Welcome to once again yet another one of the greatest happening for the second time the legendary winter exhibition. If you could understand any of that sentence I give you props! Anyways, it’s that time of year again. Or at least it was that time of year again. Last year we started and finished one of the big PLP exhibitions. Sorry about that horrible New Years joke. Anyways it’s 2019 now and back in December we presented our big winter exhibition project. Let’s rewind a bit…

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Part one starts in the science class room. We started learning all about bonds with elements. It was very interesting. You can read all about this part HERE, but for you lazy people who couldn’t bother with pressing that link I will simply explain it now. We started off learning about the element bonding, but at this point we still had no idea what we were even doing for the exhibition. All of a sudden on a Monday we got a mini video project due by Friday. We knew the exhibition wasn’t for a couple weeks so we didn’t exactly know how this was going to relate to the big project. Anyways we got put into groups of two or three (I was with my boy Nik) and got to work creating a story about a bond. We had been learning all about what makes a good story in Humanities and used these skills to write a great story and story board. After creating the story we had to then make an animated film about it. Everything had to revolve around the main idea of chemistry (bonds). Nik and I made a short animation about an app called ‘Bond, the app to create everlasting bonds’ or some cheesy saying like that. Anyways it was about a Calcium trying to find his perfect match then finally finding one and marrying them. Pretty simple concept, but remember we only had one week to make it. After finished I think it turned out pretty good. I will put it below shortly (not on YouTube yet). After that week we knew we were in for something crazy for the exhibition.

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Part two starts in a little place called ‘monkey something what not escape room place’ (I’m too lazy to find the actual name of the place). Mrs Maxwell had just brought us across town to an escape room. We had been learning about the importance of everything in a room and setting. We were going to the escape room for two reasons. One, because it’s fricken awesome. Two, because of what we were doing at the exhibition. We got told that at the exhibition we were recreating a room to make an interactive experience using our stories. We went to the escape room to get an idea of what our rooms would look like and get an idea of how everything in the room has to tell the story. I chose to go into the scariest room that we could with Nik and some other members of our class. We had a blast, I’m not gonna spoil the experience for you so let me just say it was crazy how much stuff was in the one room and how important everything was. So with this experience fresh in our heads we headed back to school to get back to work.

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Well, time for part three. This was the last bit before the exhibition itself. We were put from our original groups into bigger groups of 4 or 5. Our group consisted of Nik, Izzy, Amelia R, Anika, and I. We all worked together really well. From this point we had to take both of our stories and create one. We took the app aspect of ours and blended it with the characters of theirs. For our story we made it so that old lady sulfur downloads the app, but then gets sucked in. We decided to do this so that at the exhibition we could make our room like an alternate dimension. After old lady sulfur enters the app she meets different bonds and ends up falling in love with this guy named strontium. Later on she finds out that strontium had created the app to suck people in, but she still stays with him as long as he deletes the app from the public. That’s the basic storyline. After creating the story we had to design how the room was going to look. We were obviously going to make it all hearty and lovely. I will explain how we designed the room on the night of the exhibition in the next stage.

And now it’s time for part four. This was the actual building of the rooms for the exhibition. We started by creating the entrance into the app itself (the story). The entrance had a big phone that you walked into with many streamers guiding you into the app. Izzy was at the entrance explaining that Sulfurs dog had passed away and she felt lonely so she downloaded the app. Once you got into the app we had three characters, Amelia as Strontium, Anika as Old Lady Sulfur, and me as a classy server. The lights were pink with a nice glow. There was also lots of classy finger foods with a nice Valentine’s Day mood. On the tables there were little brain teasers where you try to take two pieces of metal apart, these represented bonds. There was a pool game in the corner where you tried hitting the correct valence balls into the right pockets to create a full valence shell. There was a little office section playing Nik and I’s story aswell as Izzy’s, Anika’s, and Amelia’s. It looked very nice and romantic in the room with many things for the guests to do. There were newspapers you had to put together to find out that Strontium created the app. Many people loved the room and creating it was fun, but also hard. We had Mr Gross help us with putting paper over the lights to make them pink. I think our room came together very well, but it was hard putting all the chairs from the staff room into a smaller office. Anyways, once we had all that set up we were ready for the exhibition.

It was finally time for the exhibition itself, part five. I thought the exhibition went really well. I dressed up in a suit without a hat (that’s a first) and acted as the waiter for half the exhibition then the greeter for the other half. Izzy had to leave half way through, so when she did I took her spot as the greeter. Right at the beginning we had tons of people and we had lots all the way until probably the last 45 minutes. The very end not many people came, so it got a little boring, but it was still fun. Halfway through we got to see what the grade 11’s and 12’s had done for the exhibition. It was actually pretty amazing. They made the whole gym into an immersive experience about capitalism. Anyways the exhibition was great, but I did forget how bad your feet hurt after standing for that long.

Until next time… Aedan Loughran