Toy Story 3 - Beat Sheet

Opening Image – most of the characters from previous Tory Story movies are introduced, they’re in one of many adventures played and created by Andy, it’s revealed that it’s an older video of Andy playing with his toys

Theme Stated – Andy is going to college and Woody wants himself and all of the toys to be there with him

Set Up – Andy isn’t as interested in playing with his toys, he has grown up and ready to move on to college, his boxes are ready to leave and the toys want to make sure they make it into the things he takes with him to college

Catalyst – Andy’s toys are put into a trash bag that his mom mistakes for trash, so she takes it outside then Woody goes to save the mix-up before the garbage truck makes it

Debate – the toys are convinced that Andy doesn’t want them anymore, however Woody is still insisting that Andy does care and that they should be there for him, the toys decide that they go to Sunnyside instead for a better life

Break into two – they arrive at Sunnyside daycare and at first glance everything looks great, they meet new toys who seem nice, Woody is still convinced that he would be needed by Andy

B story – while the toys are at Sunnyside with the younger kids in the daycare, Woody escapes to return to Andy

Fun and games – Bonnie, this little girl, finds Woody and takes him home, while at Sunnyside, the toys realize their daycare isn’t as fun as they thought it would be, Buzz wants to talk to Lotso to talk to them about changing their age group, however he learns that the group of toys that welcomed them in are not good toys and Buzz gets reprogrammed by Lotso

Midpoint – the toys are locked up and controlled by the bad Sunnyside toys, Woody goes to rescue his friends at Sunnyside

Bad guys close in – lotso’s toys patrol the daycare during the night, but the toys have a plan to escape and everyone is working together in their own tasks

All is lost – all the toys make it to the garbage chute, but at the last second lotso appears to stop them from escaping, the baby throws lotso into the bin and woody is grabbed by the foot by lotso. All of the toys get thrown into the bin after trying to save woody

Dark night of the soul – all of the toys were so close to escaping but they all somehow find their doom in the garbage bin, plus they’re all stuck in there with lotso, they all fall into the pit where the trash goes to burn in the fire and they all brace each other and are ready

Break into three – a giant claw saves the group of toys from being burned (and of course it’s the little aliens), the toys are saved, lotso is taken away by a driver

Finale – the toys make their way to Andy’s by getting on a garbarge truck that’s on the way to Andy’s house, they make it into the house and into the box set for attic while Woody plans to go into the box for college. Woody writes Bonnie’s address for the box that’s supposed to go to the attic and Andy goes to drop the toys off

Final image – Andy shows Bonnie all of the toys to her and they play together and with andy one last time

A Thousand Words - short film

Since this semester started, our class has been working (and struggling) to determine our short film plans. After much debate, we all decided on producing one movie, titled A Thousand Words, which is about a young writer who's experiencing writer's block and lacks any inspiration for her work. She then goes out and finds girl who is mute, and watches her paint a mural, which triggers her inspiration for her writing.

This movie has become more of a community statement, involving students from multiple schools and getting people all over the city to support the movie and its message. Our plan is to find a building or wall to paint the mural on, preferably a setting where traffic is heavier and people who drive or walk by it have easy access to seeing the magnificent mural. The mural itself will be painted by a group of recruited artists from all over the community who are willing to become involved in a great project.

My role as the publicist is to provide the artwork that is advertised such as our artist flyer and logo design. The other roles of the publicity team include social media, such as our Twitter and Instagram, to further promote and update our production.

Self Portrait

My first project of the new year was to make a "self portrait" video. This had to basically depict/represent ourselves as an individual and it could be as abstract as we want. The way I interpreted this project was to go with a "day in my life" theme.

What I wanted to show in my video was that I'm easy going, love music and being creative. I began by getting shots of my room, which in a way kind of represents who I am and what I like to do. The footage I got were just panning shots of my walls that included some art, I also included objects in my room like my guitar/piano.Other than that, I took my camera with me while hanging out with my cousin, who goes everywhere with me. We took a long drive and the timing ended up being perfect since the sunset that night was beautiful.

I edited the whole thing as a montage and included my (temporary) logo in the beginning of the video. This project was fairly easy to do and fun for the most part. Most important thing I think I've learned from it was that my camera battery does not at all last as long as it should and its annoying how many times its died on me while getting footage.

6 Second Entertainment

Without a doubt, we are advancing into a more digital world where the majority of what we use to function or view are done predominantly on these flat rectangle surfaces called screens. Ranging from massive projected images on a wall in movie theaters, to a tiny 5 x 2 computer that fit in the palm of our hands, we as a human race have found a tremendous amount of ways to entertain ourselves. Media as a whole is becoming more and more brief as technology progresses to feed us information quicker than ever, just with a few clicks of your mouse (or finger).

Thanks to our advancing technology, people are now able to access any possible resource, whether that be books, movies, ways to contact people, and even find out how to get from right where you are standing to a certain spot in the country. In many aspects, this exposure to data at such an immediate rate has affected not only how we obtain information, but the length of our attention span as well.

Take motion picture for example, early movies and shows have been a form of entertainment ever since the invention and advancement of the camera. The length of motion pictures can play such a large role in how well people will be willing to continue watching. The success in amusing a person all depends on how well a story is told, time being a big factor. 
Nowadays, it is so easy to not only capture someone's attention, but to also lose it. Digital media has evidently caused our attention spans to shorten. This can be shown through sites like YouTube, where if the length of a video is too long, many people tend to click away. Videos being produced have become shorter and shorter to an average of 3-4 minutes on YouTube. And somehow, people have found ways to fully tell a story in just 6 seconds!




I am specifically referring to Vine, one of the most popular social media apps accessible on any smartphone. Vine is the prime example and proof that our attention span has become smaller. It takes creative minds (and probably people who have nothing better to do) to come up with a way to entertain in using only 6 seconds, and sometimes even less.


Personally, I think it's amazing that we can even comprehend what happens in that short amount of time. A variety of videos are posted each day on Vine, then shared on other social media such as Twitter. Whether they're humorous, informational, promotional, or even just used to express thoughts and opinions, these short clips can easily capture anyone's attention and even with a few seconds, can have great quality.

College Bio Project

During ONW's annual Blood Drive, a group in my college biology class had taken advantage of the event to film a quick and fun video for our project. Since I'm in E-Communication, I had the idea to take responsibility of the actual video production and film part of the project, which means storyboarding the preproduction, coming up with ideas and organizing how and when to shoot, and also I had the responsibility of editing.

The scope of our project was to explain the concept of blood cells along with how it ties to cell diffusion and osmosis.  My group had come up with the idea to interview random students who were at the blood drive and we all wanted the responses to be unexpected and funny. We had less than two days to shoot during school, however only one day to be at the Blood Drive and get footage from that event. My teacher had also only given me one day to edit, so we were pretty limited on time to complete this entire project. 

As I came up with the general storyboard and organized how were going to shoot, the rest of my group created the content that would be in the video and how to include all of the biology that we had learned. Then, on the day of the Blood Drive, we checked equipment out and went to the flex theater to shoot.

Filming the interviews didn't go too bad, the only downside was that we were very limited on time and had a lot of footage to shoot, at least for the biology side of the video. We had prioritized the biology content first, then worried about the interviews and having fun after, which resulted in a short amount of time to find many students who would be willing to be in our video.

After getting all of our footage, I edited (mostly by myself) and clipped together all of the interviews along with the information about diffusion. I tried to edit in the way that ONW's segment "Word from the Halls" does, with quick cuts and random sound effects. After watching the finished video, I feel like I could have done much better on the editing and it could have been longer with better content if I had more time to edit. During the editing process, I relearned shortcuts on Final Cut that I've forgotten and overall gotten more familiar with the editing software. All in all, I feel pretty satisfied with our video and my group ended up winning a prize out of other groups in our class. 

Developing Our Short Film

Story Developing and Script Writing

For my class's short film, I've recently been involved in helping writing the script, along with a few others who have created the story. Throughout the process so far, I've learned many techniques and skills, and overall I've gotten more dedicated to our story and not to mention I've grown closer to my classmates.

Everyday for the past month, we sit in the conference/studio room with the script projected on the TV that's mounted on the wall and discuss ideas and how the script will play out.
I should probably mention that when we first developed our film idea, the entire concept was COMPLETELY different than what it is currently.. (Long story short, our original story was too risqué and we couldn't film it due to the risk that it would lead to a very admired teacher being fired).

example of our not yet developed ideas

After several modifications and ideas straying far from the original plot, we finally have a developed storyline. One that includes interesting reversals and twists that will play with the audience's minds. Through the process, I've learned much about story developing and how to create interesting characters that the audience will either sympathize with or absolutely hate. 

Before even beginning to write the script, we wrote a short analysis on each of our key characters. We wrote their age, background, history, what their passions are, the experiences they've been through, and really as much as we can come up with about the person. This helped us get a feel of how each character would talk, react, and think as the story goes on. After writing each analysis on them, during the writing process, if we needed help with what a character would say or feel, we'd refer back to this document.

With the help of Alex Noury (this cool former student who's had experience in LA and came back to ONW to teach about story developing), we began to finally write our script on Celtx. The main writer and person responsible for our story concept is Clayton. He was in charge of actually physically typing out the script and the majority of the credit for the story goes to him.

first page of script on Celtx

Overall, the process of writing the script was very interesting and I feel like I've learned a lot from this experience. Because our story included many twists and reversals, we had to contemplate exactly how each character would think, react, and what they would want others around them to see and what the audience actually sees. I never actually thought that this much thinking and consideration goes into writing, but after this process I've learned so much and love how much thought goes into writing. I think its so interesting how much you can easily play with feelings and surprise the initial judgments of characters.

20 Steps Challenge

20 Steps

For this week's project, we followed a challenge on vimeo, where the rules are to take 20 clips after every 20 steps in one area. The purpose is to tell a story from your point of view using different angles and being creative with your 20 shots.

My cousin and I went to the lake one day, and I decided to bring my camera along to film for this project. I made a quick short list of shots that I knew I wanted to include, then when we got there, I spontaneously filmed the rest of the clips I wanted as we walked around. I made sure to get beautiful shots of the water and other random shots of plants and the sky to include variety in the video. I wanted to continue filming after sunset, however my camera battery died in the middle of shooting. On the bright side, I had more than enough footage to edit and use.

The editing process went fairly quick and easy. I tried to keep the shots in order as much as I could, that way it would show the point from where we started, then down to where we stopped walking, which was the dam on the other side. From this project, I learned a couple things: 1) I should fully charge my  battery before leaving the house 2) I still need to learn how to keep a steady hand with my camera and lastly, 3) favorite more precise clips in Final Cut to make it easier to find exactly the shot I'm looking for.