Music Videos Rock!

P1T5 Crossing Field from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

I'm counting the days left till the end of school, I can't wait! Well, I'm also not looking forward to Summer school, and next year... Well one of the many things I need to finish by the end of school would be the music video for media class (at least it's kinda fun ). To be honest, this project is probably one of the most stressful projects, same as all the last projects of each year. EVERYTHING MUST BE PERFECT.

So for this project, besides from having to be in the music video, and lip syncing, my part was most of the filming outside of school. Cherish had to edit, and make animations. Iris's part was to film and help April plan what we needed. April did the planning, and worked on the story board.

I have no idea what part of our video our audience might like. Maybe the bloopers because they were so 'funny'. Or some scene in our music video? Oh well~ I kind of think its the originality of it, since our music video was the only one that was in a different language (Japanese).

Our music video shows what we have learned this year because it has, different camera shots, an animation, sequence from wide, medium, to close, and it shows how some awesome editing skills!

Just a little extra, here are the requirements for the project...

Requirements: 90-120 seconds of Fantastic Filmmaking
Everyone’s lip synch alternating with STORY
Short 2-4 second shots of Creative Sequences
Variety of Special Effects, Cut In & Away, etc.
Will your audience be completely entertained?
Export… Share > File > 1280x720 > P#T# Song Title

Lyrical Livelihood

Describe how your favorite song lyrics make you feel.
What music video song did your team pick and why?
Explain the visual story that your music video will tell.
Cite Musician & Screenshot Production Plan

XD XD XD XD XD XD I AM SOOOOOO EXCITED!!!!!! You know why? Cause it's time for MUSIC VIDEOS! This has always been my favorite part of GT. To get started I want to talk about my favorite song... I don't have one... I feel like there is something wrong with me! Why don't I have a favorite song you ask? Because there are so many songs that are awesome as fudge, and I can't just pick one as my favorite! I guess if I had to pick one it would be something from Journey, or Queen... (Yes I listen to them. Don't judge me. XP) I guess my favorite could be, um... "Open Arms" by Journey maybe. The song lyrics make me feel like the song was written from the heart and is to me. So that's that! For the project, my team picked a Japanese song titled, "Crossing Field" because it's upbeat and unique that we chose a Japanese song. (Again, don't judge...)

For our music video we chose the song "Crossing Field" by LiSA. It is the first opening song to Sword Art Online (if you know that anime). Our team chose this song because we wanted to do a music video with a Japanese song to make ours original and unique. We also wanted the song to be upbeat. Other than those reasons and that it had a do-able story with it, we had no exact reason for choosing this song. :)

As for our story for the music video, we don't really have a good idea of what it is... Our team has changed it so many times, none of us know exactly what the story line is. Though a vague idea of what we're trying to tell in our music video is that a group of people (our team) who were depressed, shy, a loner, and worrisome would come together. They would become friends, becoming happy and joyful!


Our team's story board, I know, its pretty bad.



And our team trying to brain storm a story (at the bottom), never let us brainstorm, it will not turn out good... As you can see... Ok Bye!

Our Animation Story

For our animation project, our focus statement is Keegan Bakes Perfection. We chose those words to represent our story because our main focus is how Keegan's doubt is stopping her from accomplishing baking cupcakes. In our story, Keegan wants to be a good friend and bake cupcakes for her friend's (me) birthday party, but she quickly comes face to face with failure. But with practice, patience, and perseverance Keegan overcomes the challenge, and successfully finishes the task.


Above is a picture of April editing some images.

The lesson our audience will learn from our story is that failure isn't always a bad thing... failure can have absolute great outcomes sometimes. But success will only come if you are patient, positive, and persevere through the challenge. We show this lesson by showing Keegan having trouble and doubtfulness in her abilities to be successful. Instead of giving up, she decides to try one last time and overcomes the challenge.


Here's Keegan animating a scene.

Over-all, I think my teammates and I worked great together! One of our best moments (I believe) was when we were taking photos for a scene where I am overwhelmed with joy that Keegan baked cupcakes for her birthday. For this scene, I had to kind of jump on or push over Keegan in an over-excited hug. Another funny and good time was when Keegan and I were filming a voice-over, and made the funniest sounds!(at the end of the video) One of our worst times was probably when we had to turn in our two scene teaser. As in, we had a difficult time meeting the minimum time requirement and did not include voice-overs ugh. But we soon got to work and completed all that was required (THANK GOSH).


The making of our last scene.

Animation Outtakes

As you can see above, my next project is animations. We/my team has to create an animation story that represents a real life story that happened to one of our teammates. My team is Keegan Kessler, April Murakami, and Leleaka Anakalea. If you didn't know, Keegan makes some amazing cupcakes (*SPOILER* which is what our video is going to be about). She also is commonly mistaken for Leila Nelson, because they look very similar. April is actually a twin to Iris Murakami, and they both do similar things so it is sometimes hard to tell them apart. Though they have very different personalities. Leleaka, or... I call her Lele, and she is the best singer I have heard.

Stop-Motion animation is basically a type of animation that is made up of pictures. It is also the base to other types of animation like claymation. This process can be very time consuming, especially when you have more pictures to animate, however, the end result can be amazing. Stop-motion is a way to make things seem more surrealistic with unique movements. The most popular type of animation seen on the internet are GIFs. GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format. To put it into terms, GIFs are small clips of an animation that plays on forever in a loop.

Focusing back on the project, our animation is going to be based on something that has happened to Keegan. She wanted to learn how to make cupcakes because her mom owned a cupcake shop. And me being her independent self, she wanted to make them on her own. Then she noticed that her friend's birthday was coming up (in the video I'm her friend), so she thought it would be a good idea to make cupcakes for her friend. Instead of making the best cupcakes ever on the first try, she fails terribly. So she tries again. Finally after enough times, she did it! Obviously, I loved the cupcakes in the end. The reason why we chose to do this story is to show that everyone goes through tough times, but if you stick through it, you'll come out of it a winner and more knowledgeable than you were before. 

Typography Images

Describe your biggest challenge during this project. What did you do to overcome the issue?

Explain each of your 3 examples, what makes them different, which one is your favorite & why?
15 sent, 3 finished images, 5 hyperlinks

So, my project is now to make a "Typography portrait" of a teacher at KMS. According to google, typography is the style and appearance of printed matter, which basically means, what words and letters look like, and how they are arranged. A typography portrait is when words are on a portrait or making up the face of the person in the portrait. I makes a portrait go from "just" to "wow." I makes the picture look so amazing and breathtaking. It's an unforgettable image in the end.

My biggest challenge was getting the pictures and crops just right to make it look really good. My brain was still in the last project and I wouldn't crop the picture close enough. But I got it eventually... I just thought to myself, ok just a little room above the hair/head and about the same amount of space on both sides of their face. 

I made three different typography portraits:

The first one is a typography of Marie Curie My "innovator typography."

This is my chorus teacher Ms. Lardizibal, and I made a Typography of her.

My final Typography Portrait of me!!!!!!!!!!! I think it looks really nice actually, even though the words are just black. In my defense, if I added any color it wouldn't look as nice in my perspective. Here's a before and after of this picture:

  

So now that I'm done, I can talk about what troubled me the most... GETTING MY FACE VISIBLE! So I just had to make the Shadows layer filled with black words to get it visible.

Double Exposed Portraits

Double Exposed portraits are my next project in my GT class, so some info is needed. First of all, portrait photography is when the picture is only half of the subjects face, or the outline of one side of the subject's face. Silhouetting uses profiles and is an image of a person, animal, object or scene that's a single color, usually black, like a shadow.

If you don't want to read this entire paragraph you can just look on how to create double exposures in photoshop by these links- 1 2 3. Ok, to create double exposed portrait images, there are a few steps you need to take. The first step is of course taking your photos. Once you get three photos, (One being a portrait picture and the other two being your other pictures) you need to open up all of your images and adjust the exposure to a way that you feel looks right. Then, you need to dodge the image. Use the dodge tool photoshop has provided and outline our portrait picture with it. After outlining it, fill in everything except the portrait you outlined with the dodge tool. After dodging the portrait picture, it's time to drop in your first image. Let's say for the sake of me telling you the steps, it's a picture of a tree. So after you drop in the picture of the tree, Click the blend mode drop-down menu at the top of the layers panel and choose "Screen" to blend the trees with the portrait. Then your hit command/control+T to enter the free transform mode. Once you're in there, use the bounding box to rotate and resize the layer to find an angle that you think is well put and covers all of the portrait. Once you do this, hit enter to apply it. Next, you need to tone the image. To do this, you click the Create New Adjustment Layer icon in the Layers panel and choose Gradient Map. Then you go in the Properties Panel, click the gradient preview drop-down menu, then click the cog icon and choose Photographic Toning. Once you're in there, adjust the options to create a mode that suits your image. After you get everything done, your image should look amazing and nicely blended together.

You would want to make these images to bring out some symbolism in you. Maybe you would want to show your interests in a creative way. Or maybe you just want to experiment in photoshop on what you can do. For example I used pictures of some sheet music and drums because more than half of my life revolves around music. I play a couple instruments; traditional taiko drums, drums (like in the picture), ukulele, a little piano, and I sing. So that's why I chose to take pictures of those pictures... yeah. I also like how you can see the song title "Music in My Soul" just wanted to put that out there.
  

HDR Photography

One of my favorite things we do in GT is HDR Photography, and that's what we are doing now. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. HDR basically means better resolution pictures that, if not done right, can look really blurry and bad. It's used to make pictures look awesome, also to make the areas you want pop. I love using HDR because it makes regular landscape pictures look absolutely amazing and it's a pretty simple process.

First, you need a camera and a tripod (you'll see why). To take an HDR picture you actually need to take three or more pictures at different exposures. The camera can't move for this to work, which is why you need a tripod. Once you have taken the pictures merge them in photoshop (File, automate, merge to HDR Pro).Then do some customizing to get it to look however you want it to. I learned that the option of removing ghosting doesn't automatically make it 100% better.

Final Experiment

In the process, I thought about a lot of things like, if it looks surrealistic, and if the ghosting was ok, also if the colors were to vibrant or to dull. I was also a little upset because I took some nice pictures and I wanted to keep it realistic, but we had to make it look "dream like" so I had to. They turned out nice though, and I like how I made it surrealistic.

                          Final Landscape

The bottom picture is my Superimposed picture, and I really like it, because I think it look really cool how the colors are pretty similar. I also love how it looks like she is really daydreaming, and looking into the "explosion"/sunset in the clouds. But, I had trouble getting her into the rule of thirds because of how I took my experiment, and where her arm was cut off. She also looks like she is popping off the picture. I don't know if that's ok for the requirements, but I sorta like it. I think it's cool how the shadows are kind of like the sunset made the shadows.

Final Superimposed