Reflection: Part III

           Here is my third reflection for CAP Hollywood. Basically, its in less than 10 days and panic is beginning to set it... just a little bit. But, I think we are at a good part in the editing process. If need be, we could be done right now, except for one small issue.... our film is 1 minute and 30 seconds longer than it needs to. So for the next week all of our attention is going to be on how to most effectively cut out extraneous footage and shots to shorten our movie.

         Other than that, I think my group as a whole had a pretty productive week. Our rough cut is complete and we have our credits slide in. While we are working on shortening our film, we are also adjusting the music. We currently just have music for the flashback scenes. I'm not really sure whether I think we should have music for the present days scenes as well, but I think right now our main focus needs to be on cutting down.
         I am probably going to work with Mr. Mayo at some point this week to shorten our film. Otherwise, I think everything is going pretty well.

Reflection: Part 2

               Here I am, blogging once again about our movie, Every Last Drop. This week, we've continued editing our movie. So far I think it's going okay. We officially have all of our footage in the computer, which I think is a big accomplishment. So now, we're editing. Although we've only been editing for two classes, it feels like its been a really long time, and it has.
               As of Monday we are supposed to have a completed rough cut. I'm pretty nervous about meeting this deadline, but I hope we do. What we need to do is just put in our footage. as of last class, we were spending too much time doing small edits and not just getting the clips in. We also are really concerned about length. Right now, our film is 3:30, and about half done. This is not good considering that its supposed to be four minutes total.
                We have our movie poster done though, which I think is a good accomplishment. Next week, I hope to finish a basic version of our movie, and begin cutting it down to an appropriate length. I'm happy with what we've done so far though.

To close I'll leave a video that I'm sure everyone with a facebook has already seen, but I think is very relevant given that we're all stressing about our AP on Tuesday.

Reflection on our movie so far

        This week, I am doing my reflection assignment for Mr. Mayo's class and my blog post all in one! To the left you can see a picture I took of the screen of the camera we filmed on. The shot show in the viewing screen will most likely be what we include on our movie poster. In terms of how our movie is progressing at this point, I think its going fine. Although we filmed last weekend, we realized we forgot a lot of necessary shots, so filmed again this weekend. I think this was really helpful and will be useful when we get into the harder parts of editing.
          Other than this minor setback of having to film two weekends in a row, we haven't faced any real challenges yet. This week, I have done a few things for my group. First, I've helped import all the footage that we have so far into our computer file. I have also helped Milena and Ben look at the shots, and cut them down a little to see what we need and what we are working with. I also helped finish filming our movie, and acted as the main character.I have also begun to record voice-over  though we still need to continue recording because there have been numerous technical difficulties.
           My main goal for this next week is to have a rough cut of our film finished. although this is a lofty goal, it can be accomplished. We just need to really buckle down and focus on importing all of our clips  and putting down a timeline. after that it will just get easier to make our movie.

Cartoons

         This week, I've decided I'm going to share something that I've been working on for journalism class. We just started and editorial cartoons unit, and I love it. I think it's so interesting to be able to see a persons opinions on a complex issue in just a cartoon, mostly just a single panel. I've been working on a project where we have to collect ten cartoons about a certain subject, analyze each one, and then give a reflection of the whole collection.

         The cartoons I've viewed have been everything from amusing and almost funny to somber and deadly serious. My topic was the recent vote on the gun legislation in Congress. Here's one of my favorite of the cartoons. This cartoon depicts an arm labeled as the NRA snuffing out the light and hope of new gun legislation that could have occurred from the Sandy Hook tragedy with a snuffer shaped like the Capitol. Although this cartoon only has four words on it, it is to me more powerful than any article or opinion I've read about the vote.

          This cartoon is another from my collection and my other favorite. It not only emphasizes the fact that Congress can't seem to get anything important done, but that bad things will just keep happening until they do. It lists just four of the many terrible shootings that have happened in the past 14 years, three of which occurred in the past two years. It reinforces the sad truth that although we still have not used the Sandy Hook shooting as a way to get more gun legislature passed, there will soon enough come another shooting that might be able to convince Congress more than the money that the man is shown holding at the left.

        For this project in journalism, we also have to draw our own editorial cartoon. I am really nervous about this project simply because I cannot draw. But more deeper than that, I am nervous because I'm afraid I wont be able to have an affect like the cartoons above. I am in awe at the pictures ability to tell so much about a situation while saying so little. I can only hope that I come close to that with my cartoon in this coming week.

Music of the Streets

           We finally finished our documentaries! I worked on the four minute documentary that we were assigned back a long time ago with Samantha, Sarah, and Grace. When we first heard about the project, we all decided that we wanted to make our documentary about street musicians. None of us really knew anything about them, and we thought it would be fun to go into DC and interview people about playing music on the streets of DC.
           Well, it turned out to be a little tougher than we expected. We made multiple trips to DC and although we did find four people who played music, none of them had the time to let us interview them. So, we reshaped our view of our documentary. Instead of focusing on street musicians stories, we gave a super brief history of busking and then moved on to show the different street performers that we found.
           This process really gave me a chance to work on my Final Cut Pro skills. I did a lot of the actual editing while getting direction from Sarah, Grace, and Samantha since I was the person in our group who at least had a basic knowledge of Final Cut. I also really liked being able to go into DC and go up to random people on the street and ask them what they thought of street musicians. Although many people turned me down, I got to talk to several interesting people and become better at talking to strangers.
           I'm really proud of how our documentary came out, and I think Mr. Mayo liked it to. Here it is:

St. Anselm's Abbey v. Avalon (and a little look at my dads high school life)

                    This weekend has been a really lazy weekend for me. I literally sat around and did nothing (not that I'm complaining), but I was kinda bored. So, when my dad asked me if I wanted to go to his old high school's annual basketball tournament, I said sure. My dad went to Saint Anselm's Abbey, a tiny all boys Catholic School in Northeast DC. He graduated in 1980, which was 33 years ago (that's crazy!) This weekend was their 66th Annual Invitational Basketball Tournament. We went to the final game where the Abbey played The Avalon School for the championship game of the tournament.
                  My dad grew up in the DC area and comes from a large family, 4 boys and 4 girls. His dad was in the very first class at the Abbey and graduated in the class of 1946. My dad's three brothers also attended. Two of his brothers live in the area, so we all went to the game. His twin brother happens to be Maddie's dad, so Maddie and her sister were there too along with me and my sister.

                  As soon as we drove up, the first thing that hit me was the size of the school. It is tiny. Definitely smaller than my elementary school. My dad's entire grade was originally 33 people, but only 23 ended up graduating. On the right is a class picture from his graduation. My dad is the dark haired guy directly above and a little to the left of the Father wearing the cross. Maddie's dad is directly above the Father to the right of the Father wearing the cross.
            It was actually pretty amusing to be in the exact same building that my dad went to high school in over thirty years ago. Of course, it was a totally different experience for him. The first thing Maddie and I noticed when we walked into the game and up to the Abbey side of the bleachers was the sheer amount of boys. This shouldn't come as a surprise since it is an all boys school, but it still was. And naturally Maddie immediately commented on the lack of cheerleaders. I asked my uncle Matt (Maddie's dad) what it was like going to an all boys school. His response? "Not only was it all boys, but it was all nerdy boys. I mean, commme on."
            And he was right. It was really tough to make it at the Abbey. Classes were hard. Of the 33 that entered the Abbey in seventh grade, only half of the original class graduated (the other few were transfer students). That means half of the grade either transferred, or flunked out. There was multiple hours of homework a night, every night. My dad was also on the basketball team way back when, and that year (1980) they ended up winning the Abbey tournament championship.
              Anyway, back to the original point of this post, which was about the basketball game. When we arrived, St. Anselm's was trailing by ten, and they never fully came back. The end of the game was super intense, however. They were down by 1 with less than a minute left. They had to foul Avalon in order to stop the clock. The kid missed his first free throw, but made his second, putting us behind by two. Then, we just collapsed defensively and allowed them to pick up the rebound and make a layup, putting Avalon up by four with five seconds left. Devan Abercrombie, an Abbey junior and leading scorer throughout the game, grabbed the ball and raced down the court. With one second left he heaved the ball at the basket just outside the three point arc.
              It swished in, but it didn't matter. St. Anselm's lost  47-46. It was heartbreaking loss, but a really fun game to watch. One particularly hilarious highlight was in the third quarter. An Avalon player shot what should have been an easy basket, but completely missed. The Abbey boys began to chant "airrrrballlll, airrrrrballlll," and Avalon immediately responded with "scoreeeboardd, scoreeeboarddd" (they were up by nine). Then, to the crowd's surprise, the Abbey boys retaliated with "SAT score, SAT score" which perfectly sums up this entirely too long post. Leave it to self proclaimed 'nerdy' Abbey boys to bring a gripping basketball championship game back to the academics.      

Side note: I would include a picture of the game but every single one I took is either way too dark or blurry to even see what is going on.    

First World Problems read by Third World People

              So facebook is used for many things. Connecting with people you haven't seen in a while, sharing funny pictures, posting statuses about your mundane daily life, and sometimes, sharing really fascinating, powerful videos. About a week ago I was mindlessly scrolling through my facebook newsfeed when I stumbled upon this amazingly powerful one minute video.

                #firstworldproblems is something that has been trending on twitter for a long time (excuse me if that sentence isn't accurate I honestly don't have a twitter and I am absolutely clueless about twitter lingo). Anyway, a few example of these tweets are "When I go to my friends houses, I can't charge my iPhone because I have the 5 and they have the 4"  or "There's pulp in my pulp free orange juice" or "I just put lotion on my hands and now I can't open my gatorade". 
                Although most tweets of this nature are meant to be jokes and are admittedly sometimes funny, they also sometimes ring true in an embarrassing way. People will tweet things such as "when my finger gets tired from holding up my iPhone  and completely mean it. This video puts these so called 'problems' into perspective.
                Seeing a man standing in front of a building that is broken and could hardly qualify as a shack saying "I hate it when my house is so big, I need two wireless routers" really makes me think about my 'problems' and things that I complain about on a daily basis that really, I should be lucky to have at all. 
               Well, this has been my sappy post about people who have it a lot worse than us. I hope that if anything, people now think a little about what other people's lives are like before complaining about when they ask for no pickles but still get pickles.

Projects

       For this week's post I thought I would share my english project that I did a few weeks ago about the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. We read the book and then had to make a multi media presentation about a theme that we picked up from the book. Not knowing that we would be reading the book this year, I watched the movie over the summer with my family. At the time I had both liked and disliked the movie. I enjoyed the general idea and the acting, but found it overly dramatic and pretty depressing. When I found out we had to read the book, I was excited to see how they would compare.
      The movie and the book are very similar, but also quite different. At first I was upset I had seen the movie first since it spoiled the ending for me. But, as I was reading I was glad I could think back to how the movie portrayed certain events and have an image to go with what I was reading. Already knowing the plot made the small details that might seem insignificant to one who was reading the book for the first time even more interesting. I picked up on a lot more of the clues about the key and the grandfather than those who were not aware of the full plot until the end.
       The book also offers more perspective than the movie because it tells the story from the grandmother and grandfathers points of view as well. Because of my appreciation for the story, I was excited when Ms. Fillman told us about the project. I immediately knew that my theme would be something to do with "love and loss," which is exactly what it ended up being. I also wanted to connect it to the Simon and Garfunkel song "Sounds of Silence," because I love the song and think that it relates really well to the book.
       So, I began choosing pieces of the song that related to quotes I had chosen from the book, and getting them to correspond to pictures that matched both. After I had done that for six quotes, I finished my presentation by relating it to the passing of my dog and how loss comes in all different ways, but eventually we all have to move on. Below is my project. Although it is not exactly how I envisioned it, I'm proud of my work and I think it came out pretty well.

Silver Spring Video

                   So, as I've already shown, my video skills aren't the best. But I try. So here's my video of what life is like in Silver Spring. I started with a quick shot of Blair Boulevard, Blair's main hallway. I then showed waiting at the bus stop, which unfortunately is a huge part of my life since my parents are generally working and insist that since I can use public transportation for free, why not take advantage of it? I then show going in Downtown Silver Spring to Noodles&Company, where I also spend probably more time than I should. Last I showed something, that while not part of my everyday life, was fun and important: the 2013 Panther Cheer Competition over at Paint Branch. The Blazer cheerleaders ended up winning the spirit award, captain's award, AND first place overall, so they were all really excited.
                    I shot this video on my phone, and edited it in wevideo with a song that I thought fit the mood that was also from wevideo. Here it is:

Pick Pockets

           This morning I read a really interesting article in The Washington Post. Let me clarify that it was actually my mom who read the article, and then suggested that I do as well. This is because as much as I think reading the newspaper everyday would be really helpful to my everyday life, especially journalism class, I don't always do it.
          Anyway the article was called 'Pair of pickpockets counted on kindness of elderly shoppers' and can be found here, although under a different name.
         Basically, this article is about a pick pocketing duo who were nicknamed 'the Salt and Pepper Crew' by the police. It was one man and one woman, and they would both go into a grocery store searching for elderly shoppers who were most vulnerable and would not be aware of the situation. The woman, who would wear makeup and a wig to look like an elderly woman herself, would approach the victim and say something like: "Can you help me read this label? I left my glasses at home?" While the unsuspecting person brought the product close to their face to examine it, the male counterpart of the team would quickly swipe the  persons credit cards. The two would then go to somewhere like Target and buy thousands of dollars worth of gift cards with the stolen credit cards.
           This went on for quite some time, but the two were eventually caught just recently. Here are their pictures:

  

       For some reason I can't figure out how to put them next to each other, so the pictures are formatted like this. Oh well. Anyway back to the original point of this post.
       The reason my mom showed me this story wasn't because she just thought it would be a good read (which it was), but because she said she cannot understand how someone could possibly spend their life tricking innocent people and stealing away not only their credit cards, but their trust in strangers and trust in general life.
       What these people did was cruel. And what made it even crueler was that they didn't just do it to the first person they saw, they specifically targeted old ladies, some of the most kind and trusting type of people. One of their victims was 98 years old. 98.
                                                    I realized that pick pocketing is not an uncommon thing. I remembered the

 

story I had grown up hearing from my uncle, about when he was younger and was traveling on the subway when a blind man accidentally bumped him. In helping the man up and picking himself up, an accomplice grabbed my uncles wallet and ran off. The other man was pretending to be blind.
        My mom also told me a story of when she was in her twenties and traveling in Italy with her friend. They were resting on a small wall when a man came up to them and asked for directions, saying he was lost. While my mom's friend was trying to help him, my mom saw a hand coming up over the wall from the corner of her eye. She quickly clutched her friends purse to her chest, and the men exchanged horrified glances and sprinted off. My mom said not five minutes later she heard a woman crying "Help! Thief! He stole my purse!" from down the street.
        Even my grandpa was pick pocketed. And this was relatively recently, at the Pope's funeral. The Pope's funeral. The irony.
        So the point of this post wasn't to share pick pocketing horror stories that I've heard over the years, or even to share this article. It was so I could express my views on some people's moral character, or lack there of. I don't understand how so many people could spend their lives doing this. Because of 'Salt and Pepper,' some old women are scared to go shopping alone. In my uncles case, a man pretended he was blind, pretended he had a disability, just so he could steal the wallet. People with disabilities lives are already hard enough, without the added scrutiny of whether they are in fact disabled, or are just trying to scam people.
       In conclusion, I know that there are also incredibly nice unselfish people out there. Just last week my cousin dropped her wallet in the streets of DC. She retraced her steps but could not fin it anywhere, and gave it up as a lost cause that someone had probably taken it and her credit cards. As it turned out, when she returned home there were several messages on her work cell phone, whose number was in the wallet, detailing that a man had found and turned it into the police station  and my cousin could drive down and pick it up when she got the message.
      So yes, there are horrible, deceitful people in this world, but there are also incredibly kind ones, who just try to do their duty as citizens of the world.