A super exciting thing—the bestie Chiisana and I have finally released our duet of Girl's Day's iconic song Expectation!!! Although we recorded it in 2014, many plans fell through throughout these years and at long last, expectations have become reality....haha get it.......thanks I'm here all the time
We're very privileged to have aeror404's hot, leggy art and Nobelz' amazing animation 💗
Since there have been multiple "finished" versions of this mix that span across 5 years—evolving with my growth in mixing skill/judgment—I was interested in comparing them and seeing exactly how my style of mixing and mastering changed!
Sad that YouTube was not very kind to the mix though so please listen at the link below:
Hawwo, it's been a while. TAT I honestly don't even remember how I spent April but I was certainly busy with something or the other... Now the month of May has blown by me with little semblance of healthy personal time. orz I was sick for two entire weeks and then had the most intense, draining, high pressure business trip for a week in Phoenix.. Now I'm mostly recovered but still got busy and some stressful times ahead. Yells a little.
Right before I got sick (and probably the reason), Fome and I made a 1 day trip down to LA because my favorite!!!! group!!!! Lovelyz came to the Korea Times Music Festival for their first American performance. QuQ I was so happy I got to use my lightstick and banner.... My princesses were beautiful and glowing 💗 The downsides to KTMF were that it was outside, a very long show, and it got cold once the sun went down—but o m g it was so much better a concert than I ever imagined it to be.... We both enjoyed it a lot!!! Every single act brought a quality performance and we were constantly awed by how impressive everyone's skills were... Kim Bumsoo is now my favorite ahjusshi; he's literally a godman and can do no wrong ever. Super Junior is always a joy to watch; plus their live vocals were very clear and they nailed them. Eunji from Apink is just such a wonderful and incredible singer and person!! Sungwoon's super stable vocals and dancing! And of course Fome's favorite Taemin dances for this non-broadcasted outdoor concert with as much charisma and feeling as he would for a music video shoot. And everyone else was impressive; I'm just too lazy to write about every act.
Here's me being the one embarrassingly loud Lovelinus in my section.
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The Ascension Chorus Battle round 2 deadline was a few days ago and yaaaay our group actually made it...... Not gonna lie, we were getting worried but hoooooo everyone really worked their asses off and pulled through in the end. T___T So thankful for everyone's hard work; this round was not easy at all.... On the vocal and mixing side, we struggled a lot. We sang XAI's "THE SKY FALLS" (which btw is from a Godzilla anime movie OST, which for some reason we were pretty hyped about) and it's a very cool song but is overwhelmingly repetitive, so we came up with a lot of melody changes and stretched ourselves to add new adlibs and harmonies as last ditch efforts to add a little spark... And then this sort of song is pretty unforgiving to mix since the vocals are very exposed, so every adjustment makes a drastic change in the sound and you end up going back and forth trying desperately to find a sweet spot that may not exist. (Not to take credit for the mixing—I only did timing and then neneki mixed while Mimi and I gave feedback so we were all frustrated together lolol)
Visuals are freaking amazing. This concept? The selective colors? The character styling? The story? The Marvel reference? Amazing amazing amazing.
A few weeks ago was the round 1 end of the newest, hottest chorus battle Ascension. Before I rave on and on about my own group, here are some of my close friends' groups that I highly recommend a watch through!
🔹 CYPHER - Redmoon :: Absolute legends. My favorite boys. ❤️ Truly, I admire every single member of this group and I LOVE that they are a CB repeat group! This time they came back with AN EPIC ORIGINAL SONG written by one of their members Toast who just released his first EP which you can buy here! I highly recommend checking out the lyric translations for Redmoon and the rest of Toast's songs as they're just poetic artistry. Everything about Redmoon is flawless....
🔹 The Prison Girls - Division Battle Anthem :: Badass rapping girls!!! Everything is so cool and I've never known of a CB entry as rap-centric as this before! So impressed!!
There's an abundance of great, impressive, fierce, beautiful, sweet, hardworking groups in this battle and you can find them in this playlist~
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It's kind of like a long-time dream come true to finally form a group with some of my favorite singing homegurls Mimi, Chiisana, and Aerin/Erin ❤️❤️❤️ Of course Mimi, Chiisa, and I are very used to working with each other, and Aerin has always been one of Gemini's closest friends and supporters so she's basically family. (Aerin and Mimi have also recently made a duet channel so please subscribe since they'll be active there. ^^) The four of us have great synergy and an honest, comfortable, trusting dynamic that allows us to really try our best—and so it's unbelievably gratifying and touching to hear from...actually a handful of people.......that we were their favorite entry vocally ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; omgggggggggg............ how is this possible?????? what a dream come true... It's especially flattering because our visuals are so strong that it's crazy that people are still able to give attention to our vocals? ToT
We sang the Japanese version of "What" by Dreamcatcher!! It was fun to get to show our colors as we're all also k-pop coverists and Dreamcatcher's songs in the k-pop scape have the unique quality of sounding like j-rock!
And of course the staff are the real reason our entry turned out amazing....
neneki was an incredibly dedicated mixer whose magic touch was what seamed our vocals together and made us shine! She's been dealing with some terrible circumstances but she still chose to work hard towards this entry in spite of everything—and for that, we're indebted to her big heart. ;; Please consider checking out her audio editing commissions as the income would mean a lot to her!
minty⁺ art speaks for itself.... I had a friend describe her art style as "timeless" and I think that's right on the nose. It's visually appealing as hell and she represented us as pretty, fierce, and vulnerable all at once. So freaking perfect. T^T How lucky were we to get Minty art..... I love it too much....
We were also privileged to have pKotetsu and shippa work on the animation and they really brought to life this story of 4 students trapped in nightmare scapes! I really love that we each have our own spoopy situations and how the color grading sets each world apart. Honestly both of our animators were dealing with reallyyyy busy lives during this round so it's crazy impressive how the animation still came together despite how little time they had to work on it. ;;;
Actually Chiisana and I last minute helped out with the animation to take a little off their shoulders—I animated the rap portion and Chiisa animated the bridge! Luckily we had pKotetsu's comps and settings as a base and I'm happy with how my portion turned out ;o; I felt like I leveled up as an animator from this!
Hello hello! I procrastinated blogging a lot in the past few weeks but I've been doing well! I've dedicated a lot of my time to singing projects but not in a burnout sort of way. ^^ My business trip earlier this month was incredibly exhausting but it's for one of those causes that feel warmly gratifying and fulfilling—I edited a video that celebrates some of the brightest students in the country with the strongest knacks for scientific research and potential to improve the world, and they always fill me to the brim with inspiration and pride every time I work this event. ;A; These students are so brilliant, ambitious, sweet, and hardworking; I love being able to share their stories and share their research, showcasing impressive and fun sides to them, and letting them see themselves as heroes. In comparison, they make me feel stupid and unpassionate but I try to think that my part in doing my heartfelt best to create videos that spread the message about their achievements and help them be proud of themselves is important too. ;o;
On this trip I also met up with Sonny for the first time over delicious ramen!!! We became friends many years ago through our blogs so it's super meaningful to me to get to post about our first meeting here. ❤️
Also got dressed up for the fancy gala at which my video was shown at the end of the trip!
Hmm, what else has happened... Chiisa and I got tickets for NCT 127's US tour in May! The ticketing process was painful but yay we're going! Also just one mere month before the concert, MY FAVORITE GROUP IN THE WORLD Lovelyz was announced as performers for the Korea Times Music Festival in LA 😭 Even though I had to book plane tickets and a motel, I'm gonna be exhausted from being busy, and my bank account has a chunk taken out of it from my lung situation, I thought of course I have to go......... How much would I regret it if I missed Lovelyz' first ever appearance in the US? ;;; Sadly Chiisa can't come but Fome wanted to accompany me so it's going to be his first kpop concert ever wowowow~
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March 16th was my singing fam Gemini's 8th year anniversary!!! We wanted to be more active so on top of a new project that's being worked on, we also thought it'd be nice to pick up a really old project that we recorded back in 2014! I had actually mixed it back in 2015 and shockingly the mix was not bad at all, I was kind of proud of myself..... But it wasn't up to current standards and our old mics sounded like crap, so I went and basically redid the majority of the mix L-LOL.. orz;;
A-and then I was going to make kind of a simple lyric video with chibis and just like.... particles and our dumb representative symbols from 2011, BUT LOOK WHERE WE ARE. LOOK WHAT THE NOOBIE ANIMATOR DRAGGED IN FROM AFTER EFFECTS HELL... I sold my soul for over a month animating this in most of my free time while listening to 37 episodes of Shokugeki no Souma dub in the background LOL. It was my first time making a 3D scene and I learned a ton of new things just for this video ^^;;; Please look upon it kindly!
We were all amazed at how our vocals from 2014 don't actually sound that bad ahaha. Of course we've all become stronger singers since, but man this really feels like the ~essence~ of Gemini that we're most familiar with. I'm incredibly proud of the six of us and how we've stuck together through all of these years—making us one of the few permanent singing groups in the communities we've been in that's this old and somewhat active. Especially in the past couple of years, we've been hearing a lot from people that have been supporting us for a long time or tell us that we inspired them, and that's just soooo amazing and heartwarming..... I really want us to keep going if that's the sort of impact we can have. ;^; ❤️❤️❤️
I was in a collab of LOONA's debut song Hi High as Choerry!! Bless the Torangi crew for continuing to actively organize and finish k-pop collabs in this landscape of dying projects ;v; We've been at it for a looooong time and I'm happy that they still invite me back. I really like this collab because everyone sings with a lot of energy and suits the song well, plus I love LOONA 💗
Helloo I'm now writing this post on the plane on my way to DC for my first business trip since my lung collapse in October. So far this morning has already been absolutely horrific but at least I still have both of my lungs? The large vehicle we ordered to take us to the airport turned out too small for all of our equipment so I had to carry my luggage on my lap... except it's not exactly a small suitcase, so from the passenger seat it SOMEHOW would keep pushing the gear into neutral while we were driving—which is absofuckinglutely terrifying and such an unsafe car design flaw, what the fuck!!! So I had to hold up my suitcase for the entire 50 minute hellish drive to the airport, literally hanging on for dear life until my arms became numb. It was raining too so if we had gone into neutral and slid on the freeway, we probably would've been in a terrible accident. Oh my god!!! Also I was feeling nauseated since my body can't handle lack of sleep anymore, and I barely slept because of finishing everything I needed to do before leaving for a week. ><
The entire month of February for me was a project grind month. 💪 It's super wonderful that Gemini is active and will be uploading soon! My chorus battle group is doing great as well! But I realized that I need to sharpen my time management if I want to be able to do everything that I want to do. I don't understand how some people accomplish so much in a day—I often feel like my time passes me by and I always fall behind or have to sacrifice something or the other.
I've been putting in a lot of effort to keep myself from being stressed/burnt out or unhappy and I'm very proud of that. ;v; Instead of being a workaholic, I've been trying to make sure that every moment is meaningful to me. This mentality has helped me a lot! Basically I've been multitasking a ton, cutting out the "fat" in my day, and no longer have productivity guilt when I'm not working. I don't have to feel like I'm wasting my time when I watch shows, because that enjoyment is still meaningful to me. ^^
While animating, I started watching/listening to shows in the background and that's done wonders so that I no longer feel like, "Ugh the whole day passed and I just worked and had no fun." When transitioning between tasks or doing chores, I started always listening to music and the endless kpop albums I'd been meaning to check out for forever. I've been so consciously efficient about everything, I feel like I don't even stop to think anymore without something happening at the same time whether it's music or a render/mixdown or the microwave running LOL.
Another lifestyle change is that I've climbed out of the sinkhole that is scrolling through twitter and looking at random things out of convenience rather than genuine interest, then refreshing my TL and continuously waiting for something interesting. Nope, I don't wanna give away my precious time like that anymore! And no more constantly checking discord and skype and /waiting/ for messages. I only be distracted by social media when I want to!!! The new Eva says no more just dawdling around, no more dumb sulking, no more waiting, no more being too lazy to take action. Gotta fill my days with good things, efficient productivity, entertainment, and plenty of sleep 💖
A week and a half ago, I went to Red Velvet's LA concert stop and Disney's California Adventure Park with friends!!! It was a super fun trip full of yummy food and many matcha desserts. Red Velvet were unreal! Chiisa and I by pure coincidence wore Mickey and Minnie shirts :>
Wows, 2019 has been such a crazy productive year already and it ain't gonna stop~ This past Valentine's week saw new covers out from some of my closest friends ;U;
【cover】Million Love (eng.)【chiisana】
Chiisana who's capable of all genres and charms (trust me—unfortunately there's not evidence of all of them online :c) put out a suuuuuuuuper adorable cover!!! With translyrics that she wrote 10 years ago ahaha THE EPITOME OF CUTE. AN ACTUAL ANGEL PRINCESS. 💗
【mimi✽rin】EXID - I Love You (알러뷰)【cover】
Mimi and Aerin/Erin sang and rapped a BAAADDDAAASSSSSSS cover of EXID omg. Queens!!!! They killed it so hard—I felt attacked by cuteness just moments ago and now attacked by ferocity and power. They are planning to be quite active on their newly debuted duet channel so please look out for their stuff and also ;D ;D ;D
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I love that I got to post Chiisana, Mimi, and Aerin's new covers because...the four of us are doing a chorus battle together as a quartet! (Almost makes me wish I uploaded a cover this week ahaha jk I don't wish for death) We were blessed by amaaaazing staff members too—such a privilege, we can't believe they all agreed. *^* This lineup!
Most of us are very busy people so we started working hard on our entry very early on, like... December early even though round 1 ends in March LOL. We're making unbelievably good progress and making sure everyone gets plenty of time to do their tasks! A stress free CB experience? Who woulda thunk it might be a real thing? Also it sounds amazing and the aarrrttttttt is to die for. You can definitely look forward to us!!!
On the other hand, on the list of things you don't need to look forward to LOL... is the animation that I've been grinding what feels like nonstop lately for Gemini's upcoming throwback upload. It's something that we recorded in 2014 and never finished, but we wanted to finally bring it to light. And I made a terrible mistake thinking that it might not be so bad if I animate it... After all, I'm practicing After Effects and familiarizing myself with the expensive plug-ins that my boss bought for me... I am just honing my motion graphics skills to up-level my contributions at my video editing job.... Sits in a little puddle..................... what are aesthetics what is creativity what are colors how to use plugins how to make nice things why do i work so slowly i don't know
Under the jump:
🌟 haircut selfie dump... again :'D
🌟 K/DA progress! + lung update
🌟 Irozuku, the anime I'm currently watching that's already entered my eternal top faves T__T 💖💖💖
It's a good week of uploads!!! I published my solo cover last week and today, the best friend [goddess] Chiisana uploaded her solo cover! We worked hard on our videos so it's nice that we got them done QUQ Fun fact: we both sang, mixed, and animated our own videos!✨
【歌ってみた】Shokugeki no Soma OP - BRAVER 【小さな】
I'm slain!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We are not deserving of Chiisana's vocal cord vibrations. Her talents transcend human capabilities. Chiisana is a literal goddess and angel. I can't even begin to fathom how she does what she does. This animation is badass. And just..just listen to her belting. Are you still alive? Yeah, me neither. I want Chiisana to sing at my funeral. I love her so, so much.
t h i s i s t h e c o v e r o f t h e c e n t u r y
💘💘💘💘💘💘💘💘💘💘💘💘💘💘
【Cover】 JUNNA / Shooting Star (eng.) 【Eva】
And then there's my cover which I wrote about here LOL.
This was my first time mixing, animating, AND drawing for a video! Albeit they're very low quality, childish doodles because that's all I can do. ;o; (The main illustration is by soemei 💞)
Tbh you wouldn't think that a mix for this type of cover would be difficult at all, but this was a struggle through and through. All of these years of using a Blue Snowball—which has the reputation of being a difficult mic—I'd NEVER had nearly this amount of trouble T_______T Matching my mic quality through all of my takes was an absolute nightmare that I probably spent at least 10 hours on over the span of the year. I wish I were joking when I say that I probably did some sort of EQ adjustment to literally every single syllable in this song. Recording this cover was the reason I decided to finally upgrade and take up Fome's offer to long-term borrow his extra mic passed down from his uncle lol;; Considering what I had to work with, it now sounds somewhat consistent enough so I think my long hours of EQ bore fruit, yay!
I don't even know what to say about the animation haha. It's pretty simple. I wish I had good aesthetic sense and had better creative ideas adlkfjslf but luckily I had pretty soemei art to make up for it!
Fun fact: I just discovered today that my cover might just be the only... existing version of this song on youtube....... I-I can't believe.... Gotta make a shout out to Victor Entertainment—I'm so fortunate that they actually approved my copyright dispute ;u;
Hello hello!! So I finished working on a solo cover on Saturday and uploaded it to youtube but encountered something for the first time—the video didn't become unblocked as soon as I submitted a copyright dispute and it says, "Viewing restrictions caused by this claim are still in place for the time being," which was new to me and some friends. ^^;; When I uploaded a snippet as a copyright test in March of last year, they approved my dispute so fingers crossed that their policy hasn't changed!
In the meantime since I don't know when (or if, heh--) I'll be able to publish the cover, I thought I'd post a sneak preview here for the couple of people that regularly visit my blog. ♥ Kind of like a secret patreon reward lolol except you've paid me with your interest and support and that truly means a lot! It's really an honor that you come and read what I have to say, especially in an era wherein blogging has died and following social media feeds is much easier, yet you go out of your way to let me feel like I have a voice and a space to share things. ;^; Usually I don't very much address my "readers" since I don't like setting up expectations that I'll have readers, but I know a few of you have been out here lately and I immensely appreciate you~~ <3
The song that I covered is a b-side track from JUNNA's first mini-album called "Shooting Star" ! It's mostly in English with a bit of Japanese sprinkled in, which I found interesting along with the fact that there was such an easygoing acoustic song amongst JUNNA's intense discography ;u; If you don't know who JUNNA is, she's a brilliant little rising star with an amazing and surprisingly deep voice. At the age of 14, she was the singing voice of Mikumo (whom I cosplayed) in Walkure / Macross Delta. I had the privilege of seeing her perform live at AX two years ago and she just..blew me away.... and hilariously could not come out for the final bow at the end of the show because it was past her curfew LOL.
For the art, I commissioned soemei whose work I really love! It's tender and flows beautifully, and her coloring style is lovely as hell. It's so nice, what the fuck--
I also did a simple animation for the video so please check that out when and however the video gets published later on, hopefully soon. ;v;
Click above if you'd like to listen to my Shooting Star cover, or this link:
Hi! I hope anyone reading this has been doing well and taking care of themselves 💕
TAT I feel like I've been doing really, really well myself ever since the holidays and it's rather awesome! It's great that my New Year's resolutions are fresh in my mind, as I've been consciously trying to keep at them/move towards them and I feel like I'm in a good place where my irrational thoughts are in check, I'm in tune with myself, I spend time doing things I enjoy, I'm driven to work at goals without being overloaded, and I'm always reminded that people support me. QUQ
Physically, I've recovered a good amount too! This week, I went to my first kpop dance practice since my lung surgery, planning to take breaks whenever I felt that I was pushing it—but I must've been in amazing condition that day because I kept up the entire time, didn't need more breaks than the others, and had no pain or trouble breathing! Unfortunately Chungha's "Gotta Go" dance has lots of chest movements so I had to go lightly on those, but I was shocked that I danced for hours without issue!!! Once in a while though, like today, I do still get scares of sudden pain, but at this point I've been through enough of them that never have serious consequences that I can calmly wait them out like, "yeah ok I'll just go back to the hospital if I need to lol" 👌
I was invited to sing in a chorus of Bokutachi wa Hitotsu no Hikari (the final song from the Love Live! movie qq) for a NorCal friend, Alice ^___^ It just came out a few hours ago! Most of the folks in this I'd never worked with before so that was pretty cool. Big props to the organizer, mixers, artists, and animator for finishing this on time (!!) for Alice's birthday today and making a really sweet chorus. ;v; I'm happy I got to be in this and ALL THE ART IS SO CUTE AAAA
The heartwarming second part of our Anime Expo Youtaite React special, in which we asked the participants about their favorite memories of being in the community! It's really nice to hear people talk about these kinds of things ;u;
Tbh after putting out the first part, I thought it would be ages and ages before I would get to editing the rest of this but it sort of jumped ahead in my project queue LOL;;; because I wanted to film the "Ask a Youtaite" episode while all the NorCal kiddos had winter break and this release was a good way for us to collect questions from viewers... The next episode will be fun! This time I really don't know when it'll get edited LOLOL
Another video I edited recently (which features a lot of footage I shot) was BAR Con's season 3 promo!
We're branching out for the first time—it was just announced yesterday that there's going to be a BAR Con Los Angeles !!!!!!! I'm not gonna explain what BAR Con is since the video does precisely that in only 30 seconds LOL.
It takes place every first Friday of the month and I've been volunteering as Fome's audio engineer assistant over the past two years. The staff is actually entirely made of volunteers (profits from every show go to performers, charity, and venue cost!) so it's pretty cool how much we've grown and how sort of a community has developed around this monthly event. This year we started using titles and they branded me their Director of Media Production 😱 which sounds way more legitimate than I actually am LMAO. Aside from making videos, I like working with sound and music and I keep learning a ton from the experience under Fome's wing (which actually benefits my job work when I do on-location sound!) but man the pressure can be high for sure... I respect sound engineers—Fome recently pointed out that it's "one of those jobs where even the best get blamed all the time" which makes me feel better but also realize that I would never be able to handle doing live sound for a living. Whenever things go wrong—often times not in my control—I feel so humiliated and guilty. Some of my goals for this year include being less burdened by irrational guilt and and worrying less, so that's the energy I hope to carry forward. ^^ I may not do it for a living, but it's a very cool opportunity to do once a month!
!! I had my hair cut to the shortest it's been since elementary school!
Miyawaki Sakura from IZ*ONE/HKT48 was 100% my inspiration for trying this style LOL. I remember seeing her in ep 1 of Produce48 and marveling at how glowing and celebrity-like she looked with her shoulder length cut. Someone pointed out that we had the same hair colors—at the time we both had brown with red tips—and that kind of planted a seed in my head. 👀 I'd been in real need for a haircut for several months (what is this mess hanging off my scalp) so I thought... if I was gonna go out of my way and pay for a haircut, maybe I should just try something new while I've been in the mood for change...
wow pile of hair
I still have no clue how to style hair but I surprisingly like it more than I thought I would???
!!! It's now been 10 years since I first started doing 100 resolutions per year in 2009! I was 15 and now I'm 25... Wild. Here's how I did on last year's resolutions if you're curious~
In 2018, my goals largely focused on self care and developing better habits for both my physical health and mental health, and I'd definitely like to keep going in that direction.
This year, I want to work on being more independent and being in control of my emotions, rather than vice versa. ;v; I want to be my own motivator, to be able to pull myself out of a ditch, to be my own precious treasure, to never feel empty when my life is so vibrantly flourishing. In 2019, I thrive on self care and self love!!
2018 was a frighteningly shitty year for the world at large, ugh. Nothing directly affected me personally, but it definitely had the effect of heightening my anxiety and making me constantly feel unsafe and paranoid about what bad things could happen. :c Sincerely I hope that it will only be uphill from here. It will be, right??!
It's hard to sum up what 2018 was for me personally—but I think if I were to rate each day numerically, the average would be higher than other years of my young adult life. ;u; I didn't hit any serious low points, but there were plenty of medium-low days that I wish didn't happen. My high days were the best in many years! <3 And that's a wonderful accomplishment!
I really do feel like I've made strides with my mental health and taking care of myself. There's lots to be proud of! On the downside, I also struggled with some insecurities and anxiety that I didn't expect to and I'm working on that.
It was a very eventful year!! I went to Japan and Korea for the first time and made incredible memories. :> My lung collapsed which caused me to be hospitalized for 8 days and have my first major surgery. Friends and I made Youtaite React a real thing and already put out 5 episodes! Anime Expo and KCON were both really fun—and many great memories were made in general.
I think I did pretty well on a good amount of my 100 resolutions for 2018!
Ones in blue I'm especially proud of~
