The Oscars

Tonight (Sunday, February 24, 2013) are the 85th Academy Awards (a.k.a. the Oscars)!  I'm really excited!

Here is a link to the Oscar website which tells all the nominees, a little bit about the movie, and a trailer for it.

I though I might try to explain the voting system for the Academy Awards.  Members of the Academy are the ones who vote (pretty much everyone who is part of a movie is a member of the Academy - except for extras).  The members are given a list of all the nominees in each category and then they rate the movies/actors/directors/things in the other categories in the order of preference (favorite to least favorite).  Let's say that the votes for Best Picture are being counted:  all the number 1 votes are distributed to their respective movie.  Then, the votes from the number 1 movie with the least votes are redistributed to the movie that the voter put as their number 2.  This continues with number 3, 4, 5 and so on until there are only the top two movies left.  Whichever has more votes wins.  The Washington Post made a really good sample of this where it takes you through the process with your votes.  Here is the link.

There may also be some potential firsts in tonight's Oscars.  At nine years old, if Quvenzhané Wallis wins Best Actress, she will be the youngest person ever to win an Oscar.  At 86 years old, if Emmanuelle Riva wins Best Actress, she will be the oldest person ever to win an Oscar.  

The video below is called Paperman.  It is nominated for Best Short Film - Animated.  It is made by John Kahrs.

 

Cabin In The Woods Horror Story

*Warning: If you do not like horror stories in the slightest, stop reading now!*

The other day I heard a horror story that I found rather weird and rather horrifying (probably the point of it being called a "horror story").  Anyways, I thought I would share it on my blog as my weekly post.  Sorry if this is not as scary as you are hoping - I'm horrible around scary stories so this one is super terrifying to me.

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Cabin in the Woods

One day, four friends and their dog decided they would go up to a cabin that one of them owned in the woods.  The friends really like going up to the cabin and they go around once or twice a month.

They stopped at a gas station on their way up to grab a few snacks.  When they were paying the cashier struck up a conversation.

"Where are you girls off to?" he asked.
"Just up to the woods.  I have a cabin up there," answered one of the friends.
"You better be careful," he warned, "A guy recently escaped from an insane asylum and is said to be hiding out up there."

The girls laughed, thinking that the cashier was just messing with them - trying to have some fun by scaring four young girls.

They went up to the cabin and went to bed.  The next day it was beautiful out and they spent the day hiking and swimming in a nearby lake.  That night, they each retired to their bedrooms and fell asleep easily, worn out by the day's adventures.

"Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!"

The friend in the far bedroom woke to the most horrifying shriek she had ever heard.  She thought it was just a dream, but then she heard

thump, thump, drag.  thump, thump drag. Then a moment of silence, and another scream.

Now she was getting nervous.  She heard the sounds again.

thump, thump, drag.  thump, thump drag.  And a scream.

She was really scared now.  If there was someone in the house, the only person left to scream was her.

She heard the sounds.

thump, thump, drag.  thump, thump drag.

She put her hand down next the bed to pet her dog to give her courage.  She petted his matted head, got out of bed, ran to the window, jumped out, and ran screaming.

The next day, she arrived back at the gas station and told the cashier what had happened.  They called the police who went up to the cabin and found her three friends and her dog all dead.  They also found the man who had escaped from the insane asylum.

He had no legs.  The thump, thump was him putting his arms on the ground and the drag was him pulling his body along.  The surviving girl never pet her dog.  She pet the man on his head.

The End.
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I hope you enjoyed/are scared by this horror story.  Here is a picture of a cabin the woods so you can get some sense of where these girls are supposed to be.

 

Image Source: Cabin in the woods

Gross Feet!

 

Last week CAP hosted around 14 foreign exchange students from England.  During their stay we were assigned a project where we had to make a 60 second film in the one week.  The catch is that we had to use a random prop.  Ours were these huge, gross, disgusting feet. 

When we first saw the prop we got we were all freaked out.  If the feet look horrible in the film, they looked even worse in real life.  Then, we had to start brainstorming for out video.  It took awhile, but eventually we all agreed on an idea.

The premise is that there is a new girl who has normal feet and everyone else has the weird feet.  The new girl thinks that her new class is strange and they think that she is strange.

From this project I learned how to crop the screen on final cut pro.  I didn't know how to do that before and I think it is a good skill to know.  I also learned how important it is to plan your script in advance (ours didn't have the greatest detail which made filming difficult) and how important it is to take multiple shots (we had to go back and redo one or two shots and some we didn't have time to redo so we just made the best with what we had).

I thought this project was pretty fun and I also liked how it was different from everything else we've done.  Originally I thought we would not finish, but we did, and I am happy with the results.

A list of our shots:

-Setting the scene that this is a classroom.  We are trying to make everything seem normal.

-The new girl comes in and seems a little bothered.

-The class sees the new girl and seems bothered/grossed out.  Sorry that the camera is a little shaky.

-Close-up of the new girl's face.  She is really freaked out now.

-Shots of the gross feet.

-Girl's face being freaked out.

-More feet.

-The new girl's "normal" feet.

-The class being freaked out about the girl.

-The teacher introducing the new girl.

-The teacher's weird feet and then the new girl's "normal" feet.

-A student asking the new girl what is wrong with her feet.

-The new girl being totally freaked out.

A Fascinating Post on Asbestos

Today is kind of a dismal day.  There was snow on the grass this morning but its all melted now.  The sky is gray.  Its cold out and the minor flurries are just making everything wet.  The reason I am telling you this is because the dismalness (sorry - not a real word) is making it hard for my brain to think of an excellent and entertaining topic for a post. So unluckily for you, I am going to write about something that will most likely be quite dull.

The topic of this week's post is asbestos (it took me a while to figure out how to spell that.  Sorry if it still isn't right)!

I got the idea for this post because we are getting our kitchen done and our tiles tested positive for asbestos so now we have to find someone to remove them properly.

So for those who don't know what asbestos is in simple terms it is pretty much this stuff they used to put in tiles to prevent them from catching fire.  According to the EPA, asbestos is "a mineral fiber that occurs in rock and soil.  Because of its fiber strength and heat resistance asbestos has been used in a variety of building construction materials for insulation and as a fire retardant..." and then it goes on to say more stuff.  If you really care about what the EPA says about asbestos, click here.

Unfortunately,  you can't tell if something has asbestos or not just by looking, it has to be tested.

Asbestos is really bad for you, but if it is in your tiles or anything it will only hurt you if it is disturbed, like if the tiles are ripped up or cracked.  If you breath in asbestos, you can get lung disease.  If you want to know more about breathing in asbestos, click here. If it is undisturbed, nothing will happen.

Asbestos tiles and such can be removed, but probably best way to deal with them are just to cover them up with other non-asbestos tiles.

 So now you may be wondering "Well, if you have asbestos tiles in your kitchen, why are you not just covering them up?" and the answer for that is, I'm not really sure.  It has something to do with the floor being too high already and if they add another layer of floor its just going to get higher (I guess I do kinda know the answer).

Hopefully, you are still here.  If you're reading this, I assume you are.  I guess that wasn't actually that bad.  I thought it would be worse, so you got lucky!  I'll try to write about something more entertaining next week.  If you have any recommendations...

 

Apparently these tiles have asbestos in them.

Image Source: Asbestos Tiles

Works Cited

"Asbestos Health Effects." Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry. Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, n.d. Web. 3 Feb. 2013. <http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/asbestos/asbestos/health_effects/>.

"Learn About Asbestos." United States Environmental Protection Agency. United States Environmental Protection Agency, n.d. Web. 3 Feb. 2013. <http://www.epa.gov/asbestos/learn-about-asbestos.html#asbestos>.

Living in DC

Our newest independent video assignment was to create a video between 60 and 90 seconds that shows what it is like to live in this area.  We also had to make sure that there is background noise, like people talking.

On Sunday, January 20, the day before the inauguration, my family and I went into DC for the day.  Even though I don't exactly live in DC I thought it would be pretty cool to film this assignment there.

The day we went had perfect weather.  It was sunny and around 60 degrees.  I tried to capture some of the pre-inauguration excitement.  There were all sorts of people walking around, talking about their plans for the next day and everyone was really friendly - and they were all there for the same reason which sort of created a kind of invisible bond between everyone.

Anyways, I edited this video on wevideo.com which has pretty good editing for a free online site.  I turned down the sound from the clips I filmed because you could hear the wind and such, but no worries Mr. Mayo, you can still hear people talking.  I also decided to add some music which I got directly off of wevideo.  They provide it for their users to use in their videos.  And the music I added doesn't even drown out the sound of people talking!

I hope you like my video (as always, its a bit jumpy and stuff - I haven't quite figured out all that stylistic stuff yet.)

*The first person you can hear singing is James Taylor practicing.  During the merry-go-round scene you can also hear a recording of Bruce Springsteen that was playing through the jumbotrons. 

Challenges of Making a Documentary

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how we are making a documentary for our media class.

Well, at first I thought this would be really easy - an interview with our principal on she choose for our school to have a closed lunch, what some students think, and some interviews with the stores that agreed not to sell food to students during school hours.  Throw in some B-Roll (secondary footage) of kids eating lunch and the Woodmoor area (the place near our school with all of the restaurants), and, wa-la! we would have an A+ op-doc.

Unfortunately, this is not the case (as you've probably already figured out).  We were on a roll when we got our interview with the principal talking about the policy and her decision (and she agreed to a really good idea we had which I'll come back to later) and the head security guard who came up with the idea of not having businesses sell to students during the school day.  We even got some really good interviews with students.  Things started going downhill for us when our idea (which I mentioned before) didn't work out.  Our idea was to try to leave campus and see if the security guards stopped us and then continue on to Woodmoor to see if the businesses really didn't serve us food.  Our principle said that our idea was great, as long as our teacher came with us (which he agreed to) and we had parental permission (which we did).  On the day we planned to execute our plan, we found out that our vice principal had said no to the idea.  Not only were we disappointed because we wouldn't be going out for lunch, but that was going to be a major part of our documentary.  Then, later that day when we tried to interview the business owners and managers after school, they wouldn't agree to go on camera and we were not allowed to film in the stores.  I get that they want to keep their privacy but those were all going to be important parts of our video.

We are currently making a new plan for our video (we did write down the interviews with the managers) so we can just do voice overs of those but our documentary won't be all that we hoped it to be (I hope this isn't a regular occurrence in film/documentary making).  I think we'll be able to pull it all together and still have a great documentary though!

I think we're going to be done sometime in February so I'll be sure to post it on my blog then!

This is the Woodmoor shopping center near our school.  They have a Starbucks, Chipotle, Subway, a delicious deli, a bakery, and a bunch of other restaurants.

Image Source:  Woodmoor Shopping Center

Change Project

This year, we have a year long project called the change project.  I guess it technically started in the summer when we had to write a proposition for what we wanted to do for it.

Basically, this project requires us to find a way to instill change in our community.  I originally was hoping to do something relating to healthy eating and nutrition but my group (if you look on the right side of my blog there is something that says "Change Project."  If you click on one of those tabs you can go to my group members' blogs) and I instead decided to try to do something relating to books and a library.

We decided that since we obviously are not able to build a library we should expand one.  We contacted Children's Hospital in DC and they agreed to work with us.  Them agreeing was really exciting because it was the first major step in our project that was completed.

The hospital can only take new books though, so instead of doing a used books drive as well as purchasing new books we had to find a way to raise enough money to purchase enough books to actually make a difference in their library.

We had a bake sale at an event at our school one night, and although there was another group there having a bake sale as well we still managed to make a ton of money.  After asking for donations we got even more.

Then, we got really lucky when we contacted Scholastic Books, a book program that we have become familiar with throughout our time in school.  Anyways, with Scholastic we found a really amazing deal where we can get 50 books for $50.  With the amount of money we have raised there is going to be a huge difference in the hospital's library.

So the reason I finally thought to do a post on our Change Project is because we plan on ordering the books sometime this week.  Hopefully it all works out! 

 

This is just a picture of a library in general, not the one we are donating to.

Image Source:  Children's Section