All About Me

Updated version at the bottom ;)

Some things about me are:

I am a die hard Heavy Rock fan and was born in California. I'm absolutely in love with animals. If I could attend school for more than 6 hours I would. I can't stand raw fish. If I could have one superpower it would be to fly.

I think the Hunger Games are totally amazing (Jennifer is my role model :P). I spend as much of my time possible reading books! I am a "Siddy" lover (snake, kitty, dog lover). I don't have Bieber Fever, and never will! I love taking silly pictures, nothing formal!

If you asked me team Peeta or Gale, I'd say "Duh, team Finnick!" I'm already studying for my SAT's (I love their challenging question of the day!). I love traveling. If a genie gave me one wish I'd wish to be a shapeshifter. I love soccer. I want to be a lawyer, a actress, or a animator for Pixar Studios when I grow up. I'm Italian, French, German, Welsh, Polish, Scottish, Irish, Cherokee, English, Norwegian, and German.

UPDATE:

Hey everyone! Can you believe it's only been a year and a half since I originally posted this (January 15, 2014)?! Crazy! I am going to do a little then and now update so I hope you enjoy :)

Some (updated) things about me are:

I still am a rock fan; some things will never change. My favorite bands as of right now are Fall Out Boy and Plain White T's :) I love school as well and will never be able to eat raw fish. 

Can't wait for Mocking Jay Part 2 and just to be clear, I had the vaccination for Bieber Fever before it started. I am of course still as silly as ever :P and my definition of formal is a skirt with a graphic tee instead of jeans :)

Team Finnick all the way baby. Always and forever. I am continuously studying for my SAT's, but I haven't been as good about it as of late because of schoolwork. Now if a genie gave me a wish, I would wish to meet Doctor Who. And travel in his fabulous TARDIS. I am doing to be TARDIS for Halloween! Unfortunately, I am much to uncoordinated to do sports now, but I still like to watch soccer through the TV where I am not in danger of being hit by the ball. When I am older I want to be either an astrobiologist or an aerospace engineer. And as for ethnicity, that hasn't changed.

Me and my weirdo self :)

Well hope you guys liked the update and I will post again soon!

Proactive or Procrastination?

Hey everybody! How are you? How has your day been? Good? Bad? I hope it was good. If it was bad then I hope tomorrow is better. Anyway I know you stopped at this post to read and/or look at it. So this post is about whether I am proactive or a procrastinator or maybe a little bit of both. Well I know your just dying to know which I am (that was my version of a joke so sorry if it was absolutely horrible), but you'll have to bear through reading farther. Hope you enjoy this post!

Well if I had to categorize myself as either a proactive person or a procrastinator, I'd say I'm quite close to the middle but maybe slightly more of a procrastinator. It really depends on the situation. For example; I am hardcore perfectionist. So last night I was doing a science project that I missed and I had only one day to turn in. The project was a pamphlet classifying the levels of organization from cell to organ and the requirements were to have these complicated precise measured sectors for each level and the definition for each one. Also we had to draw a simple picture for each level and a couple of examples. I measured the sections, made extremely detailed definitions, a colored and labeled picture for each section, and tons of examples. Yeah, so in cases of papers or projects I can't have anything less than the best. But, um, well, I may be a perfectionist but I am also a procrastinator. I always put my homework off until Sunday night and then I end up staying up until ten and being extremely tired in the morning (that is every weekend). But I guess if I had to choose, I would say I'm a procrastinator.

I think your level of productivity relates to your free time because from experience (how little it may be)  I know that having more time to do your work, what your doing looks better and makes you feel better too. It also gives you a lot more (relaxed) free time! If you put something off for a long time, I will always be like the story of Damocles and the ominous looming sword. The longer you put it off, the more the string frays until it snaps and you drown in homework! Yeah so anyway my point is that if you just save it for Sunday night, than you will be scrambling to get it done and then it won't be as quality work! So stop putting it off and do it; I don't want you to drown!

There are definitely some things that I could improve in my everyday life to make myself less of a procrastinator. I could cut back on my TV time (I'm addicted to Master Chef), do my homework ASAP after school, or maybe even before that, and just overall working harder. I would probably make these changes by setting sticky notes everywhere so that if forget or refuse to do it I will see them and get to work or get guilty that I didn't do my work. Another thing, I'm really bad at keeping my train of thought. So to solve that problem, I could do my work in a no distractions environment and really focus on what I'm doing.

Are you proactive or a procrastinator? You know my response, but if you're in the commenting mood (I can only comment when I'm in the zone or fangirling... haha) I'd really like to know yours. Oh and still working on my Ireland post; I'm really lazy (:P). Bye!

Lessons Learned

Herro People of Planet Earth!!! Thanks for coming back to my blog. This post is continuing all about our new project, a news story all about gluten. My team consists of Kacie, Julie, and Shaday and I am super excited about completing this project. Check it out!

I think the most interesting part of our project so far is all the different kinds of B-Roll. We have all the different shot types, rolling focus', fast motion, and some very interesting angles to name a few. I'll let you in on a little secret, I'm a total tech lover. I absolutely LOVE working with the camera and doing photography/videography. I hope our final product turns out really well!

I think the biggest roadblock our team has had so far is coming up with really good voice-overs. I personally have a hard time coming up with them because I tend to word things incorrectly. A lot. So that in particular is extremely frustrating. In the end though, I think our voice-overs turned our pretty good.

The most valuable component in the filmmaking process would definitely have to be your planning. Planning is what makes you able to prepare for whats ahead. If you didn't have a plan, it would just be like winging it all the time! And that (I know this from past experience) is completely horrible. It kind of goes on the lines of life two. Because, I mean really, it's a lot easier to go forward if you have a solid plan.

My teammates Julie (left) and Shaday (right) filming at Sweet Maries Hawaii!
Thank you to Kacie Burns  for the marvelous photo!

I made this picture in GIMP to represent teamwork.

Back to School

Dia dhuit everyone! Dia dhuit means hello in Irish (Gaelic). I know most of you are like "What the heck?!" but over summer I visited Ireland (a post all about it is on it's way :D) and I learn a little Irish while there. Anyway, this is my back to school post (I am now in the 7th grade) for my new GT class! Hope you enjoy!!!

So far my favorite moment of the year is probably when I got an A on my first math test. My biggest challenge of the year so far is the IReady Test I'm currently working on. It's super difficult and it's to determine what our 7th period on our schedule will be. And the worst part about it is that I won't know for a while after I finish test if I need a support class or not (:I). 

This year I will try to be successful by doing my best on all my assignments and study hard for tests. Doing your best is extremely important because if you don't try at all than it may result in a bad grade and that may result in...........(DRAMATIC SILENCE)........... very unhappy parents. Depending on the situation it will most likely lead to punishments (no TV, no phone, grounding, ext.) and I'm pretty sure nobody likes those.

Feel free to comment below about what you all did this summer and slán (goodbye in Gaelic)!

Hey everyone! This is my bestie Maddie and I
(I'm the one in dead center and Maddie is the crazed vampire on the right)
taking a back to school selfie.

Profile Project Progress

Hey viewers! Do you remember the post called Practice Story Reflection? It was the practice interview my team did of me to practice for the actual thing. We are doing the real one on my mom and her time in the Peace Corps. and the hard journey she made with my dad to Senegal. This is our progress so far:

My team and I decided to do the project on my mom, Katie, because we wanted to learn more about her journey to Senegal, West Africa. She went to the Peace Corps. in search of an adventure and met my dad, Jason, who also wanted to volunteer to help a third-world country. We mostly filmed the interview inside my house, but some of it is filmed outside in our yard too. In our video we are hoping to capture the saying "Follow Your Dreams" because that's what my parents did and always encourage others to do that too.

You know when your watching a interview or documentary and there is like a narrator speaking over the footage? Well, the narration is called a "Voice Over" and the footage is called "B-Roll". "Voice Overs" are really important because they help the viewers really follow the story line, and really get absorbed in the story. "B-Roll" is important to keep the audience interested in the story and not get confused on whats happening, what does she mean, or what it looked like. It's really important to use these things, because without them, our videos would be very, very, boring.

My team consisted of the same people who were on my Practice Team; Talia, Preston, and Maddie. During the making of our Practice Story, our team had lots of set backs and difficulties, and in the actual thing we tried to improve the quality of the work we made. I think next time we could do more to make sure it's not just one person doing everything them selfs and therefor leaving everyone else out. I think we could have done a little bit better and tried harder to make sure it wasn't just one or two people working at a time, because we probably could have made an overall better video. We really improved as a team in my opinion because we learned from our mistakes on the Practice Story, and worked better in the real one. Next time we could improve by all of us making a stronger commitment to working as a team, and really including everybody when filming, editing, and writing the transcription template.

Me and my team need to lower the volume in our video and reshoot some B-Roll. We need to figure out a a time to reshoot because we all have things going on. We need to put in better questions because the ones we have currently are not related to the meaning. Some of the comments pointed out small portions of out of focus things and camera movement. Here are the ratings on our video:

Practice Story Reflection

From Left: Talia, Preston, Maddie shooting B-Roll.

In my 3 period GT class, my group and I made an interview video in the program Final Cut Pro. I was the one that was being interviewed. Maddie Hoesel did the editing in final cut pro, Talia Washington worked on the video's transcript, and Preston Hayden did the narration layovers. Our group consisted of only 6th graders, so it was challenging because we haven't really gotten used to using such advanced programs. Our video was about me doing gymnastics, so in our B-Roll I did some gymnastics on our school field.

We had a lot of challenges in this project. One of our challenges was getting our video transcript done in Google Drive, and also getting in our voice layovers for narration in the actual video. On the last day our team member Talia was out sick, so that was another challenge. We had trouble getting in our video on time. Unfortunately we did not do so well on the project but thank goodness it was just for practice.

In our group, we are all good friends and I realized its harder to work in a group of friends, because you are afraid to give feedback. There was a lot of stress in all of us and we didn't handle it so well. In the next project we do, I think that because of this experience we will work better as a team now we know each other's strengths and weaknesses. I am definitely going to work harder to be more flexible working in a group environment. Although the project was very challenging, I am looking forward to doing the graded one.

For the actual project, me and my partners are going to interview my mom, Katie. The topic of the project is to capture "Words of Wisdom" from a person who inspires you. We are interviewing her about the time she volunteered in Africa for the Peace Corps with my dad, Jason. This incorporates the theme because she's going to share what motivated her to help the people of Africa. Our B-Roll will be of her doing things to help the environment.