Music Videos Rock!

                      

P1T8 Ramble On from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

For our music video project, all of our team members contributed to our work. We were all actors in the video, and at least two members edited. We all have special parts to play that we need to heavily exaggerate to make it seem humorous. We all filmed something, and lip synced in the video, so we all contributed to this project. None of us really slacked off or didn't do much work.

I think the audience will enjoy our costumes the most. Since we look so ridiculous, the audience will likely love us exaggerating every single thing and being funny in a serious song. As for the actors, we all had a special part to play. I, being the cheater girl, wears a leather jacket and bright purple lipstick. I have to act humorously evil in the video too. Raf, being "Gollum", or the bad guy that takes me away from Aedan, wears devil horns, a black cape, and we put mascara on his face to make a mustache and goatee (he looks pretty ridiculous, so that will add on the cringe-worthy humor at the end). Raf has to act like a really big jerk the whole time. Aedan has to exaggerate being sad, and he wears an innocent striped shirt and looks like a nice school dude. Ana wears a bright blue dress and has to act really nice but derpy the whole time. To sum it up, when it comes to the critique, we will all be cringing because of how stupid we look, haha.

This project sums up what we learned this year because we put in tons of transitions and effects from previous projects. We slowed some clips down, and sped some up to match the time requirements. We added some visual effects to set the mood of the situation and what's happening during the video. We even added almost one transition to every clip. Everything we learned this year from the effects to the different camera angles, we tried to incorporate in this music video.

Ana and I trying to hold down Raf for his make-up

Raf getting ready to put on his costume

   

Lyrical Livelihood

OUR LAST PROJECT FOR GT IS AMONG US!!! EVERYBODY PANIC! No, don't really... But our very last project is here: The Music Video... But before I tell you about that, allow me to tell you how my favorite song lyrics make me feel, for the sake of the subject (and science). Now it's not necessarily my favorite song, nor is it the song my team will be working on, but it definitely has the feels when I listen to it. The song is "Disarm" by The Smashing Pumpkins. And the lyrics that make me feel emotion is "Disarm you with a smile, And leave you like they left me here, To wither in denial, The bitterness of one who's left alone, Ooh, the years burn, Ooh, the years burn, burn, burn" and "used to be a little boy, So old in my shoes, And what I choose is my voice, What's a boy supposed to do?, The killer in me is the killer in you, My love, I send this smile over to you". I love these lyrics because they're so poetic and great. Plus the song is really catchy and nice.

So for my team's project, we chose to do Ramble On by Led Zeppelin. My team consists of Rafael, Aedan, and Ana. The reason we chose to do this song is because we wanted to do some kind of rock song that was both catchy, and poetic. Ramble On fit perfectly into this category, and we all like the song. There were other choices like Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day and Eye of the Tiger by Journey. But our final choice seemed to be the best fit. 

So Ramble On is actually like one big reference to The Lord of the Rings, but since that would be kind of difficult to incorporate into the music video, Raf decided that the song would be about a guy who gets cheated on by his girlfriend, and he goes on a journey to find "The Queen of all his Dreams". For our video, Aedan is the guy who gets cheated on (poor Aedan), I'm the girl that cheats on him with "Gollum" or the bad guy, Raf is Gollum, or the one I go to from cheating on Aedan, and Ana is the "Queen" or the fair girl that Aedan finds. I'm feeling really good about this video, and I really hope it turns out alright and we don't embarrass ourselves on camera! 

 

Our Animation Story

P1T6 Kiara Receives Party from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

For our animation project, our focus statement was "Kiara Receives Party." This focus statement tells our story because the story is about me leaving my old school and how all of my friends threw me a big surprise party. So in this project, we film a ton of different animation types like stop motion, Styks, and Photoshop. Each scene has a different kind of animation. My whole team worked extremely hard to try and get our story across.

The lesson that this story teaches is that your friends will always come through for you and you shouldn't give up on them. How our project shows this lesson is by showing my friends throwing me the party, giving me a gift (hat), and carrying me to my car when the day is done. This was a little difficult to show at first, but we figured out how to do it in the end. Now with our project, you can see how our story shows this lesson.

We had some ups and downs in our project. Our best moment was probably when we finally reached the minimum time limit of 60 seconds. We were all celebrating when we saw that we had about one minute and three seconds, which sounds kind of ridiculous when I say it. Our worst moment was probably when we had to do a Styks animation in a short period of time, and we were two people short. And added onto that, the two people left either wasn't very experienced in Styks, or was busy with something else. But in the end, we pulled through.

Animation Outtakes

So I'm doing a new project in my class: Animation. First I should start off by describing my new teammates: Rafael, Aedan, and Iris. I'm really happy with my teammates and I feel like we will all work well with each other.  Rafael (Raf), is always joking around, but tries his hardest when it comes to work that matters. Aedan is super nice and fun to work with. Iris is very intelligent and works very hard to get things done. Together, I think we make a great team.

Stop motion is a technique where you would have to take a picture of something, move it a little, then take another picture. This would, when played out, create the impression of movement towards the object. You would keep doing this until you're done with the animation. A .GIF is a series of images animated by moving the object little by little on the computer and lasts shortly.

For our story, we're doing a surprise party that my old friends threw me when I moved away. This idea shows that you shouldn't give up and forget the people you care about, as my story shows me still keeping in touch with them. This might be kind of tough, but it'll definitely be fun!

Typography Images

Typography is the style and the appearance of printed matter. In translation, it is the act of arranging type and printing it. Typography can be used with images to make a lasting impact. The way typography does this is by using the text to your advantage and creating things from it to make it more than just text on a page. Typography allows you to transform some thing boring, like text, into something much more meaningful like a person or other image.

While doing the first picture of Nikola Tesla, I ran into one or two complications. One of those being the text itself. I had to copy and paste almost all of the text from Nikola Tesla's Wikipedia page and squish it all together into one big paragraph. I felt the need to indent all of them, (even though I was not supposed to!) But the actual problem I had with the text was that I thought I was doing everything wrong, (which I do often) but Leila told me that it was fine, so I took her word for it. If I did it wrong blame her (jk). Once I put all of the text together, I had a little trouble adjusting the lighting of the text and Nikola himself. I overcame both of these obstacles, and I think it turned out great. The real obstacle I came over was in my second image, I had a lot of trouble bringing out her eyebrow.

I liked my first typography image a lot. Though I admit, it could of been improved, I think that I did fairly well. What makes the first image different from the others is that it's: 1) Black and white. and 2) The text is in the background as well. My second image of Ms. Bandsma could've definitely been improved. It was difficult to see Ms. Bandsma's raised eyebrow and I had to start over and completely change everything. I like a few qualities about my second image, but I could've done much better... My third image is my favorite by far. While it may not be perfect, I really tried my hardest on the image. I like the colors I chose and my word choice is pretty great. I used words such as "Dork", "Nerdy", "Gamer", and "Kind" to match who I am, or at least how I see myself. My biggest obstacle would probably be trying to get Ms. Bandsma's eyebrows to stick out. We weren't really supposed to use the soft brush at all, but it was the only way I could get her eyebrows to actually show. So I was kind of in limbo for a while. I ended up using the soft brush anyways, but turned the opacity down a bunch.

1st Finished Typography Portrait of Nikola Tesla

2nd Finished Typography Portrait of Ms. Bandsma

My "Me" Typography Image in Process

Final "Me" Typography Image

Double Exposed Portraits

Today Mr. Sanderl posed a fair question for us to answer: What is portrait photography? Or an even better way to phrase the question: What is portraiture? I looked up the definition and studied up a bit on this knowledge. I've studied enough for me to put it in my own words. Portraiture is a photograph of a person or a group of people that shows some kind of emotion or mood. The focus of the picture would be their face and sometimes most of their body and background. Now I realized that portraiture can relate to silhouetting, since silhouetting is basically a darker object's shadow with a light background. Mixing portraiture and silhouetting would be a beautiful photo to create. Now what we're doing is something called double exposed portraits. What these are is taking a portrait picture, and two other images that may be symbolic or just beautiful. Then you blend these images together and you get double exposed portraits.

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. Whether you're doing something symbolic or just for fun, you should definitely try out double exposed portraiture.  

HDR Photography

Some of you might be wondering what that little setting on your camera that says HDR does. Well HDR itself means "High Dynamic Range" which is fancy for the ratio of light in your photograph. When taking HDR photos, you don't just take one photo, but three or more photos at different exposures. What makes HDR photos so special is that when you combine those images together, it creates a surreal image thats pleasing to the eye. HDR photos add light to the spots that need more light and darkness to the spots that need more darkness to create a mysterious, yet beautiful picture. What I like about HDR is that it can turn a boring image with no effects, and turn it into a fascinating picture that brings out the natural part of the image and makes it look more real, yet dream-like.

Now even though I gave you a brief explanation on how HDR works, I feel like I should explain it more. So once you find a picture-worthy place and set up your camera, you find the exposure setting. I recommend taking five different photos at different exposures. The first image is at a low exposure
, the next picture you go up one or two notches, the next go higher, and so on and so fourth, until you've taken the right amount of photos that you want. None of the photos should be the same exposure when taking HDR photos. Now if you have an automatic HDR function, it makes it a whole lot easier. Automatic HDR basically does all that manual stuff for you. It takes multiple pictures at different exposures and combines those pictures into one image. Now while this may be very helpful, I have seen that taking manual HDR photos tend to look better than the automatic HDR photos. But that's just my opinion...

The landscape HDR photo that I took myself, looks pretty surreal to me. I really like how it merged together even though I (for some odd reason) only had six photos instead of seven... Though I was really upset I only had thirteen photos instead of fourteen, I feel like I did fairly well. I think my landscape photo was better than my experiment photo, and the surrealism is very nice in both photos. The thought process behind the landscape photos is simple: I wanted it to look like a dream, but not the kind of dream where it's all nice and fairytale-like. It's the kind of dream where it's mysterious, yet beautiful. In my experiment photo, I wanted to pay attention to the detail.

My final picture that I put together in photoshop turned out alright. I could've done a lot more to make it better, such as paying attention to the rule of thirds, or maybe moving Rafael and Leila up a bit so Rafael's head is peeking out of the ocean and Leila is actually looking at the word "confidence". But the final image still turned out okay even though I could've made it better.