.MOV Film Festival

Hey guys! Our new project in GT is to  make either a movie trailer, sitcom, or an animation. My partners Wailana, Ella (go check out their blogs), and I have decided to do a movie trailer. Its about two hippies learning to do things. It is supposed to be a comedy but if its not, whoops. Some keywords that would describe our trailer would be friendship, learning, patience, determination, and appreciation. These words are important because our movie trailer is not only supposed to be funny, but also very low-key inspirational. Friendship would apply because the two hippies become friends in their journey. Learning is extremely important because these hippies are learning to do new and unique things. Patience is also very important because the friends aren't good at what they are learning at first but it takes patience to continue trying. Determination because they will not stop until they get the hang of the activities and perfect it. Lastly, appreciation because each hippie is taking the time to teach each other the things. The hippies appreciate it. They also appreciate all the work they put in to do this activity because they soon realize that what they are learning is not easy.

Our overall message is to be kind and help. Whether it's something that someone is having trouble doing, or some is wanting to learn how to do it, we want to teach them to be a friend and help. In our movie trailer, our hippies are learning to do activities loved by the other hippie, like surfing or designing. They are taking time and putting all their effort into getting the hang of things. They WANT to learn. Not only do they learn to do the actual things but they also learn kindness and patience. We want people to think of the hidden meanings.

The biggest challenge that my partners and I had to face was scheduling. I have dance Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Ella has soccer Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, with games Saturday. Lastly, Wailana has volleyball Friday and Sunday. So as you could see, finding some time for filming was extremely challenging. We filmed all of it in about 6 hours total, the first three proving to have been completely useless. So basically, all the footage that we are using came from about 3-4 hours of film time. When we first filmed, I had to skip dance because it was a Tuesday. The time that we used was the useless bit. Then we made another time on Sunday morning. I got picked up on Saturday by Ella, then we went to her house. Wailana came over and we spent the night. then, on Sunday morning we got up and filmed. We used all of our time wisely. Then, Wailana's dad grabbed Wailana and I and took me home. The Wailana went to her volleyball game. We got everything we needed!

Tiny Spherical Worlds

Hey guys! I'm back and I wanted to talk to you about composite images and panoramas. Most of us use the app or thing on our phones to take panoramas, where you just move your camera sideways. But do you know what its doing to make the picture? Well, its taking multiple pictures in a row and layering them into one image. This is a composite image. A composite image is an image that is created by layering and combining several different photos. You may be wondering "Why do we have to have several pictures to make this kind of image? Isn't one picture enough?" One image is not enough and that is because when you take multiple pictures, it creates an image that portrays a scene that the average camera can not capture. It is a larger view of the subject. So basically, the point of composite image is to make a wide view, larger than life scene. Thats cool right? Much better than a regular picture.

In class, we are making two different types of panoramas. Polar and spherical- and they may look similar but they are different. If you can tell from my examples, the polar panorama looks like a tiny world. Like everything is being dragged outward. But the spherical looks like its a crystal ball, like everything is being dragged into the center. They will both look very similar, but will mean and portray different things. And my pictures have captions so you can tell the difference if you don't understand.

When we make our worlds, the organic outcome is a world or ball type thing with a harsh line from where the edges of the panorama meet. So, we have to use the stamp tool that can be found in the tool bar in Photoshop. We have to cover that line and make it look natural, like there was never a line before. Also, there is a ring of white on the spherical image and a ring of black in the polar image that make it look convincing and realistic. It makes it seem like there was nothing artificial around it or, for the polar, it looks like the black part is space or something like that. We must make it look as real as possible for the best outcome!

Hockney Style Joiners

David Hockney is a famous artist and photographer that has become well-known for his interesting and unique photomontages. A photomontage are several different photos arranged to create a new picture or abstract art. Hockney's photomontages are different than the ones we are making. In some ways, like they are taken at different times of the day (as seen in Hockney's image to the right). You can see that a part of the sky was taken at night. Or in the picture in the top-left corner, some of the clouds around the mountain are dark and stormy, and others are white and puffy. Also, some of Hockney's photomontages aren't close to the original object. The subject is seen multiple times and is somewhat spread apart.

My trampoline covered with memories, with my feet and another mysterious pair of feet.

Images can be powerful things. They can make you feel things. They can make you think things. And sometimes, some make you do things, all of these things both positive and negative. An image can send positive messages by using warm, light, and pretty colors and combinations. Or by presenting happy things like sunsets or someone smiling or a wedding and being humans, we have the urge to be happy when others are happy. If an image uses dark, colorless, and bland things, it tend to make people sad or angry. Or by depicting negative things, like funerals or death, humans will feel and think negatively.
My final photomontage is of my trampoline. This trampoline means so much to me. I've had so many great memories on there with all my friends and family. It represents me because I'm always so jumpy and hyper and constantly moving. I do dance 5 days a week and I still always have energy. But behind that, there is a deeper meaning that I want people to notice. It is that you should jump to reach your goal. Don't just stand there- try to jump ahead and reach for your dreams. And most of all... have fun! If you don't enjoy what you are doing, don't do it then. Its your life. You can jump anyway you want. While your up there, do a front flip. Why not? Just do what makes you happy and have fun. Be active... BE YOU!




-My friend Cara sitting under a tree at our school outside of our
 GT classroom.

2016 Aspirations

Happy New Years everyone! It's 2016 and it's time to start thinking of New Years resolutions. Everyone makes New Years resolutions but sometimes they don't complete them like they hoped they would. But, I am hoping to attain at least one of these goals (hopefully all of them). I am constantly tired in the mornings and have a hard time getting up, so one of my goals is to go to bed earlier and get more sleep. Another, resolution I have is to end my 7th grade school year with straight A's on my report card. Its always a good feeling to know that you have improved over the year. As you guys may know, I take dance. I am taking classes four days a week and training to go en pointe (the picture to the right is a dancer who is en pointe). So one of my goals is to get my pointe shoes sometime this year and start getting comfortable with them and possibly start dancing in them. On the topic of dance, even though I take lessons four days a week, I want to go more often and longer. I started ballet only a few months ago, and I am behind everyone of the skills and training level since I started so late. I want to learn more and more so I can get to the same level as all my other dance friends. Lastly, I want to eat healthier. Being a dancer requires a lot of strength and I eat a lot of candy (whoops). So, I want to start getting into shape and stretching more often at home to get more flexible. Anyways, I hope I didn't bore you with that long paragraph.

The most important goal for me to reach this year is to eat healthier. This is because I dance a lot, and if I don't eat healthy, it makes it a lot harder for me to dance. It drags me down in a way, plus I have to get more flexible and eating junk food will not help. Eating healthy is a hard thing for me because I LOVE candy but if I want to be successful in dance and get better, I need to switch a few things up in my daily diet. For example, have one piece of candy every three days instead of everyday. And yes, I am very serious about dance and love it a lot so you are going to be hearing about it very often. Anyways, eating healthier is also extremely important because not only will it help me in dance, but it will help me feel a lot more active and happy. I know, I sound like a crazy person talking about dieting and eating healthy but I'm not a crazy person (well... not completely crazy)! Alrighty- enough of that!

My most important goal is to eat healthier and stretch more, but I can't just snap my fingers and BLAM... I'm eating healthy. It will be a challenge but if I take certain steps, I can do it. First of all, I'd have to tell my family about this goal so that they could help me stay on track. Then, I have to set a limit like eating only one piece of candy or one bowl of ice cream every other day. Then, I will continue getting stricter, by saying like only one piece of candy or one bowl of ice cream a week. But it will take a while. The second part of it (stretching more) will be achieved by me stretching at home and in my free time. I'm pretty flexible but I need to be more flexible to be successful in dance. This one will be easier that eating healthy because I watch a lot of YouTube, so I can do some stretching while I'm watching videos. the hardest part of achieving this goal will probably be to continue doing these thing throughout the entire year. That is why I have to let my friends and family know what I am trying to do because then they can help me and keep motivated. 

Scratch Game Design

My GT teacher wanted us to critique other classmates' games that we had been working on. We used the sandwich style method- a compliment, the constructive criticism, and another compliment. The comments my classmates left for me were really helpful. They had kindly pointed out the flaws and told me how to make my game even better. Before, there was this glitch were the score would jump from 23 to a number like 46. But someone pointed that out and I fixed it. Another thing was to make the sprites (characters) smaller so there was more room. That definitely improved my game. Several things changed and improved in my game all because of my friends.


Of all of the games I made, I can't choose a favorite. They are all so different and unique and fun! For example, in both the Chase game and the Platformer, there was story line to go with it. But the Operation Freedom is just a bunch of craziness and fun! I feel like Operation Freedom represents me the most because its just a jumble of the internet in one game! Lastly, all of them are so different and are most definitely not perfect! All of them could use some fixing up. I think my Chase game and my Platformer game are the easiest. The Freedom game is really challenging: WARNING!

My best code would have to have been in Operation Freedom. I managed to get my frog to jump and look realistic using a special gravity engine. Of course, I had copied my teachers code to get it to jump that way but when I tested it out, it looked really smooth and I was really proud of myself since I got a complicated code to actually work! Making a game is not easy. Nothing is perfect, especially if it's your first time doing such, so I had many bugs that had to be fixed. One of the hardest ones was getting my score and time to work correctly in my Chase game. What had happened is that I would get my time to work perfectly, but it would throw off my score and vice versa. Eventually, I had gotten it to work by basing them off of different signals.

Invention Commercial

My teammates for the commercial were the same ones from the Composition Scavenger Hunt- Kyllie and Cara. We had a lot of fun filming this video but we also had goals to reach. Our main goals were to get all the clips filmed in time, edited, and turned in before our critique.  We also wanted to make our commercial funny! Who doesn't love a good laugh when you are waiting for The Hunger Games to come back on? Anyways, not only did our commercial have to be funny, but we also wanted to keep a clear focus on the actual product. Lastly, our most important goal to reach was a well edited, smooth flowing commercial that was intriguing and caught the eye. We tried to edit it as well as we could but are only 7th graders! I still think that it was a good video and it somehow managed to make the top 3 best commercials! Success guys!

My teammates and I planned a sleepover so that we could film and during that time, we got to know each other a little better. It was so much fun because as you can see, in the video, we were all wearing lip stick but when Kyllie tried to take hers off, it smudged everywhere and made her look like a clown! And it stayed like that the entire day! It must have been so embarrassing! But I think the best team moment of them all were the videos we took in between shots. We pretended like we were vloggers (video bloggers)! It was so funny (and yet so cringe worthy) watching it back! We would be talking into the camera saying dumb stuff like "Hey guys. Welcome back to Alina, Cara, and Kyllie's daily vlog!" or  "So today we have to film a video for GT!" It was like we thought there were people actually watching us! And we were taking videos that were just plain nonsense. Like Cara would be filming me and I wouldn't know it, so I'd be dancing really weirdly and she had it all recorded! I wish we had time to put bloopers in our video- that would've totally made the class laugh! It was so much fun. Then after we finished filming, we played on her trampoline. It was a crazy (yet eventful) Friday.

When we were editing this incredible video, we had certain things that we did. Cara looked for sound effects because that was a job that could be done on a separate computer. I did most of the cutting, moving, and touching up of all the clips since it was on my computer. Kyllie found music to go in the background (another job that could be done on a different computer). But then, once we had all the sound effects and music in place, we all listened to it and looked for parts that needed a small fixer upper. We all had major jobs (especially since we had to come in during lunch break to finish the video) and all had to participate. Sometimes Kyllie didn't come in for lunch, sometimes I didn't, and sometimes Cara didn't. But in the end, we all worked hard on this project and I think we did a good job of accomplishing our goals.

Composition Scavenger Hunt

Hey my people! I just recently learned about composition techniques and their meaning. I found out that there are so many different techniques and angles to film with but I personally think that the Rule of Thirds technique (scenery or subject) would be the most significant because it makes the shot look even and balanced. It gives a feeling that there is asymmetry in the shot. I don't know about you guys but whenever something looks uneven or looks messy it bugs me down to the core, just like what I was saying in my comedic monologue (go check that out on one of my previous posts titled "My Humorous Monologue"). Anyways, back to composition techniques- there are so many unique and useful techniques but I personally think Rule of Thirds would be the most useful and the most important. But that's just me! What do you think?

Some of these techniques were easy to film and some were not. The most difficult composition technique to film was probably macro. It was very hard to get close to the subject and have the camera focus on the correct spot. Plus, we energetic, hyper middle schoolers are just constantly moving so it was hard to keep the camera still in general! I'm pretty sure its not the candy... Anyways, I might start using it more because when you finally get the camera to focus, it looks very interesting. You can see tons of little details like the pollen on a bee, or the little ants crawling on a flower. Plus, with the right lighting it'd be a great Instagram picture. I'm just kidding (not really)!

My teammates for this project were two of my closest friends Cara Griffin and Kyllie Belmonte (Kyllie is the one in the screenshot to the right -------->)! In our composition technique video, we all rotated positions. In some shots, Cara and I were the subjects, with Kyllie being the camera person. Other shots, were of Kyllie and i was the camera person. Cara and I did most of the voice overs but Kyllie was good at being quiet while we were doing that. Then, the time came to edit it. Cara managed the cutting, moving, and editing of all the clips. Kyllie and I helped pick and type the labels, chose the music, and the transitions! I think it was pretty fair. It was fun to work with all these incredible people and the video turned out pretty cool. Bye bye for now and I'll see you soon!