Music Videos Rock!

         We are now more than 100% done with our music video. I think that the costumes added a great touch to everything. I'm pretty sure that people will be able to understand our music video much easier now. My teammates have contributed so much. Especially Ana she was the one that came up with the idea of us to change into costumes rather than just keep on filming in our school uniforms. Kiara also contributed money for the supplies we needed to get costumes and make us the way we needed to look. Rafael contributed a lot of supplies as well that we needed.

         I think that our audience will enjoy the humor parts of our music video. Kiara and Rafael make it extremely funny with their many different facial expressions. Yep, it was proved, they loved the humor part the most. Another part they liked I believe is all of our different costumes that we added in. Especially Rafael with his devil outfit.
          I think our music video shows a lot about what we learned this year. For one, how to make great quality work. The music videos also shows our talent in imovie and our use of transitions and video effects that we added in to our music video. I think that this is a great way to end the year in G.T. This has been an amazing project.

Lyrical Livelihood

The people in my team are Rafael Sifuentes, Kiara Wetherington, and Ana Ell. My favorite song at the moment I guess would be "I Constantly Thank God For Esteban" by Panic At The Disco. I really enjoy all of this band's songs. This song makes me feel I don't really know, happy and full of energy would be a way to say it. When I listen do my favorite artist or band I feel like I could do a lot like I'm empowered.

 My team chose "Ramble On" by Led Zeppelin. We chose this song because we really liked the artist and we thought that it would be a very creative song to do. It also has a great beat and rhythm. We did have a lot of other choices for the music video but most of them were either not school appropriate or everyone didn't agree on it.

Our music video is going to tell the visual story that we thought  the song meant. We think that this song talks a lot about heart break and finding your true mate, or around those lines. So I am going to sort of be the main character that gets cheated on by Kiara who is the cheater/evil one. Kiara cheats one me with Rafael. In the middle of our film session on Thursday we realized that people will have a hard time trying to understand what the story is about. So we got some costumes made Kiara and Raf look relatively evil and me and Ana kind and good hearted.

Our Animation Story

Or focus statement is "Kiara receives party".  Kiara's story was her last day at her old school in North Carolina. On that day her advisory teacher and all of her friends threw her a surprise goodbye party with all of her favorite drinks and food. I think our focus statement tells our story very simply, it pretty much sums the entire thing up.

I think this story has many valuable life lessons, but I think the most biggest and most important one in my own opinion is to always do the best that you can to make someone have the best time they could possibly have. Her friends and teacher could have done barely anything, but no they threw her a whole entire party for her. A surprise party. Just by doing that they made that memory an actual memory that she would remember for hopefully the rest of her life. So in my opinion making a memory last for someone is what I think the audience will learn after this.

Okay I'm pretty sure that I take the placeholder for my team's worst moment. We were doing the wide for scene two in Stop-Motion and I could not get the camera to focus at all. No matter what I did I tried I couldn't get it to focus. Turns out I had it on manual focus. Yep I was feeling great. Now I think that Rafael takes placeholder for our teams best moment. He completed the close for scene four, the beautiful car, during the critique. Finishing that scene gave us the twenty four seconds that we needed to get that requirement checked off. I really enjoyed this project and can't wait for the next one!

Animation Outtakes

My team for this project includes, The talented Iris Murakami, The brilliant Kiara Wetherington, and the skilled Rafael Sifuentes. Two interesting facts about Iris is that she is a twin and she like anime. Two interesting facts about Kiara is that she has been to acting school for two years and she loves to sing. An interesting fact about Rafael is that he is an extraordinary debater and plays the guitar.

Stop-Motion animation is a type of animation technique used to manipulate an object or person to make it seem like it moves on it's own. In my animation project we used stop-motion for two scenes. In these two scenes I manipulated Kiara and Rafael walking with style throughout the school, handing papers to each other, and opening doors. A .GIF is a multitude of different clips merged together and played on a continuous loop. I have created two .GIF animation examples.

For my team's project idea we went with Kiara's. Kiara's memorable moment was when she was switching schools, and on her last day of school her friends and teachers threw her a surprise party with all of Kiara's favorite food and drinks. I think you should care because this is an amazing thing to do as a friend, if I were in Kiara's shoes at the time I would have felt just so happy and full of joy because she knew that her friends cared for her. Also it's just pretty interesting.

Typography Images

 Typography is the art of arranging text in an image to create an image that has an emotional effect on the viewer. Filling in an image in with inspirational or motivational words can have a lasting impact to them. Sometimes these words are used to describe the subject in the image or just a famous phrase or saying.

I think that the biggest challenge during the innovator project was getting all of my layers in the correct order. Also I got very confused with all of the keyboard commands when first learning them. I really enjoyed doing the teacher typography project. I did hit some bumbs along my way as getting my text to show through my final image also getting my brightness and contrast to even out. I had a ton of highlights in my image and not enough shadows. That created the problem with my text. Thanks to some friends that taught me that I could easily bring out my subject's features by going over the eyes and lips with the text tool. With my final typography portrait I had a problem with getting the right amount of black, grey, and white to show in my photo when I posterized it because I had maybe when tiny spot of highlights.

My innovater typograhy portrait is a picture of Thomas Edison covered in very small text describing him. My teacher portrait is a picture of my sixth period science teacher, Ms. Bandsma covered ibln text that describes her. She has been my teacher twice in seventh grade and now once more in eighth. I chose her to do my teacher portrait with because she is the teacher that I know the most. My "Me" portrait is a picture of myself covered in text that describes me. They were all made using different steps and methods. For my innovator portrait I first started out by cropping the image around Thomas Edison's face, then I created a new layer and filled that layer with black. Then I chose my font and text and started to add my chosen text to the image. After I have completed that I added a layer mask to my text layer. Then I copyed the backround layer and pasted it directly on to the layer mask. After I had completed that I just duplicated my text layer to make my image brighter.

My teacher portrait was done differently and was the most fun to do in my opinoun. First I started out with a picture of my teacher and used the quick selection tool to cut out her face and then refined the edges a bit. Then I made a new layer and filled it with white so that I would have a white backround. Then I went ahead and selected all of the shadows in the image, Select/Color Range/Shadows. Then I copyed the shadows and then created a new layer with them. then I did the exact same thing for the midtones. Then I turned my backround layer off so that just the highlights and midtones were showing. Then I filled my highlights layer with 50% grey and my midtones with black. Then I merged the two layers together. Now I created a new blank layer and filled it with white. After I did that I crreated the text brush that I will use later on for the image. The words that I used in my brush were words that described my teacher. After I finished putting all of my words on to my text layer I used the  rectangular marquee tool to select the area around my text then I went to edit then define brush preset and created my brush. Then I made two new blank layers and filled the first new layer with white, and hid that. Then I went back to my backround layer and copyed the entire thing; then I went to the second new layer and selected my text and chose a black text color and started stamping my text over my image making sure to change the size of the brush every so often. After I finished placing my text I place a layer mask on layer three, then I held down alt on the layer mask to make sure I was working on it then pushed Ctrl and V, Ctrl and D, then Ctrl and I. Now after I finished that I went back to the image I was working on before and turned off the layers that I merged together. Then I turned on layer 2 so that it would make it brighter. For the last step I added a gradient overlay to get some color. This was my favorite typography image.
were words that described my teacher.

Innovator

For my final typography image the first step was to crop my image. Then I used the quick selection tool to cut away the backround. I unlocked the backround layer and renamed that layer "Portrait" then I made a new layer and filled it with white so I would have a white backround and moved that layer to the bottom. Then I went to Image/Adjustments/Posterize and set the level to four. Then I created the text brushes the same way I did with my teacher portrait but this time using words that describe me. Using the rectangular marquee tool I selected the black in my image then went to Select/ Similar. I then made a new layer and filled that layer with the words that represents me, I did the same for the light gray, dark grey, and white. After I placed all of my text in the right spot and size I added a gradient layer for some color.

Final Me Typography

Teacher

Double Exposed Portraits

Portrait photography is a picture of a person that captures both eyes and usually all of there face. Portrait photography can relate to profile view because you are still getting half of the person's face compared to the whole face in the picture. Portrait photography can relate to silhouetting because when you take a silhouette of someone or something, their face or body is usually completely darkened or black against something bright like a sunrise or something else.

To create a double exposure image in photoshop you first have to go to, File = Scripts = Load Files into Stack. When you get all of your files loaded you want to use the dodge tool and make the entire space around your portrait white. Once you have gotten your background white you want to crop and resize your photo to 8.5 by 11. After you finish resizing your picture you want to double click your layers and go to the blend mode option and select screen. Now you can adjust your pictures move them around a little, add some adjustment layers and explore the different options photoshop provides for you.

The two pictures that I used in my portrait was a picture of some of my favorite favorite books. I added that picture in to symbolize how much I love to read and write. The next picture that I added into my portrait was a picture of my shoes. A lot of people know that I love the Coverse brand and shoes all together. The adjustment layers that I added to my photo were, Curves, Vibrance, Color Balance, and Exposure. I think that I could have increased the quality of my work by just cleaning up all of the marks by the edges of my photo. This project was very fun and I'm glad that we got assigned this project.

HDR Photography

HDR photography is a method of photography used to add more High Dynamic Range to photos. HDR is the ratio of light to dark. HDR is used in photos to increase the Dynamic Range shown in photos. I really like using HDR in my photos because, I like how it adds so much color and vibrance and can turn a sort of dull and boring picture of a landscape into something with so much color and vibrance. But sometimes it can look sort of fake or to real.

When you have finished taking your seven different exposure level photos, they are ready to be put into photoshop. First you open File, then Automate, then select Merge to HDR pro. Browse for your seven different pictures and open them up, and then sit back and watch as Photoshop merges the seven different pictures to create a final HDR image. Then you can choose and test all of the different settings. Increase the gamma and exposure or turn down the saturation and vibrance. Then you're all done. This process is very different from automatic HDR functions like phone cameras.  They differ from each other each other each other each other each other HDR method combines all of the different exposure levels into a beautiful picture.

My thought process for my landscape was to get a different angle on the mountain. I could have improved this picture by a lot if I had moved the horizon line up so that less of the dark sky would show and more foreground would be there. My thought process behind of my portrait wasn't really there. A lot of things can be improved about this picture. For one, the rule of thirds, I could have moved her to the right more so that she would be lined up. Also It's out of focus, which could have easily been fixed. Surrealism isn't there.

Movie Trailer Critique

Our new project was very fun, it was a new experience for me. Me and my team had to create a movie trailer, which was a huge part of my and my teams grade. We also made a movie poster to go along with our movie trailer, which was a big part of our grade as well. My team consisted of myself, Maya Clark, Seth Kostelecky and Kaylynn Drake. Both me and Maya were actors in our trailer. Seth and Kaylynn did a lot of camera work and helped with the posters. We had a Trailer Plan where we organized all five scenes and wrote the voiceovers and dialogue, and the movie trailer synopsis.

The project requirements that we needed to include were voiceovers, voice acting scripts, dialogue, and text layovers. It needed to be between one minute and thirty seconds and two minutes. Also it needed foley, special effects, and our completed movie poster. I think that we got all of the requirements. The foley that we created was the sound of a backpack dropping on the ground, and the sound of footsteps going up stairs.

I put our team evaluation picture by the bottom. We got the most points in satisfactory and an average amount in room for improvement. We got the least points for above & beyond. Yes I agree with the statistics that my classmates gave my team. I think that we could have added a little more detail to the overall story. This project was extremely fun and educational, I learned a bunch more techniques using the camera, and how to do certain things in Final Cut.