Back to School

My summer was filled with many laughs and great memories, but now its time to go back to school. So far this school year has been good, Ive met many new people and made many new friends. My favorite moment so far was hanging out with all of my friends at recess at lunch. I love talking story and having laughs with them all. My biggest challenge was when my class and I got assigned to start our first project in photoshop. For this project, our teacher Mr. Sanderl let us do anything we wanted to, but there was a catch. The catch was that he was not going to help us at all, we just had to use whatever knowledge we already had. Many people had a lot of experience with photoshop, but many students had no knowledge what so ever with photoshop. Many of the students helped each other and used our different tools like safari to learn how to use the application. For my first project, I chose to do a deface animation. I learned how to do this last school year in this same class. Although I learned how to do this "Deface" project, my memory was faded. I had a hard time remembering a lot of the steps, but with deep thought I was able to figure it out.

Deface Project (Unfinished)

This year I will be successful by doing all my work on time and stop procrastinating. This year I plan to be more aware of my grades and stop focusing on other unimportant things. I am going to make sure to be early and on time to every class. Before school started I made sure to be prepared with all my pencils and paper, so now I just have to put it to use.

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.

Profile Project Progress

For our project we decided that Dave Stewart, Leleaka Anakalea's grandpa had a great story to tell, so we chose him to tell his story. We chose him because not only was his story very interesting, but it also had some great words of wisdom for viewers watching. His story was based on how he got to Kaua'i and the struggles he went through, and even after all the hardships he has had great success. To show some of his successes, we took some video footage if his kayak business and interviewed him. His kayak business is located in Hanalei, so we figured that would be the best place to interview him. So we interviewed him right outside of his business and it was also great because his story brought out Hanalei a lot.

In order to show footage of Dave Stewarts company, we shot some B-roll. B-roll is video footage that adds interest to the story. It also shows whats happening instead of telling. Some people also use B-roll to patch up edited voiceovers. When interviewing someone, its best to have B-roll over the interview because it helps the viewers understand more. You should always remember that there is never too much B-roll.

Leleaka Anakalea, Hershel Weiner and Loren Weiner are the members in my group. Overall our group is good when it comes to working together. We could do better though. Some parts we could work on, is communicating. Instead of letting each other know how everything goes we usually just chat a little here and there.

My group and I turned in our rough cut of our video and got critiqued. Not only we got graded but we also got some suggestions on how to make our video better. Some suggestions we got was to film a lot more b-roll to cover up more of the interview. Another suggestion we got was getting more interesting shots on our b-roll. I'm glad I got critiqued and graded because it helps me know what people wants to see. On the grading part, we did not do very well, but that is why we have got to shoot more b-roll to make our video go from okay to 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.