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

Movie Trailer Critique

It seemed to go by fast but the last project we did in G.T. was a movie trailer. For this project we had to create a movie trailer for a fake rated G movie. In other words it had to be a movie suitable for first graders. My teammates were Hannah Collins-Doijode, Keegan Kessler, and Leila Nelson.  The trailer plan document was really helpful for us when we had time to do something else productive. Our document was full of the things we had to do, like what scenes we still had to film, and we also used it to communicate when and where we could meet up. I did a good amount of work for this project. I filmed some of the scene, I helped write the voice script, I found the music and I chose the places to film.

The project requirements were: 1.) The video has to be at least 1 minute 30 seconds long. 2.) Must include foley, dialogue, text layovers, and effects. 3.) Completed voice acting script, movie poster, 5 scene plans, and trailer plan. Our team accomplished most of these requirements. The video has all the things required and is 1 minute and 36 seconds long (so close to being to short).

Movie Poster Promo

Next up, a movie trailer + poster! The movie trailer and poster will be presented to first graders once we finish. My team's movie is titled "These Memorable Moments". The movie is about a girl named Sadie whose father died. One day, she falls down near a creek, hitting her head in the process. But when she wakes up, things are not the same. She finds herself in a parallel universe. There her father is alive! However, being there comes with a terrible price, and Sadie is forced to make a choice no one should ever have to make. Possible destruction of the whole multiverse, or her father?

In my "These Memorable Moments" poster I have a picture of Leila (Sadie) and Aedan (Sadie's Father) in two different creeks. One creek is our world and in the other is the parallel universe she ends up in. I am going to make it so that it looks like they are looking at each other through the water. I put in a blur in the back so its like the two worlds are mixing together.

Like I said, the title is "These Memorable Moments" and the subtitle is "If you had a chance to see a lost loved one, would you take it?" That was the line that got my attention and pulled me in. It made me think about if I would take that chance. Some other text I added in were the reviews, and the actors names. With a lot of my text in the poster I used kerning. Kerning is adjusting the space in between letters, and the space between the lines. Kerning is really great because it can make the text look really neat and interesting which readers like.

I think the effects I put in really made it look really cool. The blur made it blend nicely and you can still see that there are some greenery on Sadie's side of the "vortex to the alternate universe."

My Visual Poem

In G.T Our next thrilling assignment was a visual poem. My visual poem was about being determined and not giving up. Most of the visuals I used were about a fear (the dark shots) and a challenge, and what it's meant to say is that you have to be determined or you wont accomplish getting over a fear or overcoming a challenge.

I didn't really put in any effects except for one generated screen, and that was supposed to show a blooming sort of feel. It was also to help understand that part better.

My final result was ok, but I probably could have made it a lot better if I was at school when my class was doing the project. I was sick at home with a fever for that whole week and so I had to do it after everyone else finished. I had to come in at recesses to work on it to get it done as soon as I could. If I wasn't trying to rush I could have been able to get better shots and edit it a little better.

Finished News Story

Our story was about a student here at Kapaa Middle School named Kaylynn Drake, and how she is breaking tradition and is the youngest and only female fire knife dancer on Kauai. According to her two older brothers, she seems very comfortable on stage and can keep her composure on stage. Everybody watching her seems very fascinated and interested. This project was a team effort, so my teammates were Leslie Acoba, Sydney Nice, and Kaylynn Drake.

The Final video was aired on Hiki No (a student run TV show on PBS Hawaii) and it looked great on the screen. I know how much work was put into it so that made viewing it even more exciting. When we came back to school our team all talked about how it looked on TV, and I think we all watched it (I can't remember very well), but I know that whoever watched it liked it.

When it was our turn to get critiqued we all got nervous (as usual). Our video actually did really good apparently, it was voted the class favorite (below). That's why our video was aired on Hiki No (I think). On the chart on the left, a 4 means an A scoring-wise. So a 3 means B and so on. I think our video was really good and we deserved the score that we got. we put in a lot of work into it and it payed off.

HikiNo Behind the Scenes

Mr. Sanderl assigned us to create an episode idea for HikiNo. HikiNo are news episodes that are made by students from different islands of Hawaii, these episodes are shown on Tv on PBS Hawaii every Thursday (I think). Kaylynn Drake, Sydney Nice, Leslie Acoba, and I are team 4. So, for my groups project idea, we are planning to do a profile story about the Drake Ohana, Mike Drake, Michael-Alan Drake, Emmsley-James Drake, and Kaylynn about how and why they do fire knife dancing. We decided as a team that we wanted to do it about Kaylynn Drake and her family because her family has been doing fire knife dancing for years and has been passing it down for generations. The story is about passing down the Samoan tradition and culture from generation to the next.

When the camera is not rolling we are coming up with ideas to make this profile story something more different, because Hiki No had another story about another fireknife dancer. So, we are also coming up different b-roll and lots of different edits. We as a team are trying our very best to make this something that no one has seen before. A lot of pressure is on us, so we have to try to make this perfect as can be. We will be discussing more things about how we should set the other shots for the other camera shots.

I think one thing that I can do to help my team is to always try to come up with fresh ideas to make this profile story interesting. Due to everything that's happening I can also focus on what we need to do and remind everyone about the due dates. I could also make sure every interview is done right, the b-roll is great, and ect. To help my team I can give options that I think would make the video even more better, I can help set up the cameras, and just see if they want me to do anything for them. The more we encourage and be there for each other, the more we will be come more of a team. Teamwork is everything! One thing I can do to help my team would be to be there and help plan things and be there to give more advice or maybe different camera angles. I think that our video will turn out really cool!

The Experiment

This was an exciting project because there were no rules and you could do anything you want in Photoshop. We had the entire period to work and do something amazing. I think we did this project because Mr. Sanderl wants to see how well we problem solve by ourselves, and how creative we can think. He let us explore and have fun while getting to know Photoshop and what it can do. On the other hand, it was a little stressful and hard when it came to the time and those times where you have absolutely no idea what to do.  I wasn't exactly done so I will upload the final project when done. :)

Metamorphosis Animation

This project was (I think) one of the hardest we did.  We had to Make up a story that shows metamorphosis using different types of animation including stop-motion, and claymation.  Thats exactly what my team did, but because we used a program called "styx" which uses stick figures to make online stop motion, we took longer than expected.  The end result wasn't as good as we expected it to be, because we didn't add voiceovers (which it needed) and a good enough soundtrack.  This time my teammates were Brandi, and Mikela.

Our focus statement was "Rose Changes Reality."  The story is about a magician who accidentally transports two girls/volunteers into a stick world.  In the stick world the go into a cave and find a mysterious cloaked figure that tells them that they need to find four different things from four different places around the world.

For our first scene we had Brandi as Rose and Mikela and I, was the audience. Brandi asked for two volunteers and then she put her green cape over them and made us disappear. In our second scene we were transported into animation. We appeared outside of a cave and then it starts to rain so we go into the cave. When we are in the cave we see a cloaked figure and he tells us that if we want to return back to the normal world we need to find four things. Those things were a golden teacup from England, a golden chili pepper from Mexico, golden maple syrup from Canada, and then golden bamboo from China. We found three magic brooms on the side of the road and we use those to fly around the world. Once we got all of those things we opened a portal to the normal world. Then we get distracted by a butterfly and then go through the portal.  Then end up back to normal but then when we get back we come in and hit the wall of a studio.

When we finished the animation we had a animation critique in class. My team didn't finish our soundtrack in Garageband but we had to turn it in anyway. For the results of the critique we met the requirements.

Words of Wisdom

This project, "Words of Wisdom", was a video interviewing our elders about some words of wisdom they have for us, the younger generation. The person we interviewed was Ms. Andrade, and she had A LOT of wisdom to share. When fourth quarter started she became one of the Vice-principles of KMS.  So she has moved up a step.  We hit some bumps along the road but with good teamwork and cooperation we managed to get it done, and have the best video in the class (arguably).

Our words of wisdom were important because as I said before, Ms. Andrade had a lot of relevant wisdom to share. It was really inspiring to hear her life story, all the challenges she faced to be here. I hope everyone else "felt the feels" like me when they watched our video. :)

FIVE TIPS FOR Improving Your Soccer Skills

In the first quarter of school, my G.T. class and I made Five Tips For... videos. My team had me, Brandi Baligad, and Mikela Griffin. We chose to do five tips for improving your soccer skills. I think we chose this topic because a lot of people play soccer and we thought that this could help some people improve. I think that we could have worked better as a team because we had a lot of disagreements. Also, we ended up not having as much b-roll as we should have had, and needed.

Practice Profile Story

Before the final product, there is usually a rough draft.  But, with this project, there was a practice even before a rough draft. Our practice story was about me and my hobby, Taiko drumming. Our purpose of our story was to educate our audience about Taiko drumming and to engage them with an inside look at a drummer and her individual story.  I worked with Brandi Baligad, Hannah Collins-Doijode, and Mikela Griffin.

My team chose me because of how interesting they thought my hobby was and how that hobby isn't that common (people find things they don't know much about interesting).  Taiko drumming was chosen because of the previously mentioned reasons, it is not very common and an interesting topic.

Composition Techniques

Rule of thirds, framing, unusual angles, and leading lines are some of the keys to great photography and video taping.  Rule of thirds is when you imagine the picture split into three equal parts two ways, and your subject is inline with them.  Framing is when you take a picture with a natural frame around your subject.  Unusual angles is... what it is, where you see it at an unusual angle.  Leading lines is where you see lines pointing to your subject.  There are others too.  Maybe you can learn about them, they are: Emotion, action, close up, reaction, contrast in content, repetition of shapes, group shot, parts of a whole, and horizontal.  Plus Vertical, but only for photography, not video.

See if you can figure out which one is which: HERE

Three Shot Sequences

In great videos, sequencing is a series of 3 short clips with interesting angles and changing perspectives that help visually describe the action happening. Sequencing is a way to make a video make more sense, and make it great. This example explains coming and writing something, in this case "PASTA!". 

Spherical Panoramas

These are two examples of Spherical Panoramas that I created. First, I had to take two different sets of 10-15 images in a 360 degree rotation with a 10-15% overlap. The images were then edited using Adobe Camera Raw and compiled into a panoramic image using PhotoShop's PhotoMerge.

Next, the rectangular 360 degree panorama was resized to be square and filtered using Polar Coordinates. Lastly, the final spherical panoramas were selected using the elliptical marquee tool and feathered by refining the edges. Then, I had to apply a black or white background.

before saving the finished composite image.