Hockney Style Joiners

Hello! So back in GT class we have another project *drumroll* ... PHOTOMONTAGES!!
Okay so Mr. Sanderl talked a lot about this famous artist David Hockney and he is our inspiration to our photomontages. Our photomontages are different from David Hockney because his are a lot more difficult than ours because we're only just starting out.

Images, pictures, photos. They're all the same, so many words for the same meaning. Pictures can send lots of different messages, positive and negative. There's so many different ways a picture could be taken, you really have to think about your audience before you post because it could either make a  person feel really good or it could effect them as being something bad and insulting.

My final photomontage is a sequence of photos taken of one scenery, the scenery is of a street that shows a mountain in the background, its a sunny day that really brought me joy. Sunny, clear days make me happy! They make me want to go outside and adventure, so I thought that this day really captured that feeling of happiness and joy. I would really like to send the message that there's always room to be happy and that you should never take a day for granted because you never know if you'll get tomorrow.

2016 Aspirations

Heyyy y'all! I just came back from the mid-west! ah yes winter break is over, unfortunately. So Merry New Year and Happy Christmas, five goals I hope to attain is to stop procrastinating, strive higher to reach my goals, stay positive, get my grades up and to stop overthinking little things. Some of these goals I have a hard time keeping up with, and some I just feel like I need to work on.

My most important goal would have to be a mix of getting my grades up and to stop procrastinating, because I struggle with procrastination which effects my grades. I would really like to get into a good college and in order to do so I need to get good grades. Procrastination is a hard thing to work on but I know that I need to change my habits and get it together. I have a few C's and need to get those up so that I can have a successful high school and college career.

To stop procrastinating I will force myself to do my work and everything else on time and when I need to do it. I will motivate myself to strive higher to achieve my goals, not let the negative things bring me down to stay positive and I will focus harder on my school work to get my grades up. I will stop overthinking small things my clearing my mind and realizing that it's not the end of the world. My plan to getting good grades is to put down my phone and electronics and to really focus on my assignments. I am going to take this seriously so that I can feel better about myself when this year is over:) I hope to accomplish these goals by the end of the school year so that I can start fresh in high school!

Scratch Game Design

In our most recent project we constructed our own games! I wanted everything to be paced smoothly and correctly so I had to do a lot of research to make that happen. The goal of the game is to see how many points out of 12 you can get in the amount of 60 seconds. For every 5 seconds you stay away from the vampire mouse thing you win a point. I tried to make this somewhat simple so the the viewers of my first game could understand it better also because it was my first time making a game.

My chase game was a smoothly paced game, the sprites move in an evenly fashion and don't stutter when moving. The chase game that I made also switches backgrounds every ten seconds, I wanted the game to switch backgrounds every once in a while so that the player wouldn't get bored. Another thing my game features is that  the sprites both say something at the beginning of the game to kind of give you a heads up that the game is going to start.

I believe that my best code in my chase game was making the backgrounds change at a certain time, I had to do thorough research to get this code and it's my longest line of code. My biggest bug fix when making my chase game was making the sprites move smoothly, at first i was having a hard time getting the sprites to move right and left. I finally found a way to make them move and then I had to make them run smoothly.

Invention Commercial

Hello! For our invention commercial I think our main goal as a team was to persuade the audience to purchase our invention and to make it entertaining. Unfortunately we didn't have a lot of footage, because we only had one time to film out side of school and we had made other plans to film but all ended up being busy. We definitely had some struggles planning, I think we all know that we could've improved greatly. I honestly have no clue to how we came up with this invention, I guess it just came to one of us. We did a class critique on our Invention Commercial and I believe that our scores were pretty accurate. If we were to do a project similar to this I know that I would improve from all the information iv'e learned.

I think that one of our best team moments during this production was trying to memorize our lines, it was really funny because it was hard for Lucy to keep a straight face while saying her lines because she had to say the lines that were meant for people to laugh at. We were all laughing cause we couldn't keep a straight face and we finally realized that we had to get it done and tried hard to not laugh.

During our editing process we all had important roles faced upon us. We each did something to contribute to the making of our commercial. Meagan did voiceovers and made the animation of the Zip Zip, I told Lucy what would look good and where to put it and she arranged the footage in a organized fashion she also chose the sound effects that we added. We all had an equal amount of work and we all took the project seriously. We definitely would've had an easier time with this project if we had been able to film for a second time, so I learned a lot from this project.

Composition Scavenger Hunt

Hello everybody! So we have two group projects, I'll be talking about the first one we did in this post. My team and I had to take a footage of the different types of composition techniques. I think that the most important composition technique is rule of thirds, rule of thirds is very important for interviews. You have to have a specific shot for an interview, this specific shot is rule of thirds. It is a very important technique to learn and use, so learn it!

In my opinion the most difficult composition technique to use is leading lines because you have to space your subject in the perfect place and there aren't a whole lot of things you can do with leading lines. Leading lines start at the beginning of a shot and run through all the way to the subject. Leading lines are hard to use because unless you're in a corn or some kind of crop field it's going to be difficult to find an are that has appropriate lines that can be properly used. I think that you could use leading lines more when you are trying to be different, if you are wanting to be unique with your footage I recommend it because it is quite different.

My teammates  are very easy to work with, we all get a long really well and never have huge challenges when working together. Meagan, my first teammate, is very good at using the camera. She has a great sense of humor, nice and all in all a really great person. She's always very focused and is very good at planning. Lucy is a great worker as well, she's always pretty focused and is really good at editing! She knows what transitions look good and how to place things appropriately. Lucy is really kind and thoughtful. We all had our own roles and tried out the different roles as we go and kinda switched off every now and then. Go check out their blogs!

Cracking the code

Hello everyone! Im back from fall break, a new quarter and a new project! We are focusing on coding while we are going to be doing our group project, but i'll get into that later. So one of the questions Mr. Sanderl asked was "Do you think everyone should learn to code & why?" I think that it is very important to learn how to code because it is used in our everyday life, almost every device has a small computer chip that is coded to make that device work. Although coding is not for everyone. If you are interested in learning coding check out coding.org it has a whole bunch of different lessons to learn from! I am excited to learn more about coding because I think it will be very useful and maybe I will get good at it and make a career out of it.

My first experience with coding was a bit difficult, it took a lot of focus to learn where to put the blocks. I am really glad that I learned because if I wanted to I could possibly make a career out of it! The first time coding is going to be hard so if you're going to try it out you should keep that in mind. I enjoy coding honestly, it's definitely getting more and more difficult to do but it's fun! I hope that I can continue to do well in coding.

If I could produce a program it would be an amazing experience, I would make an app that would work as kind of a personal assistant. You would be able to schedule anything and have this "assistant" remember all of the information you gave it. The assistant would be similar to Siri but would remember everything and help you solve your daily problems. I know that producing an app like this would be incredibly difficult but if I have do decide to try I would hire someone to help out. My app would not cost a lot of money, the most it would cost would probably be $2.00. I'm all about cheap apps, I mean who wants to spend $5.99 on an app you might not even like, so I would have a free demo that you could download to make sure it's worth the investment.

My Humorous Monologue

VietsA_Comedy from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

Hello everyone! I have learned a lot during the filming and editing in this project. It's a struggle for me to figure out how to edit everything correctly, we had a few people that have been in this program for a couple of years come up and show the class how to edit properly but it's a lot to remember. Although using iMovie is not completely easy to use, i'm sure I will get used to it and eventually be great at editing footage. Another thing that I have learned is that coming up with something funny is a lot harder than it looks, especially when you are put on the spot. I had to really think hard to get my joke/monologue in play, I spent about 2-3 days just trying to find something funny and make it into a joke plan.  Another thing that I learned is that remembering pad is hard! I am happy that I am getting this experience and I am happy that I am learning a lot from this program. 

So what is pad? you're probably wondering. Okay so pad is the five seconds you put in front and at the end of a video. You do this because the camera usually takes a moment to start recording, so if you just immediately start talking your voice may get cut off. Pad is very important when making a film, because if you were shooting something important and didn't use the 5 seconds before or after then your important footage wouldn't show up. Remember to use pad, trust me it will make a difference!

I definitely had a hard time with planning this project. Figuring out when you can film and figuring out how much more you have to film is difficult and takes time. I know that I could've done better and I know that if we ever do a project like this again that I have room for improvement. I got pretty good scores for the class critique. If we were to do a project similar to this I would like to try working with a partner.  Although I didn't make it into the finalist I am glad that I did pretty good.