Cracking The Code

In GT class, we have recently done something new, and quite exiting. We did...(drumroll please)... CODING! We didn't do the hardcore, from scratch, write the script coding, but we worked with a program for beginners. Coding is actually much more common than a lot of people realize. It's in our banking, indirectly in most industries, and many other important things. The thing is, though, that not very many people actually know how to code! Personally, I think that coding is something everybody should know how to do. Maybe not as advanced as people who's job it is to code, but should at least know how to do things like create a very basic website. I feel like that because it's in so many different and very important things. If something suddenly goes wrong with one of those things, we should all know how to fix it! And I'm sure some people would try to abuse knowing how to code, but if everyone knew how, we could all stop them.

Now, I shall tell you about my first experience with coding. It was actually NOT in GT class! The first time I ever did any real coding was in a summer course, between 5th and 6th grade. It was on a college campus, but I was learning beginner things. I was in a class with about twenty other kids, and we all had a lot of fun. Not all of the kids actually paid attention and learned, though. One kid just sat with his feet up on a chair and listened to music off of Youtube for most of the two week class. We made multiple games, all of which were fairly basic. I made a top-down shooter with different types of enemies and mazes as well as power ups, a top-down car chase games, another top-down  game in which you must fend off attacking airplanes by shooting at them, and a games in which you must guide a parachuting cow through mazes it falls through while collecting coins, and, in the end, reaching the ground. I made them by doing things like setting variables on the characters action and on what button was pressed. That means if one thing happened, it would cause something else to happen. For example, in my top down-shooter, if you were touched by a zombie or a guard, you lost a certain amount of health, which you could gain back by walking into an image of a heart you find every once and a while in a maze. Unfortunately, I do not remember the name of the program I used, but I had a lot of fun.

It seems my committed readers have reached the last paragraph. EVER. Just kidding! It's just the last paragraph in this post. The subject for this  paragraph is "If I could design any program or game"... I would design a social media app and website. But it wouldn't be like any social media website. It would be strictly for people who all share a surprisingly  common hobby of mine. I'm not going to tell you what the hobby is, but I will say it is legal, common, and many people make jobs and livings off of it. I would be the moderator, which means I would go through all the content and make sure it is all related to the hobby, and not offensive in any sexual or racial way. After a certain number of unrelated posts, say... 4 or five, depending on how unrelated they are, whoever posted them all would be kicked out for a certain amount of time, and if they got temporarily kicked out twice, then they would be banned permanently. Unlike Vine, your videos could be as long as you wanted, and the app would would have a built in video and photo editor, as well as multiple chat rooms.

My Humorous Monologue

MeredithC_Comedy from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.

From my comedy project, I have learned many things. First of all, I learned how to use a certain kind
of camera. I used it to help film my classmate doing his comedic monologue. Mainly, I learned about writing and presenting comedy. It was honestly a bit harder than I thought, but it was quite fun. The hardest part was finding a good subject to write about. What I learned from the writing, though, is to go over my monologue multiple times, joke by joke, and try to make each one  as funny as possible. I also learned about timing while I was filming my comedic monologue. I learned not to fly through each joke really fast, and to have a rhythm to your delivery. I am also currently learning more and more about using iMovie, which I think is pretty fun. One of the most important things I learned about in filming comedy is called pad. I'll tell you about that next. OR WILL I? ( Cue dramatic sound effects). YES. I WILL.

Pad is a very important part of filming anything. It is used as a precaution for clips that are either too short in the end, or cut off, (basically meaning to short), in the begging. Adding pad to your clips is actually very easy and simple. To add pad to your clips, you start a few seconds before the thing you want to film happens, and wait a few seconds after it's happened. In my GT class, we have been adding pad by starting filming, saying "rolling", then saying "three, two, one, action." At the the end, we just wait a few seconds before we stop filming. After we import the clips, we can trim out the pad, or leave some in if it the clips are too long or short. Basically, by doing absolutely nothing for a few seconds before and after you start filming, you are adding pad.

Here is my joke plan for the making of my video.

Now don't you go off thinking "oh, I'm going to make myself a video just like that kid Callum, and it'll just take me one day!" No. That's not how it works. It had many challenges, and I'll describe some of those now, along with some other things. I think the biggest challenge was editing it in Imovie. That's because I didn't have much time to do it because of a misunderstanding, but once I was able to edit, I had to hurry, and it was difficult. I had never used Imovie before, so it  was difficult, but I learned a lot. The easiest part, though, was writing the actual script. That part was very fun, and it was something I had hoped we got to do in school for years. The only hard part of that was picking a subject to write about, then I just went to work and had fun. I do think that there could be improvements, however. I think that I could have had more stable videos, (although some shots were deliberately shaky), and clearer audio. The audio is a bit unclear because I filmed outside, but I think it is okay. In class, we watched each others finished videos, and graded them based on a curriculum that we had. Below are my grade results from the other kids. The chart is a little uneven, though, so you need to look at the numbers and grades to your left of the green bars. As you can see, I did pretty well, and I'm very glad I got the results I did. CHIAO!