kyla! Why do you want to stop making friends?! Well you see, I have a lot of friends and I make friends easily. For example today I made a new friend, I'm not doing great on this one. I am content with my current friends and I don't want to replace them with other people. They are the best and I wouldn't ask for anything else. ALSO, the internet! Blame it! Those quotes about having friends and losing them. Yeah... Those hit me and made me realize that I'll lose friends because they either have new friends or I hang out with my "new" friends causing me and them to drift apart. Knowing me, I wouldn't let all those years that past that I have been with them go to waste just because I have new friends or they do. I've lost friends and earned them back, like literally my friends that I lost few years back are now my current friends. They come and go says the internet and that's the sad part but you have to accept the truth. To tell you the truth, my friends wants me to stop making friends because if I do I hang out more with them. That makes them sad and I don't want them to be sad because I'm a nice person... sometimes. I'll try and stop making friends since I'll hurt other people's feelings, literally.

To ensure that I'll be able to reach this goal, I need to stick with my friends. When there is a new student, Kyla wants to talk to them so they could be Kyla's friends. That's the first and most important step, let the new kids roam freely and don't talk to them... at least try. That's the first instinct of mine, to go up to them and introduce myself then make them my best friend. My friends told me a whole lot of times to not even approach new kids because they 100%, positively know that I will make friends with that person. Second step is to always, ALWAYS listen to your friends. I know what you guys would say, "DON"T LET THEM CONTROL YOU!!! BE YOURSELF AND GET FRIENDS!!!" Well you see I need to listen to them since it benefits me and them. Making new friends is my thing but I always go to my old buddies. They're my main, I've at least had my friends for around 3-4 years. Except for the ones I made last year which I still are friends with them. I maintain to be friends with my friends that I made friends with for a long time. Anyways those are like the most important steps to reach my goal.

Scratch Game Design

Scratch Chase Game

(If it goes back to the game you're done with, move your mouse pointer)

Hey guys, so something we've been working on is Scratch. Scratch is a website where you can create your own game. It takes a lot of coding (if you make a complex game.) For my game, I've thought of penguins. Who doesn't like penguins right? So one of my characters (out of two) is a penguin and the other one is a shark. You can say that it would be a real life situation where a penguin is running or swimming away from a shark. No, it won't get eaten you'd only lose points so no death is shown. I won't say that everybody would like my game that I created, I'm only a beginner so you have to deal with it for now (not like I'd be a professional.) It's the user who'd decide on how they would be affected by my game and it's not the best, don't expect some huge explosion then the penguin pops out of nowhere then met a villain (shark) and it has to run away from it in the sea. Yeah, none of that just some simple game where you run away (so complex I know.) I'm going to be honest, for the first few codes that we've done I was like, "Oh yeah, this seems easy. I can manage this project!" and then it gets to actually making it, then I went from "Yay" to "Nay."

I'll go in depth and tell you about my game. My game contains 2 sprites as so called in Scratch. The sprites are a shark and the penguin you see above. The idea of my game is stated on my first paragraph, it's to run away from the shark until the timer goes off. I did draw my own background and penguin, I tried my best. I had a set of plans on how things are going to go, but then I had to change it because I didn't have that much time to work on my Scratch. In my opinion, not that much people in my class drew their own sprites nor background. If I compare my game to others, one feature that would stand out is that I drew my background and penguin. (The most important and outstanding thing of all *wink wink*) To be honest I really like what my game has come to, it doesn't really work that well but it works and I tried my best. It amazes me that I can make my own game and let the whole world see and play it and compliment it how bad or good it is. I've tried my best and I know I can go over and beyond on my level at the moment, but I'm having some trouble with computers (it's not working) so I don't have much time to work on it except for school.

To be honest, I didn't copy all my code from another scratcher. I've learned from my previous scratch game which is the Chase Game. I've learned how to make it jump and so on. But overall, the best code I've done would be a simple jumping. I know its simple, it's just jumping you can just add a forever code with a sensing code and motion. Not my case, the trouble I had on making my sprite jump and gliding or falling back down was very challenging. That's what makes it the best code I've done, I've figured out how to make it jump and go back down. When it touches black then it stays there and you can jump to the next platform. Yes, it does look fairly easy to do but trust me it works great. If you played my platformer game let me tell you that there is a lot of bugs that I have to fix. One of the major one is when you reach the last level and you go to the red box it makes the sprite float up. I don't know what happened but it works fine in the first level then it goes all down hill on the second level. That's the main one actually, nothing else bugs except for the last level where it floats and then you get stuck and then you go from smiling to "oh, now what?" thing. I do hope you guys like it, it's exceptional if you don't I get it. Just hoping you guys would, I know how bad I am at Scratch, younger students than me is better than me to be honest, I won't lie about that.