Real World Report

Our new G.T portfolio project is doing a real world news story and describing it. What I did my story on was a Chinese professor spoke out against the police and got arrested for life and his life savings account of 800,000 yuan ($162,000). He was accused for separatism of the Hans Chinese and the ethnic Uighur's. Separatism is when someone tries to separate two or more large groups of people be their race, skin color, gender or ethnicity. If he was trying to separate the groups then he would be an important figure in trying to separate the Han Chinese and the ethnic Uighur's.

My opinion on this issue is simple. I feel he should have gone to jail for his life but I feel he shouldn't have had his account frozen. I feel this way because he has a family to take care of and without that money his family won't be able to live on. So, I think it is okay to take away his life, but not his families. What they did to him in jail was treat him harshly because he didn't admit to his crime and because they new he was a great figure for separating the two Chinese groups and they didn't want anyone following his footsteps.

I think this is important information to know because people need to know it is their right to speak up. I know you hear this campaign all the time stop bullying speak up or its ok to speak up. I am not trying to sound like that because personally i think those campaigns come up as an add way too often. What I am trying to say is you don't have to speak up, but if you want to make a difference you can. I understand why he did it, but if it were up to me I would just be a bystander.

Lessons Learned

These are my lessons learned about my G.T project for Hiki No about El Nino. First The most interesting part of my project is that it is about weather patterns and how they effect you in your everyday life. That personally to me is pretty cool. Also My personal favorite part is that we might be going on television. It is a great opportunity for a lot of things. For example if you want to get a message to everyone than it would be a great choice for television. Also I just plain out like hanging out with my friends. Actually the very very most interesting part of my project are the b-roll shots. They are the most interesting part because we, just this year, learned how to do time lapses, and to me that is spectacular.

The biggest roadblock my team had would probably be that my team argues a lot of the time and it kind of get irritating after a while. Well i don't think its really arguing but we yell at each other a lot. Also we cant find a very good time film. We tried to find a date but at first we couldn't get in contact with Jason, in the end we did but we had to postpone the meeting. Partially the reason is that Preston Quinn and I are in seventh grade and Jason is in sixth. And the sixth and seventh graders are separated by boundaries, so if Jason is in the sixth grade pod than we can't get to him because of the boundaries.

The most valuable part of filming is the editing. If we were to not have editing then we would make a really bad piece. For example it would be harder to transcribe because what we did to transcribe is slowed down the footage so we can hear it clearly. Also if we didn't have editing then we couldn't edit out the mistakes. For example we made some noise while filming, but with editing you can edit out the noise. Also if you don't have editing and you filmed something that was good but shot it for too long then you will have to use the footage. The composition techniques are also very important because if you ever want to get on T.V than you will have to have rule of thirds and  maybe some other composition techniques.

HikiNo Behind The Scenes

Hi guys its me, sorry you havent heard from me in a while i was at my summer camp. I just want to tell you that, like last year, we are doing another Hiki No project. Except this time we are either doing a profile story or a news story. My team for Hiki No is Preston Hayden, Quinn Consylman and Jason Hoy, so our team has three 7th graders and one 6th grader. Even though Mr.Sanderl said that no returning G.T students should be on the same Hiki No team me and Preston got put together because we didn't have a team to go on yet. We chose to do a news story instead of a profile story. If you don't know what they are basically a news story is a story of news stating facts about your topic. A profile story is a story based on one person and could have opinions included.

What happens behind the scenes? You may be wondering. I will tell you what our proccess is: First we thought of what our project was going to be about. This was especially hard because our team was a t a disagreement. One person was saying do this and someone else was saying do something different. For example someone was saying do a Twinkie factory while someone else was saying do how I moved to kauai and I was saying we should do something about someone else and so forth. Secondly we filled out a pitch sheet which Mr.Sandrel gave us to fill out. He said it would help get us organized, and it did. Without that pitch sheet we wouldn't know what to do. Next we went out and filmed our interview/B-roll.

I think one thing I can do to help my team is mediate the discussions so there is less arguing. What i mean by arguing is that my team sometimes can be jolly old good buddies, and sometimes we can say things that may not be so nice. yes we can get a little worked up at some points in our life but we still need to mediate our actions and feelings. For example one day Me Jason and Quinn were calling preston and we kind of snapped out at him for going on the bus instead of staying and helping film. Also check out my sisters blog who is also in G.T Loren Weiner. Now here are two pictures of our sneak peak behind the scenes work:

Hashtag Taking Selfies With My Sister

This is the pure definition of a work of art

This is what I do in my spare time. Don't judge.

The Expirement

For my Photoshop experiment I played around with the gradients. I used different layers of gradients and changed the opacity according to how far from the bottom layer it was. I also added a some messages that blend in pretty well with the rest of the image. I used all the gradient patterns in Photoshop and used a lot of different colors. I might still work on it to make it better yet, but for now here it is:

Back To School

I am back in school and now I am in 7th grade. My favorite moment so far in the school year was seeing all my old friends from last year. Now we have to wear black shirts! Also they didn't have any size smaller than the one I'm wearing so I'm stuck with an over sized T-shirt. I like all my teachers this year, they are all really nice. There is now something called an I-Ready test that tells you whether or not you need extra help in math or English. So far I am taking my math I -Ready, and this is the last day. Next week I am taking my English I-Ready. To be successful this year I plan to study a lot.

Metamorphosis Animation

The most recent project we did was the Metamorphosis Animation Project.What we did for this project was create an animation with stykz, digital, stop motion, and claymation.We had to do at least two types of animation for this project and my team did digital animation claymation and stop motion.Our story was Craneman Gathers Knowledge.We did the first scene as the clay ball, another character, going through portals and appearing through another portal.Our second scene was craneman forming.How craneman forms is he comes out as an egg and he starts to unravel as the nest becomes flatter and we go through the steps on how to make an origami crane.Our third scene was craneman going to a desert and gathering knowledge from a snake.Our forth scene was craneman gathering knowledge from an action figure and clayball and craneman fighting with him.On my team was Raiden Kurisu, Oriia Niitsu and Timothy Blum.Raiden did all the origami because he was the origami whiz.Except when he was sick, thats when we faced our biggest challenge.We didn't have the origami master so we couldn't do our scene.I don't think our animation went that well because we were kind of rushed and we switched our topic in the middle of the project because we figured the project was going nowhere.

On the bright side we didn't get all needs improvement on the critique we did.Although our team didn't get any votes for the best animation we still did pretty good.Except for the fact that when we changed our video we lost the theme of metamorphosis.At first our topic was a ball going through a portal and ending up on a ship, then turning into a sea serpent.After that the sea serpent was supposed to face a wizard and get turned into a kitten and so on.So, you can see why we changed our topic.