Real News #2

Here's my second post of "Real News."
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The first news is courtesy of the Huffington Post. So... Montana never ceases to amaze me. Now all of the "moose[s] and antelope[s]... killed by a car [can] be harvested for food." This a fantastic new law, because now the animals' families won't feel that their loved ones died in vein.
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A little boy calls for help! This is pretty funny. He didn't want to go to sleep so he called the cops. Not exactly sure how that would hep his cause.

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This was an incredible shot... by a cheerleader.

Got my pants dirty!

For the one-week video project, we were given a prop to make our story about. We got a nest with little eggs glued in it, so of course, we knew right away we were going to film this outdoors, around a tree. We decided the best use of the props would be to have the nest fall out of the tree, and for somebody to catch it. I volunteered to act.

It was a very cold morning, but we already had our script made so my group went outside. With the help of the storyboard, we were very efficient, and got the filming done in about 30 miserable minutes. I dove for the nest, though the intention was not for me to catch it. Instead, it would land on my back. Since that is nearly impossible to do, we had to do the best job we could to make it look somewhat realistic. Obviously every viewer knew it didn't really land on my back, but that helped create the little hook, of me diving arms outstretched, then fading out, before the next shot where you can see where it lands.

After I had done a couple dives, my group thought that was enough, but I insisted on one more. And unfortunately, I landed it some wet dirt (I wouldn't quite call it mud). I ended up with a grass stain and a dirty pair of pants. Maybe I should have listened to my group.

I thought it was cleverly done for what we had, because while it didn't look realistic, in my opinion it was still pretty entertaining. The last shot was supposed to reassure the viewer that the whole thing is indeed supposed to be a joke. By the way, that thing with three legs that looks very much like a tripod is actually a small tree, so don't mind it.

Overall I thought this was a fun project. I didn't think we needed three hours to brainstorm, write a script, and storyboard just a minute-long video. I think if we had done the pre-production stuff in an hour and a half and the filming the other 90 minutes, people probably wouldn't have had to stay to edit after school.

Google Drive

Yesterday I discovered the magic of Google Drive. While it has been around for some time now, I never understood how helpful it is.

Before I decided to learn about Google Drive, I didn't understand how it differed from Google Docs. After all, isn't that also storing data in a cloud? The tutorial video for Drive really only described Google Docs. And in reality, it is not majorly different, but there is an addition that could be very useful. Google Docs can now be edited offline. If you enable it to do so, Google Drive will run automatically when you start up your computer. Then it will sync all data from the cloud to your computer. It does, however, keep it as a Google Doc. If you want to make a .docx file you can do so by exporting it from Google Docs. But now you can open up Google Docs offline. If you don't have internet access, Google Chrome will open up and Docs will work like normal, except that until you get internet connection back, changes won't be saved on the cloud. But it will all save on your computer and then sync with the cloud once it can.

The benefit of Google Drive is big, and I'm sure Google is still making improvements on it. I'm not to acquainted with it so I don't have much to say, but I'm loving what I'm seeing. Now I won't lose files!!