I'm going to be bit preoccupied this week due to a group presentation I'm working on for my I/O psychology grad class.  My group and I are presenting on fairness and diversity in the workplace.  As hysterically interesting as that may sound (sarcasm), my group was worried that our classmates might get bored while watching us lecture for 2 hours.  Thus, I decided to get creative and make some videos for our presentation!  I figure since I already make videos for fun, why not make it for school when I have such an opportunity?

The first video introduces the fairness section of our presentation.  To make it more interesting, I made it in a way that I would be interacting with my onscreen self while it's being shown to the class.  I even asked a classmate to raise her hand so my onscreen self can call on her.  Afterward, I will be doing a short skit with...myself.  Here, I'll add the off-screen lines in for now so you can see how it flows:


Another video I made dealt with how trust can be undermined in an organization.  For this, I enlisted the help of my little brother.  Of course, you know what that means; this is going to be a silly video:


The last video I made concerns the best way to write a rejection letter to someone.  Most of my lines come directly from the textbook, making it sound rather cheesy (which was actually what I was going for).  BTW, some of you may notice I borrowed footage from another video I made previously:


At this moment, I'm still working out everything I'm going to lecture on and perhaps make even more videos for this presentation, so I probably won't get a chance to write another entry until next week.  Wish me luck on my presentation!

P.S.  Are you familiar with the multi-web cam chat room located over at http://x-angaz-ombies.xanga.com/ ?  I've recently started participating in there during nights I don't have to go to bed early for work.  Here's a sample of what went down last night:


A lot of random fun silly times...I just don't recommend going in there if you want to be productive with school work =P

About a month ago, I mentioned I was going to make another music video again, just for fun.  It took a bit more work and time than I had estimated, but I finally completed it!  It was fun getting it altogether, but it was quite frustrating at times.  You can read about the background, process, and the obstacles after the video below:


Alright, so this idea started shortly after my friend Kevin and I finished our 1st video together.  For the next one, we decided it should be one of Kevin's favorite songs and it should have some sort of story to go with it.  Picking and recording the song portion was easy enough.  Kevin just came over one day and I recorded him playing the song in one take.  However, the storyline portion was a bit trickier to take care of.

Initially, the storyline was going to be completely different.  More or less, the story was going to be about a guy seeing this girl he falls for immediately, but before he could do anything about it she already have left.  Most of the video was then going to be of the guy trying to find her, but with no success.  Finally, after he had given up he sees her elsewhere and even finds out she was looking for him as well.  They embrace at the very end and they live happily ever after (at least until the break-up song =P).

Unfortunately, those plans fell way side when the original girl I had in mind (a fellow Xangan) to help out told me she wasn't able to do it.  Because of that, I had to put the development of the rest of this video on hold for the next few weeks until I found a replacement.

The replacement ended up also being another Xangan, which was awesome.  I met up with her Halloween day and shot her scenes around University of Maryland, College Park.  Since it was just her and me, I changed the perspective of the storyline from third person to first person POV so I could shoot and act as the guy in the video (the guy in the video is supposedly Kevin, but at one scene where you see my hand you can obviously tell it's not him haha).

Finally, I had all the material I needed to complete the video!  I just had to edit it all together, which proved to be much harder than I thought.  Apparently, iMovie doesn't really allow videos to overlap while retaining another video's audio, so I had to manually go through and splice the scenes and audio together.  Ideally, I would have also added some more transitions between the singing and storyline portions throughout the video, but apparently that screws up all the syncing and audio between clips.  Urgh, very frustrating!

Anyway, I did the best I could do with the material and program I had available to me, so I think it turned out okay.  At the very least, Kevin sang the song wonderfully, no?

P.S. Here's Kevin's Xanga page.  Sarah has one too, but it's kind of private so I'm not sure if she wants me to give it out.  However, she said I could link her Facebook fan page and YouTube channel.  As it turns out, she's an excellent musician as well (check out her rendition of Truly, Madly, Deeply by Savage Garden), so she might be making a future appearance in another video someday!

My grandma LOVES to knit.  If she isn't cooking, you can bet she's on her massage chair cranking out clothing up the wazoo.  I'll give her credit; she certainly knows how to knit clothes well, but I'm not quite sure if she knows how to make them for a guy in my generation.

As it gets closer to winter, my grandma would constantly ask me if I want her to make me a sweater so I can stay warm.  I graciously say no, but come a week or two later she presents me with a brand new sweater anyway.  I smile and accept it of course (gotta be polite), but I'm just not sure I can um, do her outfit justice if I wore them in public.  Thus, I've never really worn her stuff anywhere that people can see me.

Perhaps I'm being a tad too harsh.  They aren't too bad, but they don't seem like they're for me.  Here, I'll let you be the judge.  I dug through my closest and found some of following items from Grandma's Signature Collection.  What do you think?  Are they as bad as I think they are?

1)

I told her I like blue, but I'm not sure this is what I had in mind.

2)

Yes, this will totally intimidate all the guys in the room -_-

3)

I think I should wait a few more decades before I can rock this (although it was surprisingly comfortable).

4)

I wonder if Waldo would wear this if he had decided to go blue instead of red.

5)

Very *breathes* tug *breathes* fit *breathes*

6)

Actually, this didn't look too bad compare to the previous ones I've tried on.  If only the arm length could have been a wee bit longer.

7)

Not a bad scarf I suppose, but I wish she didn't make it look so feminent.  Possible gift for a female friend?

8)

I see what she was going for with this.  If only it wasn't so cheesy XP

If, by the way, any of you are interested in getting your very own sweater/scarf/etc. specially made by my grandma just let me know!  I'm sure she'll be happy to oblige, and I'll be extremely happy to be off the hook for a while