Today I finished my second and final final for this year. It feels very weird to know that this is the end of iLab. Never thought in a million years that I'd finish out the year at home during the decline of a global health crisis. These past months have been absolutely mental. It's like God just said "Oh 2020 being a normal year? Yeah no let's throw some curveballs into the mix." Anyway before I talk about the final, thank you Ms. Reimold for a great year, this was the only class I genuinely enjoyed besides marching band. Anyway's, time for the formality.
For my final final, I made a stop motion baking video where I bake chocolate chip cookies. At first I started off slow, the brown sugar was clumped and I had to sift through it and microwave it to de-clump it. After all that, it was smooth sailing. I figured I would take as many photos as I can so as to fill more time and create a more fluid video. This ended up not being enough, and I still had a short video in the end (a little under a minute). If I were to do this again, I probably would plan ahead a bit more, as I hadn't thought about the assignment too much until this past week. The successes I had mostly came from the cookies themselves and the cleaning. The cookies tasted good and I left the kitchen spotless. My family enjoyed the cookies very much, and I learned that clumpy brown sugar can flatten a cookie into a pancake. My only regret of this year was not getting my lamp done quicker, I would've loved to see the final result. Maybe next year who knows.
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Well this week was interesting. Monday I had to wake up early (which frankly is outrageous) and go to school, meaning I had to walk to my desk. iLab seems like we're headed in a good direction, as I very much like this online learning style. My other classes are doing alright as well. Band is gonna be a mix of music theory written work and submitting ourselves playing music. Forensics is all online, on your own, just like the rest of my classes. I think I'll like the rest of this year even though it sucks that I can't see my friends for a long while.
I continued where I left off with my keychain, which admittedly wasn't that far. I've been slowly making progress on it, which has been going along not so well. Somehow, one of my pillars got crooked and it's messing up everything. As I write this, I'm also working on it in another tab, so hopefully I'll get it done before tonight. Not sure what I'll be doing for the final, but I'll look it over again tonight and decide. 28/3/2020 0 Comments Week #Boring (COVID FUN!) Greetings Reimold! I've lost it. Well not actually (at least not yet haha). This week really has been me making up assignments before they call off school for the rest of the year. It usually comprises of me sitting down to do it, then ending up playing a game or going for a bike ride. But hey I'm getting it done for the most part. I've started playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on a small TV/VCR combo with my old N64 hooked up. It takes up a good chunk of my workspace but I figure it's worth it considering how much fun I can get out of it. I haven't played since I was like 10, so I have no clue how to get the sword in the beginning to get to the great deku tree, so if you know please let me know. To be honest I thought it was in the lost woods but I searched for a good while and couldn't figure it out.
On a much healthier note, I've been getting out of the house a ton going on bike rides. Before the statewide quarantine, me and some friends would play disc golf at Wagner park most days. Now we resort to chatting on discord almost everyday. The only positive to this whole ordeal, is I get to enjoy hobbies and the outdoors more than ever. Loads of fun. 14/3/2020 1 Comment Week of Eternal Sick This week I caught a sinus infection on Monday, so I was out Tuesday and Wednesday. On Monday, I started to sketch out my designs for project #2. I drew out a rough (and I mean rough) sketch of the Grateful Dead Bear, the King Gizzard Gator, the infamous headless SG (a modded Gibson SG electric guitar that I joke about with my friends, as it looks really weird [the SG typically has a head]), and the Pig from the album Animals by Pink Floyd. I gave these rough dimensions and went about thinking I was set for Tuesday when they were due. Come Tuesday I'm home, and when I get back Thursday, I learned I needed more detail to my sketches. From there, I dropped the Grateful Dead bear, and the Pink Floyd Pig. I replaced these with a replica of Battersea Power Station (also from Pink Floyd's Animals), and the guy from Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters album cover. Deeming these good, I packed up and said "great I'll work on this tomorrow when I have more time!". Then Corona virus swept in and said "What? You wanted to get back into your classwork and commit to your grades? HAHAHAHAH nope." And then school was cancelled. So now I sit here, typing this from my desk, not even fully sure if we were supposed to do reflections, imagining my 3D printed, headless SG. Above: The Headless Gibson SG Above: The Gator that appears in the music video for King Gizzard's, The River. Above: The Grateful Dead bear. Above: Pink Floyd's Animals (album cover). Above: Herbie Hancocks, Head Hunters.
6/3/2020 1 Comment Week # Something? Monday was the day of reckoning. Not actually, I just needed a cool intro. Monday I worked on finishing my lamp design and submitting it. I had already completed it technically, but I needed to go back to fix it for printing. I needed to cut out my design and my female end pieces so that the glowforge wouldn't skip over them. We ultimately ended up never doing it, as we ran into many problems and ran out of time. On the bright side, I finally finished my house design, which ended up looking okay. Not great, just okay, and I'm completely fine with that. Then I slacked off Friday and messed around with the MIDI instead of typing this.
I'm trying some new ways to get my work done, as that seems to be the problem right now. I can't seem to bring myself to focus on schoolwork so I end up going home and watching youtube for hours. Right now I have much more of a work ethic so I'm able to go home and get straight to work. Hopefully this works as I really need to get my grades up. 28/2/2020 0 Comments February 28th, 2020Alright I'll be real Ms. Reimold, I wasn't here on Tuesday cause I was sick and we had snow days Wednesday and Thursday. So the only two days I had were Monday and Today (Friday). So if I can recall, I started to work on my house design on Monday, and that mostly turned into updating my linkedin (sorta). Then come Friday I forgot about the project. So I started to work on my final upload for the lamp. When I got that in I started to work on this and I started typing words like "bebop", "skadiddlydoo", and "apple".
My three days off were great. Tuesday I stayed home and got rest as I was sick. I had band practice on Wednesday from 12-6 and had to deal with driving in bad snowy roads. I almost skidded into a car so that was enough driving for the day, and then Thursday I hung out with a friend downtown and got comet burger. And today I reminisced on Minecraft Beta with James, Sebastian, and Kyle. 4/2/2020 0 Comments Weekly Reflection #12 This week we finished up our wood prototypes...or at least tried to. I figured out how to make a perfect fit for my bottom and side pieces. If I keep the inner piece slightly smaller than the fitting piece it fits like a snug glove. I did this for these pieces but my side pieces are another thing all together. The fit for those has to be way smaller in order to work, or I'll go with the side design Ms. Schulte used. Although the printer had issues and we couldn't work very effectively, this week was very productive.
21/1/2020 0 Comments Midterm ReflectionWhat is creative thinking? Who is creative thinking? Why is creative thinking? Isn’t all thinking inherently creative as we are individuals? How is creative thinking? These are all questions my table brought up upon reading the first section of the reflection directions. While only two of these are serious, the question “what is creative thinking” has many answers. I personally believe that creative thinking is allowing every idea to be shared, spoken, or attempted; while approaching problems from different angles. This way of problem solving has been used prevalently throughout our five months in iLab. But to look for examples, we look back at the beginning of the beginning. The straw tower tests. Back in September, we attempted to pair up in duos and build towers out of straws, string, and other assorted materials. This task proved to be very difficult as straw is very bendy, which in turn makes the structure weak and unstable. To counteract this issue, me and my partner James made triangle support beams wherever they needed support. This allowed for a more sturdy tower and helped us get quite far in the challenge. This type of creative thinking is for finding a solution, but what about creating a product? Back in November, we created pin designs which allowed for this exact thing. The assignment was simple enough. Create six pin designs. Three for students, three for teachers. This allowed us to learn the basics of adobe illustrator and had us thinking outside the box. For my designs, I tried to apply marketability to my final ideas, which helped me heavily in the creative process. I thought of teachers and students beliefs, morals, and values, which eventually led me to live laugh poop. Now I know this sounds stupid, but trust me, it was a hit. My original idea came from the slogans you see in a 40 year old single mom’s kitchen. One of the most famous ones being “Live, Laugh, Love.” This saying is very popular among adults as well as children, but for different reasons. Teenagers especially enjoy making fun of this slogan, as it’s very easy to associate this with old people that teenagers have learned to hate. It was the perfect neutral ground for me to experiment with. So I got to work. I made a few iterations of “Live, Laugh, Love.”, but most of them were boring and only seemed appealing to the older crowd. So I applied some good old fashioned Gen Z humor to it and added poop to the end of it instead of love. This touched people in a new way that “Live, Laugh, Love” could never come close to. It took a popular saying and turned it into a satirical timepiece (Okay, yes I know that is a heavy exaggeration but writing out “made it funny” doesn’t have the same ring to it). This somehow made both teenagers I knew and adults laugh. It was the universal pin. The midterm this year sparked an idea into me and James Peetz heads. We would center our ad around a podcast, and the actual midterm would be the ad reads that we naturally read out per style of the H3H3 Podcast, Joe Rogan, etc. This led us to create, shoot, and edit a podcast on our own in the LC podcast room. We wanted our project to be different than others, and this way, our ad read had a more natural feel to it, as it was just me and James roughly reading a script. This year I have been learning a lot about real world application in this class. I have learned how to market products strategically through our pins unit. The choosing of designs based on target audience was something I already had an understanding of, but now I have a much deeper knowledge on it. In terms of myself, I’ve learned to be more confident in who I am, which in turn has made me a better person. This sense of confidence allows me to help others more, as I’ve worried about myself less. In turn, this has created a sort of balance problem within myself as I’ve started to put too much stress on myself from helping others over myself. I plan to develop my skill of confidence further by putting less stress on myself. This included me quitting my job (one of my main sources of stress), and putting myself out there, but keeping close contact with the things that make me who I am (such as music or books). Our midterm project started off with high hopes and dreams of success and fortune. This quickly turned into a sense of “oh well, we tried anyway…”. I kid, I kid...sorta. We originally wanted to make a podcast with an ad read in the middle. This led to us creating music for the intro, and even filming our own 50 minute podcast after school. Our original day of filming came riddled with errors. We couldn’t figure out how to set up our recorder, which set us 30 minutes behind on top of the shrinking time limit we had in the LC. While we eventually got to record that day, our podcast was thirty minutes, our ad read only 40 seconds, and our recorder never recorded our audio. With this set back we aimed for next Thursday to film. This allowed us more time to gather additional footage to roll during the ad, more time for music creation, and more time to rewrite our script. Thursday came and went, our audio worked and all was better than before. I was chosen to edit the ad, while James was to edit the podcast together. We both worked on these individually, only conversing to discuss cuts and other important things we might both need to know. This unfortunately came with a sad realization. Our cameras had both turned off mid recording. Therefore we had no video to overlay of us talking during the podcast, or our ad read. This meant that we only turned in the ad read on its own. While this was fine, we really were hoping to prank Ms. Reimold by turning in the whole 50 minute podcast. The only other issue with this project on my end was the music. James and I both wanted something jazzy to compliment this relaxed atmosphere we gave off, but trying to write jazz is difficult. So what I ended up doing, was lightly ripping off a song I knew already but with a different key, and altered instrumentation. This worked out very well, as James didn’t notice, and I didn’t have the time to start over. James² was created due to me and James creative process being so alike. The way our brains interpret comedy blended very well together while thinking of any visual gags or other comedic elements. This also means that we both have a bad work ethic, which we do. This unfortunately made our work very relaxed under bad circumstances. We were mostly inspired by podcasts we watch. My inspiration was the Gus and Eddy Podcast, while James’ was the H3H3 Podcast. These podcasts both have very similar styles, which helped us blend together our special podcast stew. Other inspirations include Miles Davis, Mild High Club, and King Gizzard & the Wizard Lizard for music. The only real difficulty was the lack of technical knowledge. While I could argue that our laziness was a difficulty, in reality we both knew how lazy we were which actually helped us keep a tight schedule. I would say the easiest part of this whole project, was brainstorming and the shooting of the podcast. Brainstorming this was very easy, as me and James had similar beliefs and ideas of how to make a good podcast. This led to more productivity and easier writing. The podcast shoot was hard to set up, but once we started rolling, it was just all natural conversation. Me and James are very good at keeping a conversation rolling so the podcast feels very natural, and I’m quite proud of how it turned out. I learned that projects like these take a lot of time and effort, and that you need to approach everything you do very carefully. Me and James learned this after our recorder stopped functioning. This was due to human error, which made it more clear how careful we had to be. I think I learned more technical skills during this, such as how to work the podcast studio, and how to edit things better than I have been able to in the past. I probably would do it again to be perfectly honest. This project in hindsight was fairly straightforward and I had a lot of fun doing it. If I had to change anything, we would use our phone cameras for the podcast to make sure they didn’t turn off during recording. While writing this reflection, it gave me a better perspective of this class. I realized that while I’ve learned a lot this year, I’ve also had a lot of fun in the process. I’ve made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun along the way. I think going into the next semester, I should be concerned more about meeting deadlines and doing well on projects, some of which I’ve struggled on in the past. This doesn’t mean I don’t love the class, this is just laziness that I have to overcome one way or another. 6/1/2020 0 Comments Week 10 - A New MilleniumOur midterm is coming up, and you know what that means! Podcast time! Now Ms. Reimold is very weary about me and James' idea of a podcast with an ad read for the class. I understand her concerns, but me and James are for sure doing this project. We gotta, there's no choice. So, without further ado, here are my three video examples about how I would like to format, edit, and create my project.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HXVws8ZQRc Time: 0:00-0:10 These ten seconds show the multiple camera shots I would like to employ in my video. It would have two cameras facing me and my "partner" (James) kiddy-corner. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a5rOb_9h4A Time: 28:52-29:00 This time slot shows the ad break that they do in the podcast. This shows them using title cards and smooth transitions between audio and video segments. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qYKXLr28zo Time: 5:10-5:15 This clip shows the overlaying of a video against the same audio clip. This will be used during my ad explaining what we do in the class. 20/12/2019 2 Comments Week 9Hey Twitter world! It's the final week before Christmas Break, and boy has it been stressful. We started off the week by continuing our designs for our lamps. I had many ideas at first, one of which was to create a nonagon with a nonagonular prism at the top with a beam of light going through it. This proved to be difficult. as I realized that making the prism at the top with a hole in it would be too time consuming. It also wouldn't work, as nonagonular isn't a word. After these disappointing defeats, I decided to just create a nonagon with a cool swirly pattern, as this would look very interesting with the light creating the shadows. This quickly was scrapped to a heptagon and I went with this as my final design. The interlocking pieces proved to be a challenge for me, as I didn't know how I was going to make them fit together. I tried to create a design that utilized an extended piece of cardboard going through a smaller hole and fitting around it; sort of in a wing nut style shape. While this did work, it wouldn't with wood. I eventually went with the jigsaw puzzle piece method developed by Quinn, and this became my final. Friday I spent writing this reflection, and working on my glow-forge interlocking parts test.
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AuthorJames is a junior in high school; and is involved in marching band and other music activities. Archives
June 2020
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