Hey Everyone! Today is the tenth day of our 2016 STN Trip. I had lots of fun today. After breakfast, we started off the day by going to the Museum of Moving Image. We had to take the subway to get to Queens. Queens looked much different than Chinatown or Times Square. It was definitely more relaxed and there weren't as many sky scrapers. It was quite cold too, I believe like 46 degrees out. The Museum of Moving Image, or MOMI was really interesting. It was a media museum all about the history of film, television, and digital media. Our tour guide was named Tyrone. When we first walked in, there were film portraits of famous actresses and actors. Next to that, was make-up and models. It was really cool how they could literally use make up and create masks to make the actor seem different, fit the setting, or fit their character. We even saw Chewbacca's mold there too! Next to that was an exhibit about production design. Tyrone walked us through all the steps into making a set come to life. First, you needed a sketch. You then transform that sketch into a model, then a 3D model, animate it, and see what your characters in it look like. After production design, we learned about costumes. We talked about how their costume was used to make the audience think something of a character. For example, I saw a costume of dirty converse, jeans, and a sweatshirt. This told me that this was a casual outfit, maybe the person is lazy or plays a role in a comedy. After that, we went to Licensing and Merchandise, or permission and toys. We got to see old magazines, and old miniature figures and toys. There were a lot of Star Wars figurines and I saw some Pinocchio, too. Then we went to music composition. Music plays a big role in a lot of films and television. We got to see some vinyl covers of music used in soundtracks! I spotted some Bee Gees! Following that, was some old video games. There were actual arcade games! I didn't know most of them, but after watching Pixels on the plane, Some names sounded familiar. There were games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaxian, Pong, Atari, and many more! Then we went weed in this art installation of ancient Egypt. There were some pretty neat paintings on the walls all related to film in some way. Though, we did spot an out of place Mickey Mouse! We got out of the ancient Egypt installation and took a break on a TV lounge art installation and watched some old Spider-Man cartoons. Next we learned about image breaks and optical illusions. This was probably my favorite part in the whole museum. Image breaks are the one part that is blank between two images. That blank spot allows the two images to kind of merge together when it's going at high speeds. There was examples of image breaks in optical illusions. We saw a rabbit in a cage, a man running in a lamp, and my favorite, a water droplet turning into a paper airplane. That last one was called Feral Fount. They used strobe lights and kinetic sculptures to animate 3D models. When the lights were turned off, the sculptures started spinning fast in circles. It produced this model. A water droplet would drop out of the faucet, transform into a bomb, then transform into a paper airplane that lands in the trash bin. Each sculpture changed a bit so that it allowed you to see the whole motion. When it spun, you'd see all of the changes added together to create motion. The image break in this case was the darkness between the flashes. This image break created a 'moving image'. Similarly, we tried out this concept through a video flip book. It reminded me of stop animation. We had 5 seconds to do whatever we wanted, and it's break up the video into frames. I went up with Herenui and Nicole but it was really only Herenui that changed during the 5 seconds. I kind of just stood there awkwardly. After that we looked at old cameras for film and television. Then ones for film looked like the classic cliche clip art of a camera. It literally had two circles on the top connected to a box. When you opened up the door of the camera, you could see the different film strips and where the RGB came together to create color. The process of it all was interesting. The film cameras differed from the television cameras. The television cameras were bulkier and more box-like. Then, we went into this room that was soundproof. It had speakers on all sides of the walls. It was used for ADR, or Automated Dialogue Replacement. It's basically a technique used to replace your clips original audio with audio that you re-record now. I've actually tried this, and although it takes a few practices, it works! It's helpful when you have bad audio to begin with, but when re-recording, you have to make sure you match up with the lips of the original clip. Then we saw some old television sets. Some were really tiny, almost portable! Most were big and bulky but I saw some that were round shaped! We ended our visit to the MOMI by having a workshop. It was about political ads. We learned that there are two kinds of political ads: one that is positive about making the candidate appear better, and one that is negative that tries to bring all the other competing candidates down. Our job was to use an online editor and provided clips and create a political ad. I worked with Nicole and we decided to do a positive ad endorsing Obama. We had maybe 10 minutes or so. We had to make it under 30 seconds, too. Our plan was to find good sound bytes from the clips, add b-roll and add music. However, we weren't familiar with the editor and so we ended up accidentally refreshing the page twice and restarting. Although our video didn't turn out the best in the end, I learned the power of political advertisements. We left the museum and it was really cold out. So, we went to Starbucks. Although cold, I ended up trying a double chocolate frap with white mocha, thanks to Dalson's recommendation. We took the subway to Uptown and walked to where Central Park was and got lunch. Of the shops in the vicinity, I chose to try Chipotle. I've never tried it and I heard great things about it so I went with Erik and Nicole. I got a chicken bowl. We took our food to go since we were going to eat in the park. I ate on the rocks that overlook the playground. There were a lot of squirrels. They were pretty adorable too. Chipotle was pretty good. After I finished up eating I headed to the playground. I went on the swings and ended up totally failing and falling off. Central park was huge! They had a lot of activities there. However all the leaves on the trees were gone. Then we continued to explore the park and stumbled upon an ice skating rink! This was definitely one of the most fun experiences on the trip so far. We paid to get in and rented skates. I only went ice skating once on Oahu years ago so I pretty much didn't know how to skate. Thankfully, Herenui taught me how. When I first stepped onto the ice, it was really slippery. I probably was the first one who fell (no surprise there!). Herenui and my other friends and classmates helped each other out when on the rink. Practically all of us didn't know how to ice skate so we all fell down. It was really funny and painful at the same time. We joked that if you wanted to spot us out in the rink, just look at the ground. All the other people in the rink were so good compared to us and even the little kids were doing great! After probably 100 falls, I finally got the hang of it. I had a great time despite the blisters and bruises I had created. We left the park and then took the subway to Brooklyn. We saw Barclas Center. We then ate dinner. I ate pizza from Not Rays Pizza. Yep, Pizza from New York! While waiting for the other group to finish dinner we went to this bookstore and I bought two books. Then we took the subway home and walked to our hotel. I had so much fun today despite all the painful falls. I loved ice skating! That's it for today, I still have yet to post Day 9. Bye!
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