Music Videos Rock, And I'm Sad

For our amazing music video, we've put in a lot of work towards it. I've done a lot of editing, and filming. Justice has been in the actual video most of the time, being as swaggy as possible. Maceo has also been in the video a lot and has been swagging it up constantly. Lastly, Sophia has helped with the editing, and filmed a lot. We've all brought props such as sunglasses, vests, flamboyant coats, and disco pants.

I think that my audience will enjoy the humor factor of the whole thing, I mean it's pretty hilarious. Instead of having a blooper reel, the whole thing was basically a blooper. We had creative lip-syncs, an interesting plot line, and a good overall turn out. I think our audience will love the whole thing. Even though it's four minutes, it's a good four minutes.

I think our music video represents what we learned this school year a lot actually. Even though it might seem like it can be basic, we put in a lot of hard work and dedication to this project. We had to use our camera skills, getting good clear angles, and the editing skills were crucial.

Behind the scene photos of us messing around are the best kind

The last four were done by my outstandingly amazing friend Michael John Anderson, thanks, bro.

Through painful editing, and extremely fun filming, I'm going to have to say that this was one of the best projects we have ever done. Sadly, I am leaving to the high school too soon. I am going to miss this class, it made me who I am, this class is a part of me, and always will be. I'm sorry if you've seen me start tearing up because I don't want to leave morning announcements and GT but, Mr. Sandrel, thank you for the best class I could ever ask for, for three years. I hope the new students will love the class as much as I do.

Lyrical Livelihood

To be honest, I really don't know my favorite song.  I know my favorite band... But all of their songs are so amazing. When I listen to their music, it makes me feel like I can express everything I'm thinking by just playing their music, they help me to feel better and think better, and just be better in general. By the way, my favorite band is Twenty Øne Pilots. They are a band that consists of techno style music with punk or emo influences on a lot of songs, that can really vary throughout any song that you may choose.

Justice, Maceo, Sophia, and I, are doing Stayin Alive by Bee Gees. We picked this song because it's basically the most funky amazing song ever. It's funny, catchy, and everyone knows it. Best song ever am I right? The song itself is one of the most danceable well known songs I've heard. 

For our visual stories in the video, we're planning or a lot of swag. Mostly ironic. It involves swag walking, swag dancing and the evil swag disciples. We join forces and have the ultimate swag to defeat the swag disciples. We have to dance and protect the swag. God, this is awesomely embarrassing. Not to spoil too much, but it's going to be pretty amazing. 

Our Animation Story

For our animation project, we are dong the focus statement "Hannah Switches Schools." The theme of this project is to "Tell your story" and so we went with Hannah's story because she had the most interesting one. Portraying a story in animation can be difficult, but if you put enough effort and time into something like this, then it's definitely achievable. We had to use at least three animation typed, so we used whiteboard, stop motion, Stykz, and Photoshop.

The lesson we are hoping to get across the audience is that change isn't always so bad. Lots of people worry when they're moving or changing schools because they aren't sure of what the outcome would be like. In this story we would want to show that sometimes change can be for the better. Even when worry plagues your mind, you can come through and make it work.

In the process of making our animation, we did really well working as a team. We worked together, and made it happen. Our best moments were when we all were working on different scenes, and then stitching them together to make one big great animation. I think our worst moments as a team... Well we didnt really have any really bad moments. I think the worst was when Justice wasn't here, and none of us could do Stykz. In the end, we just replaced it with a photoshop scene. The only real trouble was that and finding more time in our video, we had to add on another scene to make the time cut.

The Anger Of Stykz

What the class thought of it

Animation Outakes

For our new project in GT, we weren't allowed to work with people in past projects. Of course that doesn't mean I haven't worked with all my friends so I'm still pretty happy. I'm working with Justice, Hannah, and Cherish. Apparently we have to name two facts about them. So I guess I'll start with Hannah, she plays soccer and is borderline obsessed with Dan and Phil on the youtube. Justice is a surfer and you can often see him photoshopping weird things on his computer. Then theres Cherish. Cherish is obsessed with anime and Japanese culture, she also spends almost as much time as me on the internet, which is almost concerning.

Stop motion animation is when you take multiple photos of an object and string them together to make the object move in a creative way. A .GIF (pronounced gi-if not jif), is a lossless format for image files that supports both animated and static images. So it's basically a really short clip of something that repeats.

In our story, we're doing the story of when Hannah moved from St. Catherine's to Kapaa Middle School. This story can show that change isn't always bad, and that you shouldn't let worry hold you back from making new experiences and meeting new people. People can use it as a way to relate when something of a big change happens. 

Typography Images

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language readable and beautiful. In our case, we're using photos and text, to make it look like the text makes up the photo. It can be used to make a lasting impact by sparking interest in the viewer. You can also make the words in the photo describe the person to make it more personal. Using intriguing words can really bring in the viewer and have them see why the words are used, or just look at what words make up the photo.

My biggest challenge in the project was probably following along or Mr. Sanderl when we were actually doing the typography because he went really fast when we were creating our practice typography. I overcame this issue by looking at our tutorial that he provided me with.  The issue was quickly solved by me looking closely at the tutorial, and following closely. Another, smaller issue I had, is when we had to create a layer mask, I couldn't figure out how to paste the photo on the mask. I mean, it was an ignorant mistake, but I realized that I just wasn't really doing the right command. After going over the tutorial closely, I fixed all my mistakes.

In class, we did three typography portraits. One was an innovator, someone that made something important, and I chose the creator of google. For my second typography portrait, I took a picture of Mrs. Sandrel. The last one was me. Each one got more complex then the first, making it more difficult but also improving the overall image amazingly. My favorite has to be the me one so far, I mean not to sound conceited but I think it's going pretty well. It represents me and what I like really well and while now it looks messy, once it's finished it will look more amazing then what it already looks like. 

Mrs. Sanderl

The Creator Of Google 

Me

Double Exposed Portraits

Portrait photography a person or group of people that displays the expression, personality, and mood of the subject. Like other types of portraits, the focus of the photograph is usually the person's face. In this case we are taking a photo of the side of the face. It can relate to profiling because with a portrait, the face can be turned sideways and it will still be considered a portrait, of course. It can relate to silhouetting by the similar properties it can have in the photo, like a person, and/or a face.

Double exposures are created in photoshop by first compiling your files in a stack, so they're all on top of each other. Next you can put your layers in order (face on top) and use the dodge tool to white out the background. After, you can put that layer into blend mode so the background images stand out. You can also make adjustments on the layers on make your background images stand out on the silhouette of your/someone's face.  You can really make it pop by adjusting the blend mode and adding layer adjustments. I like making these, and you'd want to make one because they turn out amazing and look like artwork. I personally added three adjustment layers to make it really stand out, and have the photos blend together well.

For my multi exposure, I used books, the ocean, and converse (shoes). The requirement was two symbolic photos , but of course I had to use three. The books represent my love for reading, knowledge and how I love learning new things. The second image is the ocean and rocks. After school everyday, my friends and I walk down to the local library and sit where I took that picture, so it holds some sentimental value. It also ties in with my last photo, which is Leila's and I's converse, representing friendship. My quality can be improved upon by making it more clear in general.

HDR Photography

HDR stands for High-Dynamic-Range photography. HDR photography is when the camera captures the image you want in multiple exposure levels (how bright that is). Then, manually, or using a program, you can put the photos together to make a photo that has the darks and the lights that make it more appealing to the eye. I really like HDR photography because it makes beautiful images so much better. You could take a normal photo and some places could be over exposed or completely under exposed, but with a HDR it balances everything out in a photo.

If you want to make a HDR photo step by step, you manually make the image better with adjusting the exposure, the colors, and everything else to make it a better image with your own touch. It is completely different from automatic HDR images, in the way that you don't have as much of a personal touch to it. With the manual you can make it surrealistic or have different colors stand out, but with the automatic, it just makes it a better picture in general.

While I was making my HDR images, I really thought about how I could make it the best I ever could, even surrealistic. I wanted something that stood out, and that didn't look like everything else. I wanted my images to be original with my personal touch. With my landscape photo, I wanted something bright and colorful, so I upped the exposure and the saturation, making the colors stand out. With my "experiment" (a photo of a person) I wanted more of a darker feeling towards it, a feeling that made people think about what was happening. After I finished both of those images, I compiled them into one, and put my subject into my landscape photo. To make it have a... How would you say... A feeling that everything came together correctly. I brightened my subject up quite a bit and then added some warmth, to make it fit better to the background. Thus creating one image with both of my HDR images in it.

Movie Trailer Critique

The new project we did in my GT class, was a movie trailer. I thought this was a great project to do, and I worked with Seth, Aedan, and Kaylynn. To do this project, of course we had to make a plan for our trailer. In our tailer plan, we laid out what we needed to do and all of the requirements that we would put in. We wrote out our voice acting script, our scenes, our keywords, etc. I contributed to this by writing out what I thought would flow nicely and making sure I was available to help whenever. 

Our final trailer needed to be in between a minute and thirty seconds and two minutes and thirty seconds five well sequenced scenes, text layovers, voice acting, foley, dialogue, and a movie poster. And yes, our movie trailer had all of these. We completed these by working quickly and efficiently. For our project, it was a bit harder to cram all that into that little time but we managed to cut some out and make it so it was just as good, just a little shorter. -



Conclude by describing the class critique & if you agree with the results. What did you learn?
In our class critique, I think we were graded unfairly. I do not agree, honestly. I think that our movie trailer was pretty great and most of our classmates gave us twos, and I believe it was at least a three. I learned that... I guess it wasn't as good as I thought it was? I learned that my class has a very sharp eye for things that I may have overlooked.

Book Folding

In my seventh period class, with Mrs.Sanderl, we did a project with folding books to make a word or something amazing.We based this project off on Issac Salazar's famous book folding. This form of art would be classified as visual literacy. Visual literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning
from information presented in the form of an image. This is an example of visual literacy because we make the books into actual words out of books, that are filled with words.

For my book I did the words "What" and "Dan". I chose these words because "what" signifies my questioning of basically everything. "Dan" represents my love for "danisnotonfire" who is a famous youtuber that I enjoy watching. For each book, I folded  between 200-500 pages. When I was folding my intentions were to make the person question what they were seeing... Now I know I haven't exactly finished "Dan" But thats okay.

I think that my project turned out quite well. I'm pretty proud of what I've done and I'll be sure to finish my last book. If I were to do something different I would have tried to make my folds more sharp and visible. If I were to do this project again, I would probably do something like Sam or Dean, relating to my love for Supernatural.

Proactive or Procrastination?

Be honest, are you proactive or a procrastinator? Why or why not?

I would say that I am definitely procrastinator. Usually, Im doing something then I remember I have homework or something and then panic but like keep doing what Im doing but with panic. Not a very good strategy, yes I know. But eventually, when it's almost too late, I get it done. I mean, at least I get it done. 

In class, I don't tend to procrastinate, but it depends on if I have a book handy or my sketch book. If I have something else to distract me, well I get distracted easily.

My level of productivity usually doesn't strongly relate to my free time. I guess if I work more then I have less free time, or if I get it done in school, then I have more free time. But really it depends on how much work I have; like if a teacher gives me like two questions or a whole paper due by tomorrow. 

If I was to change my work habits, Id probably do things when they're assigned, not the night before at 4 a.m. And, I mean I probably would if I wasnt so busy all the time. A lot of teachers blame kids for not doing their work because they are lazy, but why are kids expected to finish these huge projects for each class while they all have hours of homework, extra curricular activities, socializing, stress relief, keeping themselves healthy, and getting enough (the average teen is supposed to get 9+ hours) sleep?

My Visual Poem

ClarkM VisualPoem from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.


My visual poem is about me breaking free from all the things that hold me down. I can escape through many things. I can get away from things through art, music, shows, or anything that distracts me or changes my everyday life. It expresses how I am bored with reality and love to escape through my many passions. The visuals show how I see the world and how I really feel.

My effects, like the transitions and the color enhancing, affect my video by automatically making the video better by adding interest. I think using the transitions smooth out the video. I also think that the text layovers add a certain degree of clarification. You can also use affects to add depth and more meaning into your story.

Im pretty satisfied with my final result. I think I could've done better with my audio, it's a bit shaky and wind filled. I also could have gotten some more relevant B-Roll, but I did my best. I also feel like my background music was a little too upbeat for some parts, but for the rest I think it matches. Overall, I think my video is pretty well done and I'm happy with it.

My poem plan

Finished News Story

Me, Leila, Kiara, and Cherish, all worked on a news story on a way of alternative energy on the island, as you might have seen from previous blog posts. We went and interviewed multiple people that had to do with it, or was opinionated with the biomass plant in mind.  We interviewed people from the plant, citizens of Kauai, and people that are in direct knowledge of alternative energy.

I would have to say that my video turned out pretty well. I think we have good editing skills and that it all flowed nicely. We spent a lot of time perfecting this video and I think we did really well on this big project.

Looking at the critique results, I do not agree with them. As I was looking over the results I was confused and saddened. We did have a lot of threes, which I think could be appropriate in some ways, but there were a lot of twos which I think are wrong. I would of rather had a written response because I have no idea why we got these stats, I think we deserved better.

World News

According to a news article, Hector Beltran Leyva, a famous "drug lord" has been captured and arrested. He was in San Miguel de Allende, north-west of Mexico City, and had been living in the nearby city of Queretaro posing as a businessman dealing in art and real estate, according to the government. The Beltran Leyva gang has had a reputation as one of the most ruthless in the business.

Hector Beltran Leyva: gang known for its ruthlessness. Picture: AP Photo

My personal opinion on this issue is that I am happy that he was finally caught. Drug gangs are powerful, and being as ruthless as this one was, it could harm a lot of people. According to the article, they were planning a "bloody turf war" against against former ally Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman. These people have hurt multiples and would hurt more in the future, so I am happy that they caught him.

People should care about this because this gang and the leader could of hurt many people, and they could also bring other people down with them. People should care because these are real people that have done bad things and deserve to be thrown in jail, the people that caught him deserve recognition.

Lessons Learned

While we continue on our news story in GT, our team comes across some interesting things. For me, I thought the most interesting thing was seeing how the plant worked and seeing the workers use tools and planks of wood to keep building upon the plant to make it better. I also saw, when we were driving into the biomass plant area, we saw the colorful albizia trees that they use to burn. The albizia trees have bark in different colors which make them extremely pretty, but due to being an invasive plant and damaging the native ecosystems, they use that tree to fuel the plant.

I think our biggest roadblock in our project was making sure we met all the deadlines for Mr. Sandrel. We had to transcribe three huge interviews in a short amount of time.


I think the most important and valuable part of filmmaking is working together, if you don't work with your team, you can't get anything done. Working with your team well can push you to the next level. For example: my team and I have to have a lot of communication so we can finish our project on time. We have to plan where to go and how we're getting there.

HikiNo Behind the Scenes

For a project in my GT class, we got to chose between doing a profile story or a news story. My partners and I are doing a news story on a new biomass plant in Koloa. We are covering where it is, what its doing, and how everything works. The biomass plant uses alternative energy by using invasive trees that take over land and choke out native plats. Using these trees benefits the island in two ways: 

1. They take away invasive plants that can harm other native plants, also the unwanted trees can fall on to the highway and cause unnecessary destruction and inconvenience.
2. By taking away and using those invasive plants, they create energy for the island.

When the camera isn't rolling me and the rest of my team are working too find interviews, plan B-Roll, and tie up any loose ends that we encounter. Our minimum requirement for this project is three well done, transcribed, interviews. We also need great B-Roll to put in over the interviews to make them a bit more interesting. B-Roll that we use gives the story a more familiar feeling, as if the viewer has actually seen the biomass plant.

One thing I can do to help my team out is to plan interviews continually like I've been doing. Interviews in a news story is everything for us, they give us information, they make us more comfortable by being able to see a real person with their lives impacted by certain stories that interest the public. I email, plan, and set up interviews with important people that relate to our story. Then, we all go interview the subject and work together to make it perfect.

The Experiment

In my first period GT class, we did an assignment called The Experiment. The concept of this project was to give people without experience, or even with experience, a chance to explore photoshop and figure out how to work with it. They can see how things work and what we can use later in the school year. Mr. Sanderl basically said "Make something, without any of my help." And so thats what we did.

One of the things that was really fun is using the new tools and making something that looks really awesome. I improved on my contour skills and also I got more used to using photoshop on my own. I guess the only thing that was difficult is figuring out what to do when something went wrong, because like I said before, we weren't supposed to have Mr. Sanderl's help.

Here are the two things I made:

Levi

Destiel

Back To School

Well I'm back to school in eighth grade. Heres a little about what I like so far, one of my favorite moments I've had is meeting all my new teachers and realizing "Wow, I have awesome teachers this year." I feel like with great teachers I'll be able to learn a lot more this year, I think I'll improve on my weaker subjects like math or english because I see these teachers teach in a way that is easier for me to understand.

I guess if you hear the great parts about school you'd like to hear about the challenges of eighth grade. Like I said earlier, one of my biggest weak points in school is math. Last year I didn't really understand and ended up getting a C in math. This year I can tell it will be difficult because of all the complicated problems we are already doing. Hopefully I'll be able to overcome my struggle with math and pass with an A.

This year I will be successful by paying attention in class, studying with my friends and having them explain what I don't understand. I'll keep trying my hardest in my most difficult classes. I will be successful because I have confidence that I can pass with understanding in all of my classes.

(Raf and I being FABULOUSSS)

Words Of Wisdom

In my Gt class, we did a project called Words Of Wisdom. For this project we had to interview someone that we thought was wise. We also had to film lots of B-Roll to match the interview. We completed this by filming our interview and B-Roll on time. Then, we worked together to edit, and make the final touches. Sophia and Chazz, and I worked to the extreme in a high stress environment, just like what would happen at a professionals video workplace.

Glenna Foster

For our interview, we interviewed Chazz's grandmother, Glenna. She talked about how important it is to have fun, while still working hard. We thought this was important because sometimes people are stressed to the point of breaking down, so we think its important for people to know that you can still have fun while you're working.

Five Tips For

Our teams topic for our Five Tips project was "Five Tips For Reading a Book". We did this project earlier in the year so we could look back on it. We picked this topic because, Erin and Mikela, my two partners, also love books as much as I do. We spend our free time reading books, so we informed other people about our reading techniques. A lot of things could of been better in this video, for one example, we could of have practiced the voice over more, to have it sound natural. We also could of had more interesting angles and composition techniques. Compared to what we are doing in this quarter, this was horrible. but, it could be worse.
For another example, Erin's head is cut off and the background is distracting in the screen shot below.

Practice Profile Story

The purpose of our practice story was to prepare us for the actual interview that we have done. We planned it out, edited it, and completed it. We did almost everything that we do for the actual interview. For our practice, my partners, Chazz, and Sophia, interviewed me on reading. It showed how reading affects me and what its role is in my life. We chose I to interview because it is an interesting subject and I was willing and happy to be interviewed. It shows B-Roll and interview composition.