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.

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. 

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!

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.

                                      

My Visual Poem

My visual poem is about enjoying life. I wanted to tell people to enjoy life and do things that make you happy. For my visuals, I used a lot of pictures but they still show feeling. In most of my pictures you'll see someone laughing or smiling. You can really see that they're enjoying life. 

To make the mood of my poem a little more exciting, I added an effect called Ken Burns. This is a type of panning and zooming effect used on videos. So for most f my pictures I zoomed in on someone laughing or smiling to show that they are enjoying life. I think the ken burns helped show what I was trying to show in my pictures.

I am kind of satisfied with my results. I definitely could have made it better by using more videos and less pictures. It was kind of difficult for me to do this poem though because of how short it is, so the time for videos or pictures was very limited. I think next time I could think out a better way to show happiness and fun instead of all pictures.

Real World Report

The story I was interested in is called "No Death Penalty for Dad Charger in Toddler Death". This story is about a father leaving his toddler in a car for about seven hour. It was said that while his son was in the car, his father was sending nudes to ladies in his office. He not only sent nudes to women of age but also to underage women. The jury states that without 100% evidence that he intended to kill his son, they would not give him the death penalty. But he is facing murder charges.

I feel that he should be charged with two life sentences because if he got charged with only one death penalty, its a possibility that he could get out and that is not really fair. I feel that if he was capable of letting his own blood child suffer in the car with no air while it was very hot, he should stay in jail and be treated like a criminal. He should suffer just like his son did. In my opinion, people like that should suffer instead of just being killed easily. They should serve time around other criminals that can make him suffer.

I think people should be aware of this story because it is very cruel. People should see how important life is and how ones life can be taken at any time of day for any reason. It is also important for people to see this story so that they can see how dangerous our world is. There is a lot of people in the world that have really cruel minds and we need to be careful on everything we do.

Hiki Nō Behind the Scenes

For this project my team and I decided to do a news story. Our news story is based on hurricanes because of the great danger it can cause. We also chose this story because 2014's hurricane season in Hawai'i has been very active. Thankfully, so far this year we have not yet been hit with anything major. But we still keep our eyes open for any slight chances because we have heard or gone through experiences of past hurricanes and the tragedy it did to Kaua'i and the rest of Hawai'i.  So my team and I really want to send the message out to people that hurricanes are not something that should be taken lightly, you should be prepared; hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

So far we have gotten several interviews from family members and friends. We asked them questions like "What advice would you give to people that have not yet been through a hurricane?" and "If you have been through a hurricane, how did it affect you?". We asked various people these same questions so that we can get different ideas and perspectives and help people get a better visual on how and why you should be prepared for a hurricane.

When the camera is not rolling, my team and I are usually editing our interviews and B-rolls to make sure everything makes sense and looks good. We may look like we are just goofing around but we definitely are also doing work. I love my team because each one of us have our own great personalities and we get along well and help each other figure out problems (a lot of problems). Fixing those problems sometimes aren't easy but I think having five of us to put our brains together really help. I think to do my fair share and help the team I can talk a little less and brain storm more idea's for our B-roll. It is kind of difficult to find good b-roll because hurricanes aren't happening every day in Hawai'i (fortunately) but if i think hard enough, I'll come up with something. Stay tuned to Hiki Nō on your T.V. to hopefully see our finished product. Team Credits : Leleaka Anakalea, Russel Fu, Seth Kostelecky, and Noa Harrison.

The Experiment

Our very first project was named "The Experiment". For this project we needed to create any kind of project in photoshop. It may seem fairly easy, but the catch was that our teacher, Mr. Sanderl was not going to answer any question we had. He wanted everyone to get out of their comfort zone, including himself. Everyone struggled in one way or another, and Mr. Sanderl also struggled on holding himself back from helping us. This was an important project because it made us think deep and problem solve on our own using other programs to find answers. The down side of this project was that it took a little longer to complete it because we had to do a lot of research to find out how to do certain things. Although it was a struggle for myself, I enjoyed it very much!

Metamorphosis Animation

For this metamorphosis animation project, we needed to use different types of animation to make an interesting story. The animation we made, needed to make people think deeper into it to find the true meaning of the story. The group that I was in chose to use stop motion, digital art, and claymation. Our first scene was me playing as the bully, walking into the scene and picking up my victim (the flower) and tearing it down. Then we made the broken teared up flower travel down the stairs and a friend (Keegan Kessler) came to put the flower bak together. The friend picks up all the broken pieces of the flower and slowly pieces it back together into its normal self. Then the flower climbs back up the stairs and morphs into itself (Leleaka Anakalea). We tried to show that their will always be someone there for you and to keep you going. So even though the bully (me) broke the little flower, her friend was right there to help her.

I liked the way our video came out because it was interesting and really made you think. If I could go back and fix one thing, it would be the stop motion. Since stop motion is kind of to trick the eye, we could have made someone flying instead of just walking across the room. Although there is room for some improvement, overall I think  my team and I did pretty good.

Words of Wisdom

We interviewed one of our team members, Leleaka Anakalea's grandpa named Dave Stewart. We chose his story as our project because it had some great words of wisdom and inspirational words. We also chose his story as our topic because he told how he had some big, life changing decisions to make, and he made the right choices and now he is successful. I think that people will be interested to hear Dave Stewarts story because of his braveness and determination to do what he wanted, but of course he knew it first came with hard work.

Dave Stewart's words of wisdom are important because it's encouraging people to never give up and to work hard to accomplish your goals and dreams. His words of wisdom are also important because it helps people realize that no matter how scary some things may be, change is not always a bad thing. His words show that taking chances may not always end up bad. Taking chances may end up great!

Five Tips For

In my team there was 3 of us, Ku'umomi Thompson, Keegan Kessler and I. This is one of the first projects we did, and it was called "Five Tips for How to Play Volleyball". We chose this topic because one of our team members Keegan Kessler was very passionate and good at volleyball. So we thought it would be the most effective topic for our video. In this video we explained how you should hit the ball and where. We also explained why teamwork is good and what you should do when you're working with a team.

To make our video better, we could have thought out the shots better to make the shot clear. We could have also kept the camera from shaking by tightening the tripod. In our video there was a lot of camera movement, which in our video it's not a good thing. I also think we could have changed the color of the text over our video, or change the placement because you cant see clearly what it says in some shots because the background is the same color as the text. Although we could have done better, I think our video was good for our first video.

Practice Profile Story

The purpose of this practice story is to tell about Leleaka Anakalea's passion for singing. We wanted for Leleaka to be able to show off her singing skills. We also wanted to hear her story of how she got into singing and why she loves it most. We chose this as our practice story because it was very interesting and had a good story. We also chose this topic as our practice story because of how great her passion for singing was, and still is. I'm happy that we chose this topic because it also had some good inspirational words. I hope that people watch this video and become more passionate towards something they love and enjoy to do.

A couple of struggles that we had while making this video was finding b-roll that matched our voiceovers. We had to film our b-roll first because there wasn't enough lavalier microphones for the amount of groups. So because we filmed our b-roll first, we weren't that ready so we didn't film enough b-roll as the amount of voiceover that we had. We also struggled on the voiceover because we did not practice a lot so you could hear some mistakes. Overall our video came out good.

It was our first time as a group working in final cut pro to create a video, so we did stumble a couple of times but our group worked very well even through a little stress. After turning our practice video, we got critiqued and used those helpful comments to make our final video great.

Composition Techniques

Composition techniques are used to add interest to your different shots. There are a variety of different composition techniques. The four main ones are rule of thirds, framing, unusual angles and leading lines. Rule of thirds is when you divide your image into three parts, and place your image either to the left or to the right. Framing is when when you create an image using things in the background or foreground to create a frame around your subject.

Three Shot Sequences

In excellent videos, sequencing is a variety of shot types in order with interesting angles that show what is happening. Sequencing keeps the viewer watching. To have good sequencing you need a variety of different shot types. Those shot types include wide, medium, close, and extreme. To add more great sequencing, you can use different composition techniques like rule of thirds and unusual shots. For a great video, you need to first start planning your shots so that way you can film exactly what you need.

While making our three shot sequencing video, we ran into some problems. One problem was that we weren't ready. We made a plan but we didn't exactly follow it.

Spherical Panoramas

 Here are my two finished spherical panoramas that I made during G.T. class. The images for the spherical panorama on the left was taken at maui during my trip. Then the images for the spherical panorama on the right was taken on Kaua'i at the beautiful beach Aliomanu. To make these spherical panoramas, I had to first take overlapping images that started and ended around the same place. Then after importing them onto the computer we edited them on adobe bridge. Then we compiled them into a panorama image using PhotoShop's PhotoMerge plugin.

Next, I resized my rectangular 360 degree panorama to be squared and filtered using polar coordinates. Lastly we used the elliptical marquee tool to select the final spherical panorama's and feathered it by refining the edges. Then finally I applied a black or white background before saving the final composite image.

Polar Panoramas

 These are my two polar panoramas that I created in Photoshop. First I used the internet to see how to create a Polar Panorama. Then I chose a good location to take my images. After finding my location I took 10-15 images from left to right with a 10-15% overlap. Then I took my images and resized them in photoshop to a square, and rotated them 180 degrees.Then finally I applied the Polar coordinates filter. 

To make my Polar Panorama a little more interesting, I used the quick selection tool to cut myself out of a photo and drop myself onto the world. Then I resized the layer to make myself fit  my polar panorama nicely. The last step I did was copying and pasting my portrait layer, decreasing the exposure to black and turning down the opacity by around 50% to create a shadow.

Final Photomontages

This is a two photomontage examples that were inspired by a famous photographer named David Hockney. I used a digital camera and took multiple pictures from different perspectives of a location. ThenI edited my pictures using adobe bridge. Next I compiled them together to create these photomontages.

Magazine Cover

This is my finished personalized magazine cover that I made in photoshop to describe who I am. I edited all my photo's and different layers of this cover in photoshop cs5.1. The title of my magazine is " Family Adventures". I chose that as my title or main topic because I combined the two things I love the most, which is family time and adventures. Then I have some side topics that tell you a little more about myself and the things I like to do.