Month: November 2019

Hi, for this blog post I’m going to be talking about a vast amount of our assignments we have completed this term. Those assignments are all of our short films we have had to do this term.

So what short films have we made? We have had to make 10, although I have only completed 9. Those 10 videos were Four Shot Video, Ghost Town Silent Film, Drumheller Documentary, Alberta People Video, “Run” Remake, French Revolution, American Revolution, Russian Revolution, Revolution Of Choice, and Take Your Kid to Work Video.

My favourite of these, would have to be the Ghost Town Silent Film. The Ghost Town Silent Film is my favourite because I think it was a pretty good film for being our second film. Another reason the Ghost Town Silent Film is my favourite is because I had so much fun filming it. It was a very fun atmosphere because I had friends in my group and we had some funny moments (aka Fin slipping like 5 times). Another thing that made this my favourite was our use of tools, for example we were able to get lots a different shots because we had multiple high quality cameras. That allowed us to film from different angles and use whatever looked the best. I think by doing this it made it a more impactful for the audience.

My least favourite video would be the “Run” Remake. The reason it is my least favourite is because, in my opinion, it lacked creativity. The reason I say that is because for this video we had to make a carbon copy of the original. I probably would have liked making this video more if we were able to take the original video and try to improve it. For example, changing shots so they build more suspense, or changing the time of day to make it more scary. One last comment is even though I didn’t enjoy making this short video as much as the others I still think it taught me important lessons that I will never forget.

My biggest struggle during this project was definitely getting my best work done in a short amount of time. The reason I had to get a lot of my work done in a short amount of time is because I did I was editing for most of the videos. So since we had a short time to make them most of the time I would be editing on the final day. Because of that, my editing wasn’t the best it could have been which is disappointing because I know I could have done better. One way I tried to deal with this lack of time was I figured out a way to use different editing tool Which allowed me eliminate wasted time. The tool I ended up using was premier pro because it has more tools and it allowed me to shorten videos to as low as a millisecond which helps a lot when making a quick sequence.

In conclusion, even though I had struggles, making these videos was still a very fun process and I hope we continue to make videos in the upcoming term.

Hi, before I start this blog, I just want to say sadly this will be the final blogging challenge of this year. So what is the theme for the final blog of this year? Well, just like last year, I’m going to be making a reflection post.

What’s the best way to reflect? I think a good way is to look at my first blog of the blogging challenge and compare it to my latest one. The first blogging challenge I did this year was about my avatar, and my last one was about some Icelandic festivals. So let’s look at the biggest difference which is probably length. Looking at the first post it’s only one very short paragraph. Whereas week 7’s blog post is around 3 times that size. One thing that hasn’t changed is my grammar, but I’m working on it.

Now, for this section, I’m going to be talking about how I plan on improving for next year. One big way I plan on improving for next years blogging challenge is by working on my grammar. How will I do that? I will do that by reading over my blogs more thoroughly before posting them. I will also start using a very handy app called Grammarly that doesn’t only help with your spelling, it also helps with how you structure sentences.

The final thing I’m going to talk about in this blog is my favourite post so far this year. My favourite post would have to be my post about WordPress vulnerabilities. Why is that? It’s mostly because I’m passionate about it and it interests me. Another thing I liked about that blog is I felt like I was quite thorough explaining how things worked. If I were to do that post again though, I probably would have made sure that there were no spelling or grammar errors.

In conclusion, I think this was a great blogging challenge. I think I made some improvements but there are still some ways I want to improve.

For this blogging challenge we had the theme celebrations and festivals so since I’m writing this on a flight back from Iceland I decided to pick an Icelandic festival but since there are so many around 330 to be exact it was hard to pick just one so I settled and went for two Iceland airwaves and Þjóðhátíð.

Iceland airwaves is a huge music festival held in Iceland each year. It’s usually held over four days Wednesday to Saturday. What I find very interesting is how it was started Iceland airwaves actually started off as just some one off event in a hanger at the Reykjavík airport in 1999 and has just continued ever since. Fun fact the Canadian musician Mac DeMarco preformed at Iceland airwaves in his early years.

The reason I decided to pick Iceland airwaves is because it sounds like something that I would want to go to like honestly it’s genuinely intriguing and I would love to experience it myself if I ever had the chance.

For the second festival I’m going to be talking about I will be talking about Þjóðhátíð what is Þjóðhátíð Þjóðhátíð Is a huge camping festival that takes place in a small town in Iceland each year. Another interesting thing is the fact that the population of the town where this is held’s population spikes around the time of the event from around 1000 to 16000. Finally this festival has tons of different themed nights one is actually a kind of speed dating thing where you can a partner for the rest of the event.

The reason I picked this festival is because when I was younger I used to go camping all the time so when I was looking through festivals and I saw that one of the biggest ones in Iceland was camping I was like sweet.

In conclusion there are some pretty cool festivals in Iceland with a big diversity in themes and if I had the change I would love to experience them all.

 

You know usually I start my blogs by saying something like for this blog post I will be talking about stuff but I think today I will start it with a quote from a reddit meme so here it go’s “

saying a picture is worth 1000 words is a gross understatement.

Average word has 5 letters

1 letter = 1 byte

standard image has 300 pix per in2.

300×300 picture = 270k bytes

270/5 = 54k words per in2

so,

a 5” x 6” pic = 1.6 million words

a 8” x 10” = 4.3 million words

“

Thomas @SourHealth

Now why did I put this quote in this blog post? Well, first of all I just think it’s a funny quote. Second of all I think it relates to what I will be talking about in this blog post which is the creative reflection for a book we recently read called revolution written by Jennifer Donnelly. The reason it relates to my creative reflection is because for my creative reflection I decided to make a photo collage but instead of just using photos I found on the Internet I decided to take photos that relate to the book and run them through a program that Converts them into the style of whatever painting you want for example here’s a photo of the process.

So why did I pick this for my creative reflection? The reason I decided to pick this for my creative reflection is because around the time I had heard that we were going to have to do a creative reflection I was watching a video by a you-tuber named John fish about him decorating his apartment using a special program that converts photos you give it into the style of a painting or image using a special process I will talk about later. So after that I was like oh what if I used that process for my creative reflection some how.

After I had decided that I wanted to do that for my creative reflection it was time to find the right tool to use so having remembered that in the video he talks about what tool he uses it was called neural style. So having found out the name of the tool I went onto good old handy github searched for it and bam there it was.

After having found the tool it was time to figure out how it works which in my opinion was the hardest part. (Warning this part may get a little technical so be warned) The first step was to clone the repository which is usually easy except in order to clone a github repository you need one thing git bash which usually comes pre installed on linux which is what I’m used to using when it comes to cloning things from github so it was a little confusing but I got it figured out. The next step was to download the dependencies which are basically like python extension that the program requires to run. Usually downloading the dependencies is super easy because all you have to do is put one thing into terminal sudo pip install -r requirements.txt. Except this time I had forgotten to cd into the program here’s an explanation photo of the difference.

Because I hadn’t opened the folder in terminal the command didn’t work so me not thinking was like oh well I guess I have to download the dependencies myself which was hard at the start until just out of curiosity I put the program in pycharm which is a python IDE and in the bottom the was a button that said download dependencies so that was pretty lucky. Although I had the dependencies downloaded there was still one issue I needed to download a pre trained network which took me while to realize but once I did it only took like 20 minutes to find and download it.

Now that I had the tool all set up it was time to figure out how it works this part in my opinion was easiest because when you put help into the terminal it popped up with all of the different commands you could use Heres a photo

Once I had a good idea of how to use the tool it was time to put it to action but before I talk about that I think I should probably talk about how this tool works. This process uses some pretty complex computer science but if your curious here’s a good article or in the video above it’s talked about.

Now that I have how this tool works explained its time to talk about putting it to action. Now that I knew how to use the tool I grabbed the first image that I was going to use which was a photo of the Eiffel Tower and the style photo which was a painting of Marie Antoinette from the French Revolution and started the process. After starting the process I got very confused because it was taking super long and looked like it was frozen but after a while of trying to figure out what was going on I made a realization that it wasn’t frozen or broken the process just takes a very long time and by a very long time I mean the second image I did took 5 hours.

Now that I had the process mastered I made my final image which I did not use because it was borderline scary here it is if you want to see it

After that I moved onto writing the explanations for why I picked each photo which you can read on my other blog here after I wrote those and handed them in I was done.

overall this in my opinion was one of my favourite things I have had to do this year. The reason why this was my favourite thing was because it had a lot to do with technology and if I’m being honest I was probably going to do this on my own time anyway. If there was anything that I would change or do better is I would probably do more research into how the tool works because if I had done a little bit of tweaking to the code and more trial and error the pictures could have looked a lot better.

 

For this blog post I will be taking about a huge project we worked on recently where we studied revolutions then made short videos that explained what happened in these revolutions. But before we could do all of that we had to learn some fundamentals when it comes to revolutions the most important of which is Crane Brintons theory. What is crane Brintons theory well it’s in my understanding at least it’s the steps a revolution takes to get to the climax and what happens after. Those steps are 1. Incubation 2. Moderate 3. Crisis and 4. Recovery.

Now that have that done it’s time to talk about the actual process we took in making these videos and that starts with getting our groups. Getting our groups isn’t that exiting they were just randomly selected

Once we got our groups mine being Angelo, Ryan, Felix, and myself it was time to actually start learning about the revolutions starting with the French Revolution. To help us learn in class we watched a video by a YouTube channel called the French Revolution by oversimplified which is basically a funny video that explained the French Revolution pretty well.

After watching that video we still had some more research to do. That research consisted of reading a few textbook pages and doing some note taking on a very handy template the teacher gave us.

Now that all of the research was done it was time to actually start making our short video and being inspired by the oversimplified video we decided to make it animated. Now that we had our video format it was time to assign roles. I was in charge of animation and editing. The first thing I had to do as animator was read over the script and write down only the things we see. After that it was as easy as animating for an hour a day and then realizing I had a ton of animation left to do and animating till 4 in the morning. If the was one thing I could have changed I would probably have spread out my animation and do three or four hours a day.

the second revolution we did was the American Revolution. The first step of the American Revolution was learning about it which was almost exactly the same as the time before reading a textbook making notes etc. After learning about the American Revolution it was time to start making our video for this video we decided do make a heritage minute which is a short live action film that shows an important part of the revolution. For this video I was editing as well as acting although I would have preferred to have just been editing. The filming went pretty well we had some fake guns and ehh costumes. Overall I think it went decently our video wasn’t the best wasn’t the worst. If air were to change one thing I probably would have spent more time on the editing.

The next revolution we did was the Russian revolution so as usual we read some textbooks made some notes etc. Now it was time to make our video and for this one we had the brilliant idea of making a parody of the song Rasputin. For making the song my entire group met at my house where we worked for quite a long time. After we had the actual song done we still had to make a music video which lets just say went very poorly. In the end we had to redo our entire video. Overall if I were to change anything I probably would have planned out our video a little better and have chosen a different song to parody.

 

For the final of the revolution videos we got to choose our own revolution so after some research my group chose the Easter revolution. For this revolution the research was a little different because we didn’t just have a textbook from our teacher we had to do some googling. After all of our research it was time to make the the video and we were doing the same thing as our first ever video animating. Except this time I wasn’t editing I was only editing half the video. Overall this video turned out pretty well if I were to change one thing I probably would have done all of the animation.

https://youtu.be/k7YeK5mUu2o

now that I’m done with the videos it’s time to talk about the other big part of this project the book we had to read which was called revolution and was written by Jennifer Donnelly. As we read the book we had to do role sheets which was a kinda like a check in. For the role sheets we each got a role for example discussion director and you would have to do that job so for example the discussion directors job was to come up with questions to kinda lead the conversation. After we had finished the book we had to do a creative reflection about the book if you would like to learn about what I did and how I did it I made a second post all about it. In conclusion I think I could have kept more on track with the book and worked harder when it came to the role sheets.

Hi for this blogging challenge we were given the emoji theme and a. Few different tasks emoji story prompt, emoji math, emoji art, and the one I picked emoji guessing game. Making the emoji game wasn’t that hard I just used the handy dandy website Survey monkey the reason I used survey monkey is one because it’s just a very good website for survey and it’s easy to collect and sort information and two because recently I found out it had a quiz function so when figuring out what to use for my guessing game. The hardest part of making my emoji guessing game was probably coming up with the movies to use because even though I watch a crap load of movies I was just blanking but I think I came up with a few good ones.

Overall I think this week’s blogging challenge was fun but I would have preferred a different theme because this one was used last year too but overall I enjoyed doing this blog post. If you want to do my survey you can find it here

For this blog post I’m going to talking about a project we did recently which was called running a remake. For this project we had to take a video called run and make a carbon copy of it. The first the thing that happened in this project was our teacher sat us in front of the projector screen and played a video which was the video we would end up having to make a copy of. After that we were assigned our groups mine was me Anders and Ciara. After getting our groups we had to start on a screen play which we finished pretty fast after that is was onto our storyboard and call sheet I was in charge of the call sheet and Anders and Ciara were doing the storyboard until later on when Ciara swapped roles within me. Overall all of that stuff went well but now it was time to film.

when we started filming there were a few key things we forgot about which was the fact that we didn’t think about the think all of the props they used in the video for example the guy in the video was wearing a tuque and wearing a pair of headphones which in he first draft of our video we did not include other than that and the fact that we forgot to film a few scenes the filming of our first video was pretty good.

The editing on the other hand was not the best some scenes were a little off and the music wasn’t lined up the best that being said I don’t think it was the worst it could have been no. After editing we got marked we got an emerging then it was time for peer critique where we got some good suggestions for example they talked about how our video was too long which was true.

now that we had some things to work on it was time to do our final draft and that meant re filming our entire video which was a little bit annoying but was necessary. Our re filming went pretty well except for when we were filming the final jumps are and we realized that we needed three people two to be in the scene and one two film but we only had two so what we ended up having to do was prop my phone up on a branch of a tree in order to film also it didn’t help that I wasn’t wearing the right colour. Other than that our second time filming was definitely better than the first.

now that our second filming was done it was time for editing 2.0 one thing that was better about editing this time was that I wasn’t doing it myself I was being helped by anders which helped a lot and I think the video looks a lot better because of it.

In conclusion I think this was a fun project although I would have enjoyed it a lot more if instead of making a carbon copy we tried to improve the video because there were some ways in my opinion it could have been made better.

For this blog post my first PGP blog post of this year I will be talking about a trip you took recently in which we travelled to Alberta. In this blog I will be talking more about the fun things we did during this trip but if you would like to read about the more work side of the trip you can find that here. Before I talk about all of the fun activities we did in Alberta I think I should talk about where we spent a big majority of our time on this trip which was the bus/van. In my opinion out of the two options the van was my favourite because even though it could be cramped at times it was much more comfortable than the bus and a lot quieter. Although that doesn’t mean that the bus was bad it’s just I would prefer the van. For this post because I have already talked about some of the things we did this trip I’m mostly just going to talk about some of the bigger things in more detail. Overall in this trip some of my favourite activities we did happened when we were in Calgary for example one of my favourite things we did was beaker head/beaker head spectacle . To start I’m going to talk about beaker head which is an art event that happens every year I don’t know if it’s like this every year but this year it was in a library and had around 6 or 7 different art pieces including my favourite a motion tracking one where using a Xbox connect and a highish powered pc the artist took anyone standing in a certain area and converted them into different cool things. Another cool piece of art was one of the artists took a projector and an actor and literally projected her art on the actor who had to stay still for hours which is pretty insane in my opinion like just imagine have to sit still for hours on end I mean I couldn’t do that. Overall I think beaker head was super fun and very interesting also I forgot to mention it was right beside our hotel which meant when you were ready you could go back to the hotel so you could either go after an hour or like three hours which I thought was pretty cool. The second fun thing I wanted to talk about was beaker head spectacle which in my opinion is like the bigger brother to beaker head and by that I mean instead of around 6 or 7 art insulations there were like 20 which is a big step up also instead of being held in a small closed library beaker night was held in this huge area which I can’t really explain so here’s a photo.

One of my favourite things I saw at beaker head spectacle was this huge dragon thing that could breath fire I would explain why that’s so awesome but I’m pretty sure the awesomeness of that is pretty self explanatory so here’s a photo.

Overall I think beaker head spectacle was fricken awesome I kinda want to go to it next year if I can. In the midst of all of this fun stuff though we were working on two kinds smaller projects one was a video and the other was a kinda journal thing called our daily note where each day we had to answer a question our teachers gave us. Just before hand I would like to say I am not going to go into to much detail into each of these things but if you would like to read about these in more detail go to my last blog post here. Thinking about how I worked on those assignments now I see there are a ton of ways I could have improved for example when it comes to the daily note everyday we would get around fifteen minutes to work on it then we would go off and do our activities for the day which seemed perfect until We did it for the first time and I daydreamed for about 13 minutes and then didn’t work on it at any other point in the day which was stupid because there was always tons of other points in the day when I could have worked on it. In my opinion I think The reason I didn’t work on it at any other point was probably distraction for example when I got back to my hotel room after we were done for the day I would mess around with my friends get ready for bed then watch Netflix and sleep what I should have been doing is messing around with my friends getting ready for bed but instead of watching Netflix I should have been doing my daily note and I think if I had done that it would have made a big difference. The video on the other hand I don’t think was the worst although while I’m on this topic I think I could have made my questions a lot better beca basically all of my questions were on the topic of the pipeline which was and still is a big topic in Alberta although it would have been better if I had more diversity in my questions.

Overall I think there was some big ways I could have improved on my projects but other than that it was a super fun trip and I learned a ton.

Hi for this blog post I’m going to talk about a project we did about a week ago for math which was titled correlation vs causation and as titled was about correlation and causation. Just before I start I think it is probably pretty necessary to know the difference between correlation and causation so here’s that in my own words correlation is two thing following a similar pattern for example as the amount times I trip gos up the temperature goes down but that doesn’t mean that me tripping cause the temperature lower it may just be because for other reasons I trip more around let’s say December. Causation is when one of those things is the direct reason for the other for example someone sitting on a couch 24/7 while eating Doritos and being fat.

Now that we have that cleared up I can start the first thing in this project that happened was getting our groups which for me was the person sitting beside me until they left to work with a friend which in the words of professor hulk from end game I see this as an absolute win the reason I saw that as an absolute win was because that meant I was able to work with one of my friends Angelo. After getting our groups we had to come up with survey ideas and because me and the friend I was with are pretty techie people so most of our questions focused around technology but there was the odd question about for example how long you sleep. After we had all of our questions we had to put it into a survey for that I used survey monkey then sent it out to mostly PLP students with the occasional non PLP student.

After getting our survey responses we took them and we had to look for correlation and causation me specifically I was assigned the role of finding causation and I did sort of what I found was a clear correlation between the amount of email addresses you have and the amount of times you have had to change your password but finding the causation was a little iffy what’s I found was the magority of people who 1-5 for the amount of emails had also picked 1-5 on amount of times having to change password because they forgot it. But overall that wasn’t enough evidence.

Other than that everything seemed to go pretty well and I think our presentation was a success. Overall if I were to do this project again I would probably spend more time looking for better causation and be more prepared for my presentation.

Hi for this week of the blogging challenge I’m going to talk about WordPress vulnerability’s and how you can protect yourself from them. Surprisingly there are tons of different vulnerability’s in WordPress and they come in all shapes and sizes the first one I’m going to talk about in this blog post are vulnerable themes. After researching the majority of vulnerability’s were xxs (cross site scripting) or sql injection (code injection technique) in case you want to know more about these exploits I will link two helpful articles sql injection xxs. Now some ways you can protect against these attacks the easiest and really the only way is to just download a theme that isn’t vulnerable. But how can you do that you ask well there are a few different ways but I would recommend just doing research for example if you are not sure just put the name of the theme into this database and if it’s vulnerable it should pop up for example here a photo of me searching up the theme I’m using right now

For the next vulnerability I’m going to talk about one of the most simple yet where the majority of people screw up which is your password fun fact did you know in a recent study the uk national cyber security centre found that 23.2 million people had the password 123456 (you can find that here)so if that’s your password you should probably change it. Even though that password seems as though it would be easily hacked even more complex passwords can be hacked relatively easily using a technique called a brute force attack more specifically a dictionary attack. What is a dictionary attack you ask well a dictionary attack is a form of brute force attack where whatever tool you are using takes a list of anywhere from 100 to 11000000 passwords (the dictionary) and it tests too see if any of them match with your password the reason this is so effective when it comes to cracking passwords is the fact that most dictionary’s contain password from hacks for example you can download a dictionary that contains every password leaked in the Ashley Madison hack from August of 2015 which if I’m not mistaken was multiple million. In my opinion the reason that is so important is because just like me from a few months ago the majority of peoples passwords follow this formula some significant name or thing with some letters swapped out for numbers and maybe an exclamation point at the end just to top it off. for example I took the most popular male dog name which is Charlie and did exactly what I just said to it I think it would look something like this Ch4rl13!. Now doesn’t that look secure to most people it probably does but thinking about it if you have a password like that there is a significant chance that someone else has the same password as you. So how do you protect against these attacks and try to make your account more secure first of all I would recommend making you password a combination of random characters for example +6^5yFcPKtfcL=56~5_ the reason I say that is because a password like that is almost impossible to guess and the chances of someone else having the same password are around 1 in 2 Billion. The only issue with this type of password is it’s super hard to remember so what I would recommend is if there’s nobody in your house that may try to steal your password to just write it down on a sticky note and put it somewhere you won’t lose it if you can’t do that what I would recommend is to use a secure password storage program for example personally I use last pass because it’s secure and it’s easy to use. One more thing I like about last pass is it also generates passwords so you don’t have to come up with them yourself.

in conclusion there are ways people can hack your wordpress blogs but there also ways you can protect against them. That being said I’m not guaranteeing that by following my tips your blog will be hack proof so just stay safe and have fun blogging.