The end of grade 9 is upon us, and I’m not sure how to feel about it.
“Your First Film” is the name of our final Maker project, and the grade 9s product of presentation for the 2022 Spring Exhibition!
Right out of the gate I enjoyed this project a lot, projects that have a lot of creative freedom but are still structured out and planned always work well for me. This project was to make a documentary about a topic that we are interested in, using skills that we learnt from “Vibrant Video”.
Our first order of business was to find and get an idea approved. Since this documentary had to be something we cared about, I went with how musical improv can communicate emotions. This is quite a big topic to fit in 3-5 minutes of time, but you can see above how I did.
Like all documentaries, we created log-lines and treatments. A treatment is a short summary of your documentary as a whole, and a log-line is a couple sentences that you would put in the description of a movie trailer or film on iMDB. Creating this helped us begin to create a narrative and structure of our documentaries:
Our next step in the process was creating the screenplay. A screenplay is a written explanation of what you will see and hear in your documentary, who will be in each scene etc. Here was my first screenplay, you’ll see how revisions were made in comparison to the final product:
Although it feels quite backwards, our next step was to create the storyboard, this focused more on drawing the actual scenes you’ll see. Funnily enough I left my iPad in California during this section so I wrote it on paper and do not have a photo of it, so here’s Bugs Bunny instead:
Filming, voiceovers, and revising said filming and voiceovers was a meticulous process, mainly because it was all independent. I luckily didn’t find the creation of music too challenging, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.
Then bam, documentary was created! Since this is the end of the year, concerts and projects started to rack up and I wasn’t able to create my ideal documentary for this project, though I am still proud of what I have created.
Before I go onto how the exhibition went and how the presentation of our docs came across, let me answer the driving question for this project of:
“How can I engage and entertain an audience with my video-editing and storytelling skills?”
I hope this has been a bit of an example on how to do so. Come up with an idea that interested you, plan what you want to happen visually and audibly, plan your filming, film, edit, revise x24, publish!
But it would be a bit pointless to just publish a year end project that took so much time into the online abyss, so……..
“IMPACT” SPRING EXHIBITION 2022!!!!!!
The PLP exhibitions are a chance for every grade to tell a story and use our work to do so. The grade 8/9s worked together to tell the story of “What Does It Mean To Be A PLP Learner?”, which would transition nicely to the main event of the 10/11/12s “Cray-Cray Yay-Yay”, or more commonly known as “Impact Makers”.
I was put in the conclusion of our section, the grades 9s who I worked with me for this was Nolan, Cooper, Brooke, Hannah, Julian, Max, and Xander. It was our job to create the layout and design everything that was to be made. There was a lot of planning, revising, contemplating, and thinking done to make this work, luckily we were also given a group of grade 8s to help us create these things, and as a chance for them to present some work. The grade 8s we worked with was: Andrew, Sofia, Evangeline, Keaton, Luca, Caden, Caitlin, Judah, Kai, and Chris.
The process of creating everything was a mess, so here are some of our final planning documents:
After a lot of last minute hassle and an attempt to get 17 people to focus, it was exhibition night. I couldn’t tell if I was confident or not. Pizza was pretty good, probably shouldn’t have chugged the coca-cola though.
Everything went pretty smoothly for our section, it took us a minute to figure out how to present in a walk-through fashion but we got the hang of it. A lot of people seemed interested in our documentaries, which was good for me because I did a lot of talking and didn’t get bored.
When my break time came I went around and saw all the other 8/9 sections, as well as the 10/11/12s awesome set as well. Unfortunately I was not able to get the infamous Loon Lake juice.
Here’s a photo dump of the night that I have:
I found this exhibition very tiring and frustrating to put together, it was a lot of work and I was not sure it was going to turn out well. Especially with all the other classes happening, and the pressure of the documentaries being presented. However the actual exhibition, though long and tiring was very fun and I doubt I’ll forget it.
Each exhibition section also had some sort of question that it had to answer, and since we were the conclusion group our question was:
“What is a PLP learner?”
Our group came up with this: “A PLP learner is a hardworking, creative and collaborative individual who contributes thoughtful work that extends past school. A PLP learner is not afraid to fail, and constantly strives to improve their work.”
Thank you for reading this double blog! Only a few more to go!