In this week, we split our whole work to every group member. I wrote my biography paragraph, select some beautiful photo that I took for our group during this semester, and edited a video called ‘Nailed it.’ This video was about our preparation for the competition; we sat together and watched a YouTube video called “Nailed it.” During that time, we used an iPad to record it, and we got lots of footage for it. I chose some footage with clear sound and excellent lighting, and I cut it into about 1 minute. The length of this video could allow the audience not to waste too much time and quickly understand what we were doing together for the competition. Also, we had a group meeting this week. The reason for the meeting is for us to edit our website together. However, WIX didn’t allow two people to edit the website at the same time. Therefore, we upload our biography paragraph and head-shot into the website in a different time, and Ben will spend more time on editing website. We also planned to have a meeting before Wednesday’s Practice presentation, so that we could practice a little bit before the practice presentation.

This week I spent a lot of time editing the competition video. I probably spent over 6 hours editing the video between all the renders and everything. It was not that hard to do to be honest. Most of the time I spent on the video was waiting for it to render or export it different times. I put a crossfade on for all of the video transitions along with audio transitions of exponential fade and constant power. I used Adobe Premier Pro to edit the entire video. While I ripped the background music off of YouTube and changed some of the audio setting for it in premier. We had a little bit of a problem that when we recorded the competition only one of the cameras actually picked up audio so we got a little bit stuck with that and what we were able to do in post. Instead of being able to switch between two different camera angles. We did take close up videos and little midway interviews with a different camera that the audio did work on so that was perfect to break up the video so it didn’t get to boring. The whole competition was 30 minutes but I cut down the video to under 16 minutes so there are some sped up parts of the video so you don’t miss any of the action but don’t have to watch a full 30 minute video.

This week we entered the second stage of our project. Now that the filming is completely finished, we are putting together out final website. Although we had it all mapped out before, it is still a bit more complicated than anticipated. I think we have an extensive amount of footage, overall, and some of it might not be necessary to use. So, we are having to go through the shot footage and determine what is beneficial to the project and what might ultimately be scrapped. To do this, we’ve gone through each page we’re going to have in the website and decide exactly what is going to be on it. As not all of us have worked with Wix, before, though, some of this is guesswork at this point. Meaning, we know we are going to put a poll in our website to determine the best cake, and this is an accessible feature on Wix, but we do not know the specifics of what the polling will look like. Fortunately, these details are minor and will not heavily affect the overall outcome of the website. It seems as if we have a lot left that we still have to do, but, realistically, once the tasks have been divided it seems much more approachable. The next step is editing all the footage and making it ready for the website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojBw_4TAHhk&feature=youtu.be

In this week, we began to build our website and upload everything into our Box. I shot many photos and videos last week, and I planned to upload these things into Box this week. We had done the most challenging job for our project last week. We interviewed the final competition, and we had the final competition last Tuesday. We had a pretty fun competition last week. For these two activities, we recorded plenty of footage, and these footage could be a big help for our website. For the next couple of weeks, our website will be the most important thing for us to figure out. Fortunately, we had prepared everything we should have for the website. We had our videos, photos, introduction and explanation of our project. Also, we need to edit our footage and collected it into 30 minutes’ videos. There is one thing left is that we need to take our head-shot on the website. For the website, we need to build the layout and put all the videos into the website. All in all, I think our group did an excellent job last week, and I believe we will do better in the future!

This week we finished up our filming and started editing our videos together. We also worked on our website more now that we have the competition done. The competition was really fun to do as a team and all the footage I saw looked good. I think we should be pretty close to being finished in a week and a half. Our plan is to have it all finished super early so if we need to refilm anything or create something new it won’t be a hard thing to do. Once the website gets all the way done it will be super easy to just plug in our footage with the site. I think that will be our hardest part going further is just finishing up the layout of the website and making it easy for us to plug everything in. We should have about 30 minutes of footage from our interviews and actual competition to go up on our site so that will really help. I think we’re going to have a bunch of small clips around the site and then one page with the full 30-minute show of the competition. It should be really easy to finish everything up within the next couple weeks.

https://youtu.be/cwQYjZzsbqM

This week was our busiest this semester in terms of our project. After doing all our planning and preparing we finally had our decorating competition on Tuesday. Before the competition, we met to do pre-interviews and discuss both what we’d done to prepare, again, and how we thought that would give us an advantage/disadvantage in the final competition. It will be interesting to see the pre-interviews now that the competition is through.

The following day, we had the actual competition. Even though we had prepared for quite some time, there was still some difficulty in execution. Part of the problem was spatial issues, in that ideally we would have used multiple JVC cameras for recording the competition but that wasn’t available, Instead, we used a JVC camera, a couple DSLRs and a iPad to create a myriad of footage. The actual competition was very entertaining. We gave ourselves 30 minutes, which turned into about 40 min, to create cakes within the theme of Spring. Some people brought props and others didn’t even bring their own cakes- as someone else had baked it for him. Despite how we each anticipated ourselves doing, though, I would say the competition went as we were expecting. Those who had been taught by other people had the nicest cakes, while those with less preparation “failed it.” I will say, though, I did zero preparation and made a cake that was clearly a bunny, possibly a deformed bunny, but still impressive. I would say it was all a success.

This week, we did lots of things together. On this Monday, we took an interview for each one and had a small talk about Tuesday’s competition. We shot lots of photos and videos that night and watch a fun video about decorating cakes. On this Tuesday, we had the final competition together. We brought our cakes and bought all the materials that we would be used. My friend helped me to make my cakes last weekend so that I could bring my cake to the competition. Also, I went to Walmart to buy all the materials that I was going to use and bought some fruits for decorating. Our competition’s name was ‘Failed it,’ and the theme of this competition was spring. Strawberry and blueberry were the main materials of my cakes, and I used vanilla frosting. The competition was going well; we had lots of footages and photos of this competition. After the competition, we tasted everyone’s cake and gave some feedback to each person. We had done a big thing this week, and the next thing we need to care about is the website. We still have some weeks left, and I believe we could do it on time.

This week has been super busy for us. Monday night we all met together and filmed bio interviews of each other for the website. Tuesday night we are all meeting up together to film the cake decorating competition. We decided on a spring theme for the competition, so I spent my day Tuesday planning what I am going to decorate my cake as. I also spent part of the day going and busying supplies for the competition. I am really excited to have the competition part done this week as we will be able to start focusing on the website now and getting everything put together and in its own place. I think the competition will go really good tonight as the interviews last night were a breeze to do. We have cameras and mics all ready to be set up and film us. We plan on doing outtake interviews to which could end up being really funny if someone messes up their cake horribly. I plan on trying to do an easterish type of cake with a white base frosting and pink highlights. I wanted to buy peeps and put around the cake but target did not have any when I went there.