Music Video FINALE

HELLO TO THE COOLEST PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET! That's right. The absolute coolest. But not to cool for school. Stay in school folks. Anyway this is my final post as a Kapa'a Middle School GT student... If you are starting to cry, stop that nonsense right now. I'm still going to (occasionally) use this blog. However I'm thinking of changing the URL... is that even possible? I don't know. We end school on May 26th and I am really excited for high school (and the freedom that comes with it). However, next year we won't have any honors/ advanced classes which is a bummer. But those will be back in 10th grade, so it's not the worst thing in the world. I'm kind of sad to leave this place though... I've met so many great, inspiring teachers here that have pushed me to try harder and chase my dreams :) so thank y'all. Also I've discovered a very interesting thing about Maddie, she wants to "raise" (she meant grow but said raise) potatoes when she's older. She also wants to raise cows and cats and live in Idaho. And unlike she said on her blog, I don't want to farm humans (she twisted my words and turned it into an inside joke), nor am I a compulsive liar. Anyway... I hope you enjoy the rest of this post!

Behind The Scenes #1!

So as you can probably tell from the title of this post, it's that very special time of year again. The time of year in which we make MUSIC VIDEOS! Yaaaaaaaay! Last year, Maddie, Julie, and I made a music video to Shake It Off by the wonderful Taylor Swift. It was really fun, and if you'd like to check it out, click the link right >here<. This year I have an amazing team comprised of Alani, Makena, Emma, like always, Maddie the Monkey, and myself. We are doing the song Young Gospel which is mashup between Young Volcanoes by Fall Out Boy and This Is Gospel by Panic! At The Disco, both of which are some of my very favorite bands. Our story line, or story lines for that matter, are similar to each other in the fact that we are all sort of looking back and remembering hard times, but the actual events are different. The lyrics of the song match up to the differing story lines as they play, for example: Emma is thinking about broken memories and breaks a picture frame with the pieces flying everywhere.

Behind The Scenes #2!

For our music videos, one of the requirements was fast-edit montage sequences. We included quite a few, but my very favorite is right in the beginning. We cut between all of our faces in different locations really quickly, on beat with the music, and it gives our opening a great effect. Our editors (Emma, Alani, and Maddie the Monkey) did a great job with the video, and we're all really proud of how it turned out. Makena and I worked on the Photoshop music video official posters for our "band", Fall Out @ The Disco :)

We all worked really hard on our music video, as it is our last ever GT project and our last chance to demonstrate what we have learned over the past three years. I think that the careful planning that went into every aspect of our video really shows through in our final product. Makena is an amazing videographer (and I mean it when I say amazing, thanks Makena!) and her artistic ability shown in every shot, as well as Emma, Alani, and Maddie's great editing skills. I know what you're thinking, "Well what in the world did you do Kasiah?!" I did help, I swear. Like I said before, I worked on the Photoshop posters and helped with the planning/ story line. I also acted in it, along with my other wonderful team members. This music video is probably my favorite one so far and I'm really excited for y'all to see it!





Here is some of the lyrics if you couldn't hear the video:

This is gospel for the fallen ones
Locked away in permanent slumber
Assembling their philosophies
From pieces of broken memories

Oh, this is the beat of my heart, this is the beat of my heart [2x]
Their gnashing teeth and criminal tongues conspire against the oddsBut they haven’t seen the best of us yet

If you love me let me go
If you love me let me go
‘Cause these words are knives and often leave scars
The fear of falling apart
And truth be told, I never was yours
The fear, the fear of falling apart

Oh, this is the beat of my heart, this is the beat of my heart [2x]

This is gospel for the vagabonds,
Confessing their apostasies
Led away by imperfect impostors

Oh, this is the beat of my heart, this is the beat of my heart

Oh, this is the beat of my heart, this is the beat of my heart
Don’t try to sleep through the end of the world
And bury me alive

'Cause I won’t give up without a fight

If you love me let me go
If you love me let me go
‘Cause these words are knives and often leave scars

The fear of falling apart

And truth be told, I never was yours (and then the music fades out)

Our Score!

The Overall Rankings!

Behind The Scenes #3!

I hope every one of you astounding people enjoyed this post or at least our music video bloopers (if you didn't, I'm very sorry for wasting 5 minutes of your life) and I will post again in the future. Like it was sung in the amazing movie The Sound Of Music, "So long, farewell, Auf Weidersehen, goodbye..." and have a great time until we meet again (or connect via the inter-webs for that matter :)

Animated Life Lessons

Hello Internet! Today I am going to talk about our new team animation project! We are using the Puppet Warp tool in Photoshop to animate, which you can learn more about in my last post right here. It's pretty tedious to use, but we pulled through and finished our video on time. Enjoy!

Here is our finished video!

The 1st half of our storyboard!

The 2nd half of our storyboard!

So for this animation project we had to create a humorous animation that exaggerated all of our teammates' personal traits and idiosyncrasies. My team was made up of Lester, Kaz, and myself. The traits we tried to exaggerate in ourselves were Lester's stubbornness, Kaz's obsessiveness, and my loudness. We worked really hard to portray those things and I think we did a good job. Our story is about a group of friends who go to Graphic Novel Con (our story's version of Comic Con) but Lester and Kaz get into a fight about who's fandom is the best. I eventually convince them to talk to each other and work it out so we can enjoy the rest of the convention. All three of us are pretty obsessive when it comes to fandoms so we felt that this was a great way to portray that.

Our scores!

The humor in our story is mainly based around fandom references because that's what made the most sense for our story. In our video, Kaz is a fan of the video game Over Story (Undertale) and Lester is a fan of the show Isaac Galaxy (Steven Universe). We tried to make the video in a way so that people who were apart of the fandoms in real life and even those who weren't would enjoy the jokes. In this project our story also needed a life lesson (hence the title of this post) that would relate to the audience. Our animation's lesson was that all of us need to learn to accept each other's differences and find things in common. I think that it's a really important message, because everyone in the world is different and those differences are what make us who we are. We should embrace those things and love
everyone for who they are, not judge them for what
they believe or what their personal opinions are.

The overall animation rankings for our class!

In this project we had to work with people we've never worked with before. It's always an interesting experience to work with new people, but it can get challenging at times. We had a pretty rough time with this project. I was out sick for a large part of the preparation/planning process and my teammates both missed a fair share of days. Also, our productivity level throughout the could have been better. Some of us kept getting side tracked with other things or didn't come in to work on the project during recess and lunch to help out so that made it quite difficult sometimes. I think that the biggest challenge our team faced was like I said, staying on track with the daily agenda and things we needed to get done. The greatest achievement for our
group was definitely getting to turn in our finished project on time :D.

Well, I hope y'all enjoyed this post and I will be sure to post again soon! Byeeerrr!

BEHIND THE SCENES SCENES SCENES SCENES SCENES:

Character Development

How have you been? I've been doing good. Great actually, because I've got some pretty big news. So in January I applied to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama and I found out a couple days ago I received a full academic scholarship! It's really exciting :) I get to go for a whole week, we sleep there and everything. I want to say thank you my amazing teachers Mr. Sanderl (he teaches this GT class :), Mrs. Vedder (my awesome Algebra teacher), and Mrs. Bandsma (she was the one who really got me excited about science!) who all wrote really nice letters of recommendation for me. I love you guys! Oh and I guess I kind of like you viewers too... just kidding you're all great ;) But on to what this post is actually about...
ANIMATION! ANIMATION! ANIMATION! ANIMATION! ANIMATION!  That's right folks: Animation! Hope you enjoy!

So for this first half of the quarter we will be working on animation. Right now we are working on a .GIF to practice the animation skills in Photoshop, but eventually we will form teams to create an animation video that focuses on our personal idiosyncrasies. If I had to define myself as a person, I would say that I'm confident, passionate, and very dramatic. However, I also get mad fairly easily because of those things. I'm also a perfectionist, especially when it comes to my school work, which can make it hard to get things done  quickly (cleaning my room is a nightmare because everything has to be absolutely perfect before I move on to my other chores).

My body after it was cut out of the picture...

Me in front of the studio green screen. 

For our animation project I am going to mainly focus on my dramatic side through my actions and how I handle different situations (I've always been pretty dramatic, however thanks to all of those summers spent at acting camp when I was younger definitely developed that further). My character in our animation will get irritated quickly. She will also kind of blow things out of proportion and make things that happen that aren't that huge of a deal to be the end of world as we know it. I think that the exaggerated theatrics of my character will make the audience laugh :)

MY GIF YAY

So I've always enjoyed animation and this quarter we are learning to use the Puppet Warp tool to animate in Photoshop. But as always when learning something new, there is bound to be some bumps in the road. On the week we were making our GIF animations I was working on another project for Hiki No and didn't get much time in class to work on it. It all turned out fine in the end, but that was a difficult week :). In order to create our GIF animations, we all had to take pictures in front of our Morning News studio green screen. Then we opened the images in Photoshop and used the Quick Selection tool to make cutouts of our bodies. After that we used the Puppet Warp tool to manipulate our bodies and move them across the stage. In my GIF, I slide into the frame, stop, and then shoot upward. I know, it's just so impressive and complicated. No, not really, but I'm am okay with the way it turned out considering it was my first go at it. However, I love the background on it because it is a picture I took while I was hiking with my mom (Hi mommy!).

Well, that's all for this post, but I will be posting again soon. Bye byeee!

.MOV Film Festival

Hellooooo Internet! Okay so I know that I told y'all that I'd be posting my Ireland blog post in a week like three weeks ago. I know, I know, I am such a bad blogger. So sorry for the delay but it will be posted soon. I wrote some more of it a couple of days ago and I realized that that was 6th grade me writing that and it kind of blown my mind a little. Anyway, I promise that it will up soon, and this time I am determined to keep that promise. But this post isn't about my Ireland trip, it's about are new .MOV Film Festival Project. Enjoy!

Maddie editing!

For this project, we had to make a video that would either tell a story or make the audience laugh. We chose to tell a story about a dystopian world where an evil tyrant (Preston) stole all the color for himself. He then proceeded to bribe people into doing his bidding in exchange for colors. However, there is one girl (myself) in the kingdom who can see color! She hides from the tyrant out of fear, but soon realizes she must stand up and free the color so everyone can see. If you want to watch it, the video is ^right^up^there^.

Preston editing!

Our storyboard!

Every good video needs keywords to describe and guide the story. The keywords my team and I chose are as follows: Unfair, Dystopia, Color, Bravery, and Tyranny. We really focused on the hero's journey and the courage she has to take on the tyrant. We took a while to put together our keywords so that they really communicated the message of our video to our audience which in my opinion is that you should never let anything stand in the way of letting you do the right thing.


Our video's message, like explained in the last paragraph, is that you should never let anything get in the way of doing the right thing. Our heroine works hard to take down the tyrant and doesn't let her fear and intimidation get in the way of saving everyone else in the kingdom. She also learns that it's okay to trust other people and that working as a team can be better than working alone. She teams up with a secret group of people who have stolen some of the color and are working to give it to everyone. I think that our main character changes into a better person by realizing that working for the greater good is more important than everything
 else.

Our script!

Maddie and Preston editing!

I think the biggest challenge my team faced was probably the filming process. We took a long time in getting our first couple of shots, mainly because we couldn't agree on how to shoot them. Because of that, we ended up having a nearly dead battery in the middle of our filming and started to freak out. We did everything we could to keep the battery going, like trying to get everything perfect in one shot and turning the camera off between scenes. In our final scene, there was about 25 seconds left on the battery, and we made it just in time.

Well, it was fun typing to y'all and I will be back soon with another (hopefully) interesting post about my life and/or GT. Farewell my friends, I'll type to you soon :)

Tiny Spherical Worlds

Hello internet! How are you today? I hope

your are doing well. I have a very, very, important question for you. And believe me, it is very important. What is your favorite band? Oh, wait, let me rephrase that: bands (because honestly, is it even possible to have just one?). My top three are: Panic! At The Disco, My Chemical Romance, and The Downtown Fiction :). If you would like, comment yours down below. The project we've been working on for the past two weeks or so is Spherical Panoramas.
What is a Spherical Panorama? A Spherical Panorama is a panoramic composite image that has been formed into a circle. To construct our Spherical Panoramas, my class used Adobe Photoshop. We did this project in 6th grade as well so if you would like to see the first ones I did, click here.


What is a composite image and why would it be better that just using a single picture? A composite image is a image made up of several other pictures, most commonly in the form of a panorama. Do you have a mobile phone that allows you to take panoramic photos? Well, it isn't in fact taking just one picture. It is taking multiple pictures and stitching them together to look like a single image. We do a similar process in Photoshop, except we take individual pictures of the landscape around us and stitch use photomerge in Photoshop to stitch them together. The reason why a composite image is better to use than a single picture when creating a Spherical Panorama is because you can't capture a whole landscape in one photo, which is what you need to do in order to create a Spherical Panorama.


In our project, we did two types of Spherical Panoramas. Two were called Polar, and the other two were called Sphere. The difference between the Polar and Sphere Panoramas were the Polar ones resembled planets because the ground of the landscape is located in the center with the sky around it, and the Sphere ones have the ground in a circle around the sky which is located in the image's center. They take mostly the same steps to create in Photoshop and look really cool when finished.

It takes a lot of thought and care to make your tiny worlds convincing. When you take you pictures to create the panorama, you have to make sure that you can see the ground in every shot and that where you pictures start and end in the landscape look similar enough to piece together in Photoshop. You also have to keep your horizon like fairly straight throughout your whole panorama. Also when you go to edit your photos, make sure that every photo has similar levels of exposure, color balance, brightness, etc. When you go to create your final product in Photoshop, be sure to adjust the horizon line so it is near to perfect and when you filter the panorama into your Spherical Panorama, take lots of time covering that line where the two sides came together.





Well I hope you all like this post and I will be sure to post again soon :) Bye bye...