Thursday, May 28, 2015

Music Videos Rock!



MUSIC VIDEOS! This project is one of the most enjoyable, memorable projects that i've done each year for the past three years. I'm so glad to have three of my best friends able to do this project with me. In my group, there is Leleaka Anakalea, Brooke Kauo and Noa Harrison. I love them all because of their amazing personalities. They all now how to have fun while still doing work. We decided to do the song, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. Although Noa is a boy, and this song mainly revolves around girls, we have found many ways to incorporate Noa. So far we have mostly shot the girls parts, but No has helped us a lot to film and take charge of the camera. I love having him on our team. I also love having Leleaka on my team because of her work skills. She knows how to work under pressure and how to deal with any problems we have on spot. I also love having Brooke because she ALWAYS finds away to make everything funny. She keeps the group lively and happy which we really need for our music video.

I think our audience will love our whole music video, I think they will mostly enjoy Noa's parts, just because of the fact that it's a song mainly about girls and he is somehow finding ways to be in our video. Noa adds a really comedy touch to our music video which is amazing because it will keep people watching the video. I also think they will enjoy Noa's parts the most because of how the girls keep rejecting him but he continues to try and fit in. I'm sure that the audience will be laughing throughout the whole video. Many unexpected things coming.

Making this video is and has been very enjoyable. My team was very interesting because two of the students in my group, are actually newer to this class. This year was their first year in it. Then another group member, this is her second year in this class, and for myself, this is my third year. But that didn't make things any harder. It actually made it a lot more enjoyable being able to teach and learn new thing with the other students. In this video we showed what we learned throughout the year(s) because of our different shots and effects. We also showed what we learned by being able to edit this video on a new program. Throughout the years, we have been usuing Final Cut Pro X to edit all of our videos, but for this project, we had to use imovie which is new to many of us. Although FCPX has a lot more buttons, it does not make it harder. It makes it easier because all the tools we need are right in front of us. But in imovie, we kind of just had to explore and use some knowledge we had from using FCPX.



Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Our Animation Story



For our animation project, we chose to base our story on Kaylynn Drake's dancing story. The title of our project is "Kaylynn Overcomes Challenge". We chose this as our title or focus statement because it gives you some details on our animation. A focus statement or title should tell you a little about a story, but not too much. So from the title, you can see that our main character is Kaylynn and she faces a challenge. Our title says she overcomes it. We leave the audience with some questions like, how will she overcome it? What is her challenge? It leaves the audience wondering and they become more antsy to watch it.

I think from our story, our audience will learn that giving a helping hand really helps. It can make a big difference in some things.  In this story we show Kaylynns friend, Lilio, helping her while shes struggling on her dance moves, and in the end they succeed.  And it also shows that even when someone puts you down, don't give up. Prove them wrong and strive to be better. There will be hard times in life, but hey, There can't be a rainbow without a little rain, right? When the teacher is putting Kaylynn down in the story, she seems very down, but in the end, ends up very happy with her success.

With my team, our animation was a very enjoyable project. For me personally, it was one of the easiest with very little to no stress. With an amazing team, Kaylynn Drake, Kuumomi Thompson, and Sophia Rodriguez, the work was completed on time with great quality. We did struggle a little tho. In the beginning of our project, Kaylynn was out of school for a couple days which made it a little hard because she was our main character, but my team and I decided that we would do the stykz and white board animation because we did not physically need Kaylynn. So by the time Kaylynn came back, all we mainly needed to do was the stop motion animation. My team was very productive and handled things greatly. There was some times that we stayed a little into our recess and lunch, but they did not make a deal out of it, they were just happy that our animation was coming out nicely and so was I. i think the best moments was sitting down trying to edit. For many teams, it was stressful, but I think it was fun for us because we filmed only what we needed, so it made it easy to edit and we all got to sit down together and just play around with garage band beats and Imovie. We had a lot of laughters and were very proud with how our final animation came out.

Above is a picture of me working on one of our photoshop animation scenes.

We like to have a little fun during this work to make the project enjoyable.

Kaylynn drake showing Sophia her garage band skills.

Our results: We got the second most votes. 













Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Animation Outtakes

The animation above was created in photoshop. This was a quick animation I created to refresh my memory on doing these animations, so that I could easily do it on our real animation. In my team, there is Sophia Rodriguez, Kuumomi Thompson, and Kaylynn Drake. I love Sophia because she's really creative and does all of her work with best efforts! I also love Kaylynn Drake because she has a really funny personality and makes the best out of everything. Last but not least, I love Kuumomi Thompson because she makes the group lively and keeps us happy. But she knows when it's time to play and to work. I'm very happy with my group because I know they will make this animation project very, very enjoyable.
For our next project, we will be using a story about one of our teammates life or something that happened to them and show it through animations. We have many different animation types to show our story, like stop-motion, white board animation, stykz, etc. My favorite type of animation is stop motion because it shows real things, but can show unrealistic things happening. For instance, I could show a real human, flying. For stop motion, its basically just a bunch of pictures put together with about 30 frames per second to make it look more like a video than separate pictures. To save some of our animations that we created, we saved it as a .GIF. These files are supremely good at delivering simple animation sequences.

For Our Animation, we chose to use Kaylynn's story about dancing, because it was the most interesting, but it could also show a great story. We thought her story would be great because it's about striving for success and never giving up. We were also trying to show how life is in reality. Many people watch movies and see such perfect things, but on reality, there will be people that put you down, but with true friendship, you can prove those people wrong and show them that they aren't stronger than you.I think the audience should care about our story because of how much people are picked on, and although in our story, the main character gets help from her friend, their may not be someone to help other people, so just be nice and not put other people down.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Typography Images

Our current project in G.T is called Typography images. We are creating typography portraits which is where we use the shape of a portrait of someone and put words inside to deliver a message. It can be used with images to make a lasting impact because you can use inspiring words and show who said it at the same time. For example, you could use Martin Luther Kings picture and put in his "I had a dream speech" throughout his head. In that case, more people would pay attention to it because of how interesting it looks. So far i'm really enjoying this project.
                    Innovator 
At first when I seen how our final outcome should look, I got scared. From never doing this before, it looked pretty challenging. But over the days, after watching some tutorial videos, I realized it was a fairly easy project. I think after three years of being in G.T., i'm being able to understand and comprehend things a lot faster which made every step an easy follow along kind of thing. So most of the project was easy enough for me to follow along but hard enough to get me thinking. I Probably struggles the most with my "Me" example, because my portrait I used for it didn't have very much highlights. After posterizing my image and adjusting the contrast and some other things I had a little more highlight but still not the amount I wanted. I went on with the project so as to not get far behind and finished it up, but still the highlights weren't enough. Instead of restarting the project, I did what our teacher, Mr.Sanderl, recommended and selected my shadows and made it a different color (The blue area) and it made my image five times better.
                                                                     
The image above, is an image of Benjamin Franklin created by text. The text aren't just any words but they are information all about him. Since I made the text really small, I copied the first amount of text I got, and repeatedly pasted it until the words covered the whole page.

I think my favorite out of my three is "Me" because of how much more detail and layer effects I have compared to the other two. I also love the "Me" the best because you can see a lot of the words clearly and it explains me well.
                                                                                                                            Me                                                                           Teacher

I love the way me "Me" came out! I would definitely change some things the next time but I love it!


I also love the way my "Teacher" Came out! Love the way the colors fade together!




Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Double Exposed Portraits


Our new project consists of having a profile view picture of ourself and a couple landscape images that symbolize us. During the process of starting this project, we first learned what portrait photography is. It is photography of a person or group of people that displays the expression, personality, and mood of the subject. The focus of the photograph is usually the person's face, although the entire body and the background or context may be included. It can relate to profile view and silhouetting because the focus of a profile is also the persons face. So although it does not focus on the mood of the face, it is still used to show the outline of the face and some emotion.

Double exposures are created in Photoshop with a few simple steps. The first step is to get your images. You need one profile view and 2 or more pictures to put inside of you. Then you load it into Photoshop and make the area around your face completely white. When you are done with that, you can put one of your images on top of the profile view of you and change it to screen mode. Screen mode usually works really well, but if not you can try some of the other ones to see how well it is. Then you can add your other pictures and also make it screen so that it looks like the opacity is low. Then when you are done fitting all your pictures nicely, you can crop your image to exactly how you want, and save it. It's really interesting to make because of how original you can make it. You can put whatever it is you want in your head.

For my example, I used a picture of a small waterfall at Lumahai beach. I used that picture because of I love waterfalls and the beach, so that picture fit me perfectly. I also used a picture of a bunch of plumeria flowers. I used that picture not only because of the fact that I love flowers, but because of the color in it. The bright yellow in the flower kind of symbolizes how happy I am when I am with my family and friends. I loved the outcome of my work but to improve it, I could have added more effects to my images in my face.
Practice:
                                               
Final:







Wednesday, February 11, 2015

HDR Photography


HDR is short for high dynamic range. In my opinion, using HDR photography is super interesting. You can turn your normal pictures into a beautiful, saturated image. HDR uses 2 or more images with each image at a different exposure. For this project we took 7 pictures starting a low exposure and took 7 pictures moving the exposure higher. We then imported the pictures and put them into photoshop, but you can also use other programs. After taking some time to edit my pictures, that is my final product. I'm actually very happy with my outcome. I love the sunrise landscape because it really looks like a painting. I think taking a landscape of the sunrise or sunset is really cool because they're are many colors. The only difficult thing is keeping the camera still and your horizon line straight. I also chose Lele to be my subject because of the color of her eyes. Her eyes have multiple colors in them just like my sunrise.


Saturday, January 10, 2015

Movie Poster Promo

In our movie poster, you see the two main characters. Leslie acting as Malia and Miles acting as Ziggy. They are two strangers that meet and become best friends. Mutual feelings develop, but only for one person. Malia and Ziggy spend many days together enjoying themselves, but then things take a turn. Their friendship becomes nothing.

The title of our movie is "Young and broken hearted" because these two teens are only in high school and already get the feeling of being broken hearted. I used kerning in my title because it helps make thing more customized and interesting. Kerning is adjusting the spacing between fonts and letters.It really helps to make things original.

I used a lot of layer effects, one of them was adding a blur to make the main characters pop hop. I also used the color dropper to make a color scheme and kind of tie everything together. All of the different layer effects definitely helped my poster look more outstanding and unique.