Music Video Finale

Well, this is it. The final project for my G.T. class. Our very last project is music videos. The project where we get the most freedom in filming and effects. My teammates for this project are going to be Emma McGinnis, Maddie Hoesel, Kasiah Vercelli, and Alani Viets. All of them are great friends and students, and I'm glad I got to work with them on this project. :) So, the song that we've decided on is actually a mashup of the songs Young Volcanoes and This is Gospel (Young Gospel) by Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. Both are great bands that most of us in the group are fans of. A big part of the project was to find a storyline and how it relates to the song and its lyrics. The song is a mashup, but the lyrics we're using are from the first two minutes of This is Gospel. That song is basically about letting someone help you, no matter how alone or helpless you feel. So, in our music video, we'll show the five of us and our five parallel stories about feeling alone. Throughout the video it will show us being near or around each other, but we don't even realize it. It basically shows how many people feel that they are alone and nobody understands how they feel. They feel this way, but in reality, there are people all around them feel the exact same way. 

In music videos there a lot of things called fast-edit montage sequences. Everyone's music video had to have one of these, and in each one they have to match up with the beat of the song. In the first 10 seconds of our song there is just and instrumental and no lyrics, so we decided to do a fast-edit montage that goes along with the claps in the beginning. So for the first 6 seconds, there are quick random shots (.6 seconds) of each person on the team. They're quick flashes, and it's so far my favorite part of the video. It's my favorite because of how well matched it is, and because we're not together in any of them. That shows how lonely we all feel in the music video.

Throughout this school year I've never really been super proud to show off all of my work, and I feel like this is the first project that I'm willing to go around and show off. It's, in my opinion, the best project that I've done this year and I'm proud of it. I feel that it showcases some of my best work because of the shots and how determined we were to make it work. Getting all five of us to work together in one day was really hard to do. It didn't help that the one day that we could work out was on-and-off rainy. So I'm proud of us for getting that to work. The shots that we did were not all planned, but we made them work really well. I'm pretty sure I took most of them and I'm glad with the way they worked out.

We got second place!

This is my last project AND blog post of the year! I've had a lot of fun making a variety of media for the past three years. This class has gotten me into photography and media even more than I already was when I started. I'm grateful for all of the great skills that I have been taught, and I really look forward to using them in the future. 

Animated Life Lessons

Hey there! It's time for another G.T. project! This project will consist of animation, and using the tool that I talked about in the last blog post. That tool is the Puppet Warp tool. My teammates for this project are my classmates Maddie Hoesel and Kyler Arruda-Sukehira. One of the most important parts of this animation projects is exaggerating the character traits of each of our teammates. Maddie and I are very soft-spoken people who have never really been able to completely grasp the skills we need to socialize. I mean we can do the basics like talking and responding, but we're just not very good at it. While Kyler, my other teammate, is almost the complete opposite. He's sassy, not afraid to say what he's thinking, and he's just....Kyler.

One of the biggest factors in this animation is humor. We, of course, want to send a message with a good life lesson to the audience, but in a way that will be funny and more relatable. The message that my team wants to send is to be more empathetic and considerate. Also, we want to show that even people who are completely different can help each other somehow. Like how sassy, outgoing Kyler helped Maddie and I improve our social skills, and vice versa.

This project was one of the most difficult and frustrating projects this year. Our teacher made us team up with people that we've never been on a team with before, which wasn't at all the problem. I was already familiar with my teammates, and they were easy to work with. There were just other problems such as deadlines and animating. The deadline was a lot sooner than most students were prepared for. Luckily, our teacher had a talk with the class and let us explain what we felt and we got a few more days to work on it. Making the animation was another problem, at least for me it was. Considering I had just learned how to work the Puppet Warp tool, I wasn't exactly fast or good. Fortunately, I eventually got the hang of it and sped up just a little. Animation was also hard for me because of how quick I had to go. At least my teammates were easier to work with. This project was definitely stressful, but I got through it and also learned a little.