For the past two weeks, our entire school has been on an HSA bell schedule for testing. Because of this, we have not had advisory. If there is no advisory, there is no morning announcements. For a whole three weeks. I liked morning announcements, so three weeks without them makes the mornings boring. There is only one more week of no morning announcements though, so it'll be over in a short while. The lack of advisory also makes it a little bit more difficult because we don't usually see him in the morning.

   On the trip that we came back from teoweeks ago, I learned many lessons. I learned three though that were more valuable than all of the other lessons. The MVLs are make sure you come prepared, be clear on everything that is important, and make good use of your free time. 
   The lesson on being prepared is important for many reasons. FOr example, if you are not prepared for filming, and you go out to a site that is far away, and takes thirty minutes to walk to, you may not have brought a micro phone, so then you walk for thirty minutes back to where you left the rest of your equipment, grab the mike, and then walk all the way back to where you wanted to film. By this time, you have already wasted one hour that you could've spent filming, all because you were not prepared. This is especially bad if you are in a timed competition like at STN. Another way that not being prepared can be detrimental is if you are not prepared to edit, and you still have sequence settings that are not correct, you may have to render your entire video at the end of editing, which can take a really long time and may cause you to not make the deadline.
   The second MVL is to be clear on everything that is important. If you are not clear on everything that is important you may misunderstand a contest guide line. If you miss under a contest guidelines, you don't place. If you don't place, you get mad. If you get mad, you stress eat. IiIF you stress eat, you get a huge food bill. If you get a huge food bill, you get mad. If you get mad you, run out of the restaurant screaming. Don't run out o fa restaurant scramming, be sure you understand what you should. If you don't understand, make sure that you ask. In all serious, this is what happened to our team up until the stress eating part. SO it is really important to be clear on things.
   The final MVL that I learned is make good use of your free time. I found this to be especially important when it came to blogs. We had to do blogs every night. This was difficult because I always came back to the house or hotel room dead tired, barely able to write my blogs. I found that a way to remedy this was to write my blogs during free times like car rides or lunch brakes. All that I had to do was copy and paste my blogs into Weebly, and then I was done. This was really helpful for me.
   On the trip, I learned three incredibly valuable lessons. They are to be prepared, understanding the task ahead, and making good use of your free time.

   This is our first full week after we came back from the STN trip. We have settled back into our normal routine of things. We have blogs and a new quarter project. I am working on the STN recap video this quarter. The STN recap video is a video where you recap the STN Trip. I think that making this video can be really fun. I can't wait to see what it turns out to be like. Another thing that started up again was morning announcements. One day, we had four additional speakers, which is hard because they sometimes come in the middle of the announcements, so we can't explain to them what to do.

     I have already gone to two STNs. This has given me enough experience to be able to give little advice. There are three pieces of advice that I would give. The first one is to not get sick. Also, make sure you ask questions if you have some and make sure that you are good at what you do.    I would tell you no to get sick because there is nothing worse than having to do the Sweet Sixteen while you fell like puking. I had to stay up till eleven at night. It was horrible; all I wanted to do was throw up. It was horrible. This year was better though, I was still sick, although I only had a runny nose and a bad cough. You really don't feel good. It also is a real bummer when you are filming and them you start in a coughing fit. You no longer can use the shot that you filmed. That is why you should not get sick.

   You also should ask any questions if you have any. That was a problem with our team this year. We had a question about outside help. We did not think of it till after the question session was over. We then did not think of asking the contest booth, so we played it safe and did not film anything outside. This was really detrimental to our video. So ask questions if you have any. 

   The final piece of advice that I have is be good at what you do. IF you are the photographer, make sure that you are a very good cameraman. This is because, if everybody is good at what they do, then everything in your video will be good. If you are the filmer, then don't worry about acting, only worry about filming. This will make your video a lot better.

   In conclusion, that is the advice that I would give people in Media next year. Don't get sick, ask questions, and be good at what you do.

  Today was the thirteenth day of the STN trip. Today was our last full day in Florida and our last day at a theme park. The theme park that we went to was Magic Kingdom is Walt Disney Land. The theme park was really fun we only went on about six rides though. The first ride that we went on was space mountain. The ride was definitely not worth the near hour long wait. It was a roller coaster in the dark. It went really slowly. The only person that you could hear screaming was one of our classmates named Marlena. We then rode a train ride. The ride was sorta fun, although it did not go very fast. Wh then went on a haunted mansion ride that was not that scary, but had interesting special effects. Some of the special effects were dead people popping out of their graves. The popped out slowly though. They also had 3D projections that looked really cool. After that, we went and did another shooting ride where you had to shoot these toys that were stealing batteries. We then ate lunch. The line at this food place was ridiculously long, and the food that they had was not really good anyway. We then went to ride Splash Mountain, a ride that had a fast pass line nearly as long as the regular one. We then went home early because tomorrow has a wake up time of three I the morning.

  Today was the twelfth day the STN Trip. Today was an exciting one. I got up in the morning, got ready and left the hotel room. We then went down to the hotel lobby so that we could go to the opening ceremony. We got there and the music was painfully loud. W waited for about half an hour for the ceremony to start. When it did start it was really cool. What was even cooler than the opening ceremony itself was that our class took home a lot of awards. Our sweet sixteen team took home a second place award. You may think that second place is the first looser, but at STN, even an honorable mention is a great accomplishment. Other teams that took home awards were PSA, Anchoring, Music Video, and Spot Feature. The spot feature team did a phenomenal job and got first. This was the only tea that got first place. We then went to 5 Guys to eat lunch. I really liked my food. We them went to a theme park called Gatorland. It was really cool. There were cute baby alligators and not so cute huge alligators. Some of the alligators were albino while other alligators had teeth sticking out of the side of their mouth. Other alligators were just fat. We watched an alligator wrestling show. I kinda felt bad for the alligator because it got thrown around a lot. We then went to a bird cage where there was a lot of birds. Some of the birds landed on my head, shoulders, and hands. It did not feel that good because some of the birds had really sharp talons. There were tiny birds the size of my palm, but their claws still hurt, and my hand was bleeding when I left. We then went on a train ride, where we saw emus. They looked like weird chickens that were really big. I then went back to the hotel room to get ready for bed.

   Today was the eleventh day of the STN trip. Today was a busy day. I got up really early and then had breakfast then we went to breakout sessions the whole day. The first breakout session that I went to w`as a Les Rose one. He showed us videos that he had created and then told us why those videos were persuasive. I then went to another Les Rose breakout session. He talked more about shooting techniques for the best video that you can possibly make. They were very good breakout sessions. We then went to eat lunch. I had two turkey sandwiches. I then went to a breakout session that was about finding persuasive stories in a park when you do no know anybody in there. It was really interesting and you learn about what you should bring and the questions that you ask. We then went and did a gift exchange with our Castaic Pen Pals. After the gift exchange, we went to diner at Sizzler's, which is a steak house. We then went home and went to bed.

   Today was the tenth day of the STN Trip. Today started off early. We got up and then had breakfast. I had a muffin for breakfast.The muffin was very good. We then went to the opening ceremony. The opening ceremony was painfully loud. l really like the ceremony aside from it being loud. It was very energetic. They showed a lot of cool things like a movie maker that came form humble beginnings and is now very successful. After the opening ceremony, our commercial team made of Kai Ramirez. Halle Sakai, Saul Jaramillio, and I. We went to the briefing. After the briefing, we went on to scripting pro commercial. The topic of our commercial was the  fortieth anniversary of the Rosen Plaza Hotel. We then went on to shooting the commercial. We took longer than we should've to film the commercial. We entered the editing room late. Before we started editing and after we went down five flights of stairs and walked across a bridge, we noticed that we did not have the flash drive, so we ran all the way back to the room so that we could get the flash drive that we have to submit the entry on. We then edited the video. After we edited the video, we exported it then we turned it in. We then went to go eat diner, which was my favorite restaurant called Panda Express. We then watched another STN program then went to bed.

Today was the ninth day of the STN Trip. Today was the day of the dreaded Sweet Sixteen. It is a competition that takes sixteen hours to complete. I got up close to six and did not eat breakfast till about seven thirty. After we ate  breakfast, we went out into the community to find stories about our topic of the International Drive. The International Drive is a road that is more than eleven miles long. The story that we were doing it on was the history of the road. We spent the whole morning asking people if we could interview them about the International Drive and then getting refused. We then decided to do a short film that had me speaking in the background as we showed pictures of what we were talking about. We took a long time to film all of the shots and recording the voice overs. I think that we edited decently fast though. The only problem that we had other than having nobody to interview was that we had a hard time exporting our video to the main computer for final editing things. What we ended up having to do was delete the shots that we were having problems with, reimport the footage, reedit, and then export the video. We finally got it n the main editing computer.We then pierced all of the videos and submitted the entry. We then went to bed after twelve.