Heyo wanna hear about the PLP 10 humanities project that I did last semester? Well you’re in luck because this is a blog post just about that. What is the topic you may ask? Its a doozie for sure. For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
The Project
So obviously if we’re doing a project on Romeo and juliet, we need to actually know what story we are talking about. To help us understand the concepts and themes discussed in the sometimes hard-to-understand world of Shakespeare, we created a theme book to identify a topic within an act, include evidence as quotes from the text to support the topic, and connect that theme to one of the film adaptations we watched in class (I’ll talk about that last part later). We did this knowledge tracking twice for every act, so 10 different quotes and entries in total. As we read aloud certain scenes from every act, readers theatre style, we would make note of any quotes that we felt represented common topics in Romeo and Juliet such as; The Nature of Free Will, Honour and Obligation, The Naivety of Youth, The Power of Love and Hate, Violence and Death, Gender Roles, Revenge, and The Multiplicity of Identity. We would then write about how we thought Shakespeare was trying to convey that theme in the scene.
My themebook
The Product + Driving Question
How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?
So remember when I previously mentioned connecting identified themes to film adaptations that we watched, and then I said I would talk about that later. Well this is later because the best answer to the driving question is the film adaptations we reviewed and lead us to create our own. Yes we actually watched movies as schoolwork and were encouraged to watch more movies as homework. The films all were somewhat based or modelled off of Romeo and juliet (hence why we refer to them as film adaptations). My group re-enacted the balcony scene for our video, with myself playing Romeo and Ines playing Juliet. We chose to film it in a pseudo-Maury Povich/The Office/reality tv style with a hint of Taylor Swift. It was really fun to create and I think the final product is pretty good. So here it is!
Conclusion
Overall, this project was really fun and I actually really loved learning about Shakespeare and his magnificent play, Romeo and Juliet. I also enjoyed being able to read aloud in class and gain confidence on video. I think I did good. Thanks for reading!!!!
Hellloooooo and welcome back to another blog post by Brooke. For this project I had to get into the mind of a professional tiktok star and create some trendy videos that I’m sure will revolutionize your view of trends in the media and Disney world. Well just kidding I don’t think my videos will revolutionize anything but I hope they are still enjoyable. I know this all may sound a little different, so lets jump into why I had to make tiktok videos for a school project.
Driving Question
How do I make effective personal design choices??????
I make effective design choices by staying organized and planning things out. And I hope the rest of this post reflects that 😁.
The Project + Trip
So before we even stepped in to beginning to make our trend videos, we did some much needed personal productivity management. This included organizing our calendars, email inboxes, and most of all, our Things app. I have always been pretty good at keeping my unread emails at 0 and keeping my things to-do’s organized and functional, so this part of the project was pretty easy for me. But it was important that we got a refresher on how to be responsible for our own tasks because we would need to be able to stay on top of our filming when we had our limited time at the Disney parks. We then started researching popular video trends and looking at how we could make our own videos for the trends. Once we decided what types of videos we wanted to do, we then storyboarded and drafted 5 videos that we planned to make during our trip to Disney World. You can find all of my research and drafting in this link to my video research craft document. Once all of this was done we set sail for Florida.
The Videos
Now unfortunately one of my videos was mainly depending on Minnie’s Beach Bash, a breakfast with some of the characters. I was planning to do a character fit check video because I would have had a bit more time to do so at the bash then at the regular character meet & greets. But unfortunately by the time the teachers made the pivot to not have us go to the beach bash breakfast, I became very sick and was not able to go to the last park day where I could have filmed a replacement fit check.
But regardless, I finished 4 videos and I am quite proud of them. Here you can follow the link to see the completed version of all 4 of my videos.
Although some of my videos did not turn out exactly like I had planned, I still think most of them are enjoyable. I think I forgot about the “Filming Borzoi Shaped Things” until it was too late to grab any more interesting footage. It was a it harder to find those shapes than I originally thought 😅. But still I got 4 out of 5 pre-planned videos complete and I think that is pretty good.
Conclusion
Overall I preformed quite well in this project. I definitely could have done a better job especially at executing the final videos, but my planning was thorough and did my best to stay organized. Disney was also a blast so I think this was a pretty fun project. Anyhoo thanks for reading!
Hello party people and welcome back to my Learning Portfolio, or simply, my blog. The year is almost at an end and that means that a lot of these posts are going to be coming out at once so don’t forget to check out my other posts as well! So here is the summative post for my last grade 9 maker project, “Your First Film”
ProjectOverview
You may remember that I recently did another project with videos called “VIBRANT VIDEO POST”, and I would say that this project was basically the final product of that project. This project was all about using all of the video skills that we’ve gained top make one final video, a documentary with a topic of our choosing. The documentary had to include an interview, storyline, message, and original music. At first I had no clue what I wanted to do my documentary on, and after a few ideas I landed on a general topic of “gardening”. You see, a few days ago I moved into an apartment and I really want to grow a little garden on our balcony. Originally, I was going to focus the doc on my journey of planting a potato, but as I got to filming I realized that my original idea may have been too “vlog like” and that I could use the influence of my interviews to guide the story instead. This project was also going to be the grade 9’s focus for showcasing at the spring exhibition. Now unfortunately I was sick so I wasn’t able to be at the exhibition this year, but I’ll talk more about that later.
Driving question
How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills?
By using all of the skills that I have learned about making videos, I can create something that is of good quality and interesting to the viewers. A well written logline and treatment indices the viewer and can help get your video to the right audience. Hopefully as I explain a bit of the project, you will be able to see how I was able to use my video and storytelling skills to engage and entertain my audience.
The Documentary
As I mentioned briefly in the driving question, we created loglines and treatments for our documentaries. A treatment is a short summary of your documentary, and a logline is a few sentences that you would put in the description or be the tagline of a movie trailer. This helped us start to envision a storyline to create a structure for our documentary. Then we created a screenplay. A screenplay is a written view of what you will see and hear in the film, who will be in each scene, where things take place, etc. My documentary ended up being quite different from my original screenplay, you will probably be able to tell later on when you finally get to see my doc.
Next, step we created the storyboard. A storyboard is basically the screenplay but in drawings.
Then we had a whole butt ton of filming to do. I went through quite the roller coaster of trying to find a person to interview, but in the end I managed to have a great interview with Alex Johnson, the assistant manager at my local Gardenworks. We also had to create original music using GarageBand and I found it quite tedious but fun. And of course will al of the filming, there came even more editing. The editing was soooooo meticulous but it is a really improvement part of creating a good film. And then Ta Daaa! Documentary finished. I am super proud of the final result for this project, as it is the last maker project of my grade 9 year.
Exhibition
So as I already stated, I didn’t actually end up going to the exhibition but I will talk about the part of the process that I was a part of. Exhibitions are a chance for every grade to tell a story and answer a question, while using their work to enhance and show as an example. The grade 8s+9s worked together to tell the story of “What Does It Mean To Be A PLP Learner?” Throughout the first part of the school, and then guests would walk to the gym to see the main event of the 10/11/12s. I was part of the the conclusion of our section, where our driving question was “What is a PLP learner?”. We decided that a PLP learner was hardworking, creative, thoughtful, collaborative, and detailed.
It was our job to design the layout of our section and make all of the decor that we would need. It was a lot of work to design everything and create something visually appealing. We were also given a group of grade 8s to help us at the exhibition and give them a chance to display their work as well. Most of the work was put into the “Hall of Hard work”, where we tried to show the process of developing work to extending quality work.
Our group’s documentaries were displayed on a projector in our “Dungeon of Docs”. And I am quite disappointed that I wasn’t there to see all of the masterpieces.
We also were running some instant challenges and getting the guests to self-asses on how they preformed. As any good PLP student knows, we don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflection. Self-assessment is heavily incorporated in PLP’s structure so we thought that it was a perfect showcase of what its like to be a PLP student.
And that’s it for my section of the 2022 spring exhibition!
Conclusion
So this will be my last blog post of the year. Wow. If you’ve made it this far I really want to thank you for taking the time to read these because it takes a lot personally for me to write a whole post. I’m so proud of myself and all of my classmates for making it through this year, we did it guys! Anyhoo cya in September!
