Heyyy what’s up? I had a really, really good name for this blog post but I would’ve gotten expelled if I had put it up:( Anyways, welcome once again to the extravagant and remarkably beautiful blog. (that you have once again attempted to avoid) Today I ate warm carrots and drank tea, so I’m very excited to be doing just about anything right now. Happy November 6th, everyone. And now, for the reason that you came here, The Cool Russian Revolution Vladimir Terasenko group’s Metaphorical Machine! This Rube Goldberg machine reflects on all the work that we’ve been doing so far in this term, so we’ve all been at least a *tad* STRESSED OUT. This project goes by a driving question: How does an idea drive change? We answer this question with this project. I have so, so, so much to tell you about this project. First off, my teacher suggested to us all a really, really good way to organize ourselves and the work we do in class. She had us all make a chart in a pages document, which is kind of like a word document but there’s more options in certain areas. We filled out the chart with the times we were going to do certain things we wanted to get done that class. Kind of like setting goals. I had managed to completely rebel this chart, and I will explain how I’m such a rebellious, and daring person. My group had set jobs and roles for everyone and I was the Documenter, but I didn’t get any say in which role I had wanted to partake in. Which for the record, was definitely NOT the Documenter, since you could be documenting everything you do yourself, it’s not rocket science. During the first few classes, I went by the chart and did what I had written down that I would get done. Slowly, I began to drift. It started out with me doing a little bit of spray painting here and there, but I was still documenting other people doing what they were doing. It eventually ended with me doing the job I had actually wanted to do, the Steampunk Aesthetic person. This happened because I guess everyone in my group was a little desperate for more decor on the machine because the guy assigned to the aesthetics job wasn’t doing what his job was (you know who you are) On the very last day that we were able to work on this I made many gears with the 3D pen just because I’m so fancy and cool. I’m surprised they turned out so well with the amount of time I had to make them. Robbie gave me a really cool tip and trick with the 3D pen that he doesn’t know he gave me. This secret trick allowed me to make a lot of gears in very little time. I had so much fun making these gears, it was my favourite part of the entire project. One of my favourite parts. I honestly found it so relaxing and soothing watching the gear form, at the beginning it always looks really bad and once you’ve finished you truly can’t believe that you’ve just made that. It’s this kind of feeling, you know?
To help our machine even more, our science teacher had us make blueprints of the machine. It includes the scale factor we used to draw this blueprint and in order to get that, we needed to measure a lot of our machine. It was easy finding the scale factor after that because we already studied this in math. Fun times. Another part of this project is the video, which needs to include us explaining the project step by step and the process. We made a storyboard for the video which includes pictures we drew of what each different shot will include. It also explains what we’re going to say in the video to go with each shot in the voiceover.
There were many requirements for this project that we needed to fulfill in order for it to turn out. For example, every little piece in the machine must have a metaphor and meaning behind it. Like how in our project, we have dominos that tip over and they are the very beginning of the whole thing. Domino #1 represent world war 1 (i’m pretty sure) domino #2 represents the dude, domino #3 represents his money, and domino #4 represents him losing the money. (my life, except I lose my money to food and a $70 sweater that I forgot to check the price tag on pls don’t tell my mom) On all these dominos, there are things painted on them to show what they represent. They’re small drawings, like a dollar $ign, but they’re still drawings.
Generally speaking, I quite enjoyed this project and the idea was pretty cool. As shown above, there were a few things that were frustrating and difficult, but this wouldn’t be a proper project if it wasn’t challenging and we didn’t learn anything from it, now would it? I genuinely enjoyed this project and I hope we do something similar to it in the future.