Movie Poster Prom

In our movie poster, Andrea is played by Leleaka Anakalea, and John is played by Gabriel Sifuentes. The picture I used was a picture of Leleaka and Gabriel sitting next to each other on a dock. The location was at Stone Dam in Kilauea. The picture of them sitting on the dock is supposed to be there favorite place to go on dates.

Our title is called Letters to John because after John went missing he kept writing letters to Andrea, so Andrea would write back and that's why we called it Letters to John. The other text that we added to our poster are the names of the actors and who will be playing them. Also the reviews from the different critics. Then we added the Production Company (DreamWorks) and that the movie is coming soon. Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between letters in the font, usually used to achieve a pleasing result. We use Kerning because when you type out a word it's best to give it a better look because you don't want a boring word. You can move it up, down, side, to side and you can space it out to however you want it to look like.

Overall the use of layer effects and filters used in my poster made my poster look interesting. For example the title had Drop Shadow, Stroke, Bevel and Emboss, which made my title standout or pop out. Also that when I added the picture I had already edited it so it had a nice filter on it.

Visual Literacy

In Mrs. Sanderl's 7th period class we did a project were we folded a book in to a word. The process to this project was that we first started off with a word that had to be 4 letters or less. Then we printed out the word with gray and white lines. We had to count each line that was on the paper. We then chose a book that had more pages then the number we counted on the paper. Then we started folding. Isaac Salazar, the creator of book folding, has been folding since October 2009. He first started off doing simple letters, then he moved up to more complex words. Visual Literacy is the ability to make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. It's based on the idea that pictures can be read. Visual Literacy is used in this project because when you make a word, people have to figure out the meaning of your word.

For my books, I chose the words "Life", and "Love". Both of my books have different fonts, the first font had a curvy flow to it. The second book "Love" had a simple font, I think I did it a simple font because the first book was really hard because my font was hard to follow. Overall for my two books, I folded about 300 pages each. The purpose for the words I chose were that Life is what people live, and Love is what people have.

In the end I think my books turned out really good. Next time I would try to fold my pages a little nicer because some of them are off by a little. If I were to do this project again, I would choose another word. The word I would do would be my name, but I want to do one letter per book. The reason I want to do it that way is I've never tried it that way, and I think it would look cool and interesting.

Proactive or Procrastination?

I am proactive person. To be proactive you take care of things right away and you don't come up with reasons or excuses not to do it. I would say I'm proactive because I do take care of things right away so I have free time afterwards. I don't come up with reasons not to do it. Even though tons of homework gets on my nerves, I still try my hardest to get it done, especially if its due on Monday and I have the whole weekend to work on it.

My level of productivity gives me a lot of free time, in school and after school. I have more free time after school though because I can get my homework done quickly. If I do that then I have time to do whatever, invite my neighbor over, jump on my trampoline or even go for a walk. In school I don't get that much free time because we are usually working right up to the bell. Only once in a while we get a few minutes of free time.

If there was a way to change something about how I work it would be, the neatness. I would change how neat I write because right now I don't like my handwriting. It makes my papers kind of messy but not that bad. To do that I will write a little slower and just focus on keeping it neat. Another thing I would change is how organized I am. I'm pretty organized, but I could do better. To do that I will just keep everything in order, neat and organized.

My Visual Poem

     NiceS VisualPoem from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo

My visual poem is about family. This visual poem makes an impact to me because family is everything. Family is what this world is made of. I think this poem topic is used quite a lot because it's a poem about family, everyone loves writing about their family's.

On most of my special effects I think it caused this poem to be more dramatic. Also that the overall meaning is good because it's about family. I also think the mood was set good because with the heavy low music in the background it kind of adds a dramatic tone to the story.

In the end I feel like my visual poem turned out pretty good, even though I don't have much video footage and that I have a lot of pictures, I still think it turned out really good. To improve or make my video better, I would try to get more B-Roll of my family actually doing family things. Like having fun together, or laughing and talking about life. Also in one part of my video it talks about a family being like a book and how if you find an ending you know their love is near, it shows a picture and it says 'and they lived happily ever after," I think that it didn't really match, also that I got it off the internet so it wasn't really mine. All together I still think I did pretty good on this project.

Finished News Story

                              Kapaa Middle School MEDIA

Our story was about the first female fire knife dancer on the island of Kauai. It was about her challenges and her success doing fire knife dancing throughout her life. The people who helped us through this would be, my team, Haley Gokan, Leslie Acoba, and Kaylynn Drake. The parents were also a big help. They got us to the places we needed to be and helped us come up with new ideas.

At the end, I think our final turned out really good, very detailed, also that it kept the watcher interested. I am really happy with our video because I think we worked our hardest on it to get it from good to great. I also think that we evenly worked on it to make it better, and to help give new ideas and steps to make it better.

Our critique results turned out really good, we had a lot of 4's and a few 3's but no 2's. Our critique results showed how we tried our hardest to make this story the best. I do agree with these results because they seem accurate to me, even though all the other videos were awesome. Also my opinion is that we were actually a really good team and we all worked good together.

Real World Report

White Tiger Kills Youth Who Jumped Inside it's Enclosure at Delhi Zoo:

On Tuesday afternoon, a 19-20 year old man jumped into a white tiger's enclosure at the Delhi Zoo, located in Sundar Nagar South Delhi. Some eyewitnesses got photos and videos of the attack. After the tragedy the zoo was closed for the day. The man was identified later as Maqsood, he was a factor worker and a resident of central Delhi’s Anand Parbat. His parents claimed that their son was being treated for mental illness for the past two years. Horrified eyewitnesses screamed and threw sticks and stones at the tiger to try and stop him. The man was crouching against a wall with the tiger starring right in to his face. People at the zoo could hear screams coming from the enclosure and when they got there they could see the man in the tiger's mouth writhing badly in pain. By the time help got there he was already dead. His mom said "He told he he'd be back for dinner." But they were called that night and informed that there son was in the hospital and pronounced dead. 


My opinion is that this was a very tragic day, but I don't think it's the tigers fault because they don't know what to think, there just tigers. Also that the man made a very poor decision to go into that enclosure especially since it's a tiger's cage. I also think that the help should've come quicker, that they came really late was really strange to me. 
I think we should care about this because after this I hope nobody will try and do this. Also that if you do it's not a good choice and that you could die. Or you could get seriously injured. Some people think this would be cool, but it wouldn't be safe. Especially is you have a family or something.   

Lessons Learned

The most interesting part of our project so far is going out and filming our B-roll shots. First we got to go to the Kauai Marriott and film the luau festival that Kaylynn and her group put on. We got different shots of Kaylynn doing fire knife dancing which I think will make our project look even more awesome. Then we met up at the Kapahi park and filmed more B-roll of Kaylynn and her dad fire knife dancing but without the fire. We also went down to the Kapaa Beach Park and we got two more interviews of her two brothers and we also got some more B-roll of that.

I think our biggest roadblock that my team and I handled was making sure everyone could make it to the places we needed to be, to help us film and come up with interesting angles and techniques. We made it through that roadblock by scheduling and planning meets and times to meet. Even though one of our partners couldn't make it we still got the job done without any problems.

To me, I think the most valuable part of the filmmaking process is planning and teamwork. I would say planning because once you plan everything and know where you want to put things, then you could go out and do what you need to do and get the job done. Also I would say teamwork because you can't do the whole project by yourself, it's better to have extra people to helping you, it always makes the job easier. Also they can help you by telling you different ways of doing something which could then make your project better!

HikiNo Behind the Scenes

My team and I decided to do a profile story. Our project is on Kaylynn Drake and her family and how their tradition is fireknife dancing. So far we have filmed a bunch of b-roll of Kaylynn and her family fireknife dancing first without fire and secondly with fire at a Luau at the Marriott. We have also gotten two more interviews from her two older brothers who also do fireknife dancing. We asked them questions such "Do you think Kaylynn will be better than you when she is your age?" and "Are you enjoy watching her?".

When the camera is not rolling, we will plan on what to do when the camera is rolling. Also we will tell the interviewer what we were planning on doing next, anything else they want to add, and what b-roll we will do. Also we will ask everyone around the team to see if anyone has good ideas about good B-Roll shots and much more.

One thing I can do to help my team would be to be there and help plan things and be there to give more advice or maybe different camera angles or even how the interviewer is talking. Also to make sure if we have to schedule anything make sure to make sure everyone can make it first. I think that our video will turn out really awesome!

The Experiment

This project was for us to do freely, without Mr. Sanderl helping us at all. I think we did this because he wanted to see if we would remember anything from last year. Also I think because he hasn't done this before so he wanted to try it.

The right thing about it was that we got a chance to bring back some things we forgot during the summer, such as the select tool, the deselect tool, the size's, the quality, and also how to save it properly in Photoshop. The bad thing about this though was that Mr. Sanderl couldn't help us at all even if it was a simple question like where is this or is this right? All together it was a really fun project.

Back to School

My favorite moment so far would have to be getting to see my friends again especially the ones I haven't seen all summer. Also I am happy because I get to have 3 teachers from last year, Mrs. Sanderl for art, Mr. Sanderl for GT and also the awesome Mrs. Bandsma for earth science.

My biggest challenge would have to be finding out that after we finish all the regular 8th grade math we have to learn Algebra which is difficult especially if your in honors math, and at the end of the year we have to take a hard test on Algebra but I plan to pass! Also my other biggest challenge would have to be trying to get multiple 4.0's.  

To be successful this year I plan to work my hardest at each subject and try to make a goal and reach it by the end of the year and also to stay organized. I hope to be able to get high testing scores that shows that I have passed and also to get multiple 4.0's, also I hope that by the end of this year I will be ready for high school and all the challenges to come.