Let's Get Personal: So What Am I Doing Now?

Hello, remaining readers of this blog (i.e. my mom)! So this is my first post after being on hiatus for so long. It took a while for me to figure out what it would be. I was thinking I would do a cumulative "Favorite Songs of 2014" post earlier this year, but I had a hectic start to 2015 since I both started a new job and moved to a new place. Now that I'm more settled in, I definitely want to start writing again.

What I look like now if you weren't already aware.This is the same face I make in every selfie and I always make sure to include a marine animal.

The Gossip Mob is Going on HIATUS

You heard that right, folks. This blog will be on hiatus indefinitely. Read on to find out why.

What I've Been Listening To (Vol. 3 - Girl Power Edition)

As an attempt to avoid another #songtorture, I've decided to write a second post for this week! I haven't done a "What I've Been Listening To" in a while, so I thought it'd be good to catch you guys up on what I've been digging lately.

The theme of this list is girl power, and I promise you it came about by accident. Surprisingly, though, there is absolutely no kpop at all in this list!

These Are The Questions: Why Does T-Pain Use Autotune? And Does Singing Well REALLY Matter?

But do these answers really matter since T-Pain is richer than all of us anyway?

So a lot of people I follow on social media were sharing T-Pain's NPR "Tiny Desk Performance" a while ago (Yes! I'm late!! Again!!!). The reactions to his performance have mostly sounded like this: "Oh my gosh he's such a good singer, I hope he never uses autotune again!" I'm going to tell you why this kind of reaction is a problem.

Let’s Get Personal: 3 Things I’ve Learned from Entertainment Blogging (So Far)

Finally writing on here again! It feels good to be back.
photo cred.: strawberrydrapes

At this point, I should stop making apologies before every post I make. This blog hasn’t been regularly updated as I had originally intended. Instead of apologizing, let’s make a deal: for every week that goes by that I DON’T make a blog post, I’m going to force myself to listen to five songs that I do not share an inkling of joy or respect for. I’ll post them on my Twitter if you want regular updates on my song torture. Now I can officially stop apologizing!

What I've Been Listening To (Vol. 2)

Why hello there! It’s been a while since I wrote my last blog post (don’t I always say that?). I was so astounded by the positive feedback on my personal The Voice audition account, I wondered how I could top it. Sadly, due to not doing anything particularly interesting lately, I couldn’t come back with another great “Let’s Get Personal” post. But if there’s one thing I always do even when life slows down, it’s listen to music. So here’s volume TWO of “What I’ve Been Listening To”!

Let's Get Personal: My Audition for The Voice

Hey guys! As I mentioned in my past post, one of the reasons I neglected this blog in the past month was because I was preparing for my audition for The Voice. I went to the Saturday audition on July 19^th. I bet you’re all wondering how I did and what my results were. Well, obviously I’m not going to tell you that now because then you won’t read the rest of this post!

Before I get into anything, let’s get a few things out of the way:

What I've Been Listening To (Vol. 1)

Hey guys! Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote my last blog post. Over the past month, I’ve sadly neglected my blog in order to focus on other things such as: finishing my website (check it out here!), practicing for my open call audition for The Voice (wish me luck!!), visiting my boyfriend, and overall just trying to enjoy my summer.

It’s been pretty hard to get back on the writing grind because I always try to write really long posts, so for now, I’ll present you with another listicle! This time, it’s songs that I’ve been playing on repeat over the last month. I promise that the next post will be longer and actually tackle a topic, but for now, onto the listicle (in no particular order)!

Artists You Should Know: MNEK

Just exactly who is MNEK (pronounced “em-en-ee-kay”), you ask?

MOVIE Review for GODZILLA

(WARNING: not only would this post be image and text-heavy, there will be SPOILERS, as well!) 

I told you I wasn't going to talk about kpop the next time I made a post!

(Spoilers ahead!)

KPOP Review for Jiyeon's "1 Min 1 Sec (Never Ever)"

(WARNING: This post is text and image-heavy with lots of gifs! And for future reference, a lot of my blog posts will be like this, too.)

For my first blog post after the revamp, I’m going to be talking about *drumroll*…

KPOP!

Now I know most of my readers (i.e. 4 or 5 people) might not be so familiar with the kpop industry, but bear with me! I’ll try to make things as easy to understand as possible for the laymen, but entertaining enough for the diehard kpop fans. Now onto the review!

I'm BACK and with a new attitude!

Wow. It sure has been a long time since I've written on this blog. Why is that?

It was partially because of school, keeping up with my job(s), and just overall laziness.

But it was mostly because I had no idea what to talk about. I narrowed my blog's focus to only featuring my process behind video production, but here's the thing, I don't always make videos.

I have other interests! I sing, I act, I play video games, I analyze the cultural impact of female pop stars on a microscopic level--I do it all!

I want this blog to be my vessel for the constant stream of consciousness I have whenever I consume media...which is all the time when you think about it.

So cheers to a new focus for my blog! Stay tuned for new posts!

Check out "Meet a Brother: COOKING Edition"!

featuring Will Manning

Boom Pole Operator/Assistant: Allen Chiu

I'll be making another post soon to talk about the details behind shooting this episode.
But in the meantime, hope you enjoy the video!

Off to shoot the next episode of "Meet A Brother" soon!

Wish me luck!

Party Foul #1: Missing Audio

So this week in our Intro to Video Production class, our one minute movies were unveiled. I was really excited to show the class what my partner and I had worked on...until I find out that when it was exported to a Quicktime file, there was no sound!

Even though our movies were not supposed to have dialogue or music, we still needed to record diegetic sounds. I was mortified when there was no sound coming from the speaker.

One thing I realized, though, was that when we were recording sound and editing in Final Cut Pro, sound was coming out of only one side of the headphones. I didn't pay much attention to it, but now I know that even if there's a slight problem, I should try to fix it.

So the lesson I learned is "don't assume everything is going smoothly" and "double check everything".

Editing my one minute movie project - "Dreamer"

So one of the assignments for my Intro to Video Production class is a one minute movie where we cannot have dialogue, written words, and we can only use diegetic sound (sound coming from the story space of the movie, which means no music).

My project partner and I learned a whole lot just from these few days of filming and editing. One thing to remember from now on is to not underestimate how long shooting a short scene would take. Sometimes, it would take half an hour to shoot a 5-second shot due to set-up time and shooting multiple takes.

This was also our first time working with Final Cut Pro (or "FCP" for short). One word I could use to describe this software is "robust". It is very different from Windows Live Movie Maker (WLMM). I like that there's a lot more you could do with FCP than WLMM, specifically audio.

If you remember my post about producing "Meet a Brother: GARRET Edition", it was really tough with the editing of the audio in WLMM. But with FCP, you can isolate the audio from a video clip (within the software) and edit it as its own entity. This feature, alone, helped trim down some editing time (that plus having a project partner haha).

Although our project has its hiccups (you can see our reflections in some of the shots if you look closely), it was really fun to shoot a movie with professional video equipment and use FCP for editing.

Hopefully if my partner's okay with it, I can upload our movie to YouTube so you guys can check it out!

"Meet a Brother: GARRET Edition" The Final Product!

Here's the link to the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT3I2fejTyQ

Hope you enjoy it!

Not going to do an Oscar recap because...

I (mostly) missed the Oscars last night!

I know, total bummer, right?

I had a meeting around the same time as the Oscars, so I missed a good chunk of it.

I'm currently catching up on Oscar 2013 news, so if anything particularly noteworthy catches my attention, I'll definitely post about it on here.

But with my "research" so far, I've mostly seen angry status updates about Argo winning "Best Picture"...

Producing "Meet a Brother: GARRET Edition"

Me filming my friend/fraternity brother, Garret
(photo credit: Maria Clarice Chua)

So I'm in a business fraternity at my school, Alpha Kappa Psi - Psi Lambda Chapter to be precise. I'm also its current historian. For those who aren't too savvy with Greek life terms, historian preserves the history of the chapter. They usually take pictures or videos of brothers at events or just wherever brothers congregate. Historian is, thankfully, a creative position in my fraternity. As long as it's approved beforehand, historians can preserve the history of the chapter using any medium they choose. For example, the historian before me took all of her pictures and compiled it into a huge scrapbook at the end of the semester. It was incredible.

Introduction

Hi! I'm Jenn! I'm currently a university student who is majoring in marketing with a minor in media. Before coming to a business school, I graduated from a performing arts high school where I majored in musical theater. I've always had a passion for the arts, especially acting.

I'll be honest: I kind of hated my first year at business school. I thought that my school was completely devoid from artistic expression until my sophomore year. It was then when I discovered that there were people at my school who shared the same interests as me--I just had to look a little deeper to see past the serious business exterior.

In the second semester of my junior year, I decided I wanted to create art of my own. I'm currently enrolled in my Introduction to Video Production class. My class has its own assignments set for us students, but I definitely have some side projects. I'll talk about these often on here.

Anyway, that's all for now. Hope you enjoy my blog (once I start posting more and all that)!