Yep, it’s that time again. My first Blogpost of this school year. What will this year have in store for us? Another puppet show? Or maybe my first ever successful Explain Everything? We’ll have to wait and see.
Our first unit has been centred around the driving question How are style and form used to impact meaning? Now this unit started with us writing essays almost weekly, so I figured that it was mainly focused on getting us ready for the provincial exam. We learned how to improve our synthesis, narrative, and expository essays, something I felt was quite helpful since I know that writing can always be improved.
To help us, we read essays by famous authors such as Sir Francis Bacon, and some not so famous authors. But whether famous or not, all these essays helped us understand how style is used to create a meaningful essay.
Now I though that would be it for this unit. A lot of essays would replace a project, but I was very wrong. Towards the end of the unit, we started learning about satires and parodies, what they are, and how they are successful.
To help us understand, we watched some examples such as this MaddTv Satire:
Eventually, we were given our task: to create our own satires. Now this might sounds easy, but it is actually quite the opposite. There are many things that make a satire what it is, and there are many techniques to make it successful. These are some of the ones we learned about:
Exaggeration: To enlarge, increase, or represent something beyond normal bounds so that it becomes ridiculous and its faults can be seen.
Incongruity: To present things that are out of place or are absurd in relation to its surroundings.
Reversal: To present the opposite of the normal order (e.g., the order of events, hierarchical order).
Parody: To imitate the techniques and/or style of some person, place, or thing.
I knew that I would have to find something I was passionate about in order to create a successful satire. After much deliberation, I realized that I am extremely perplexed about the state of world politics, and I knew that this would be a great topic to satire.
Now that I had my general topic, I had to narrow it down to what I would satire. Eventually, my friends Tom, Nash, and I decided to make 3 episodes of a TV series. Since these projects had to be individual, we knew that we would have to differentiate our projects, so we decided to each focus on a different world leader. Tom would be Putin, Nash would be Trump, and I would be Kim Jong Un.
Next we had to decide what about these leaders we would satire. After reading some news articles it didn’t take long to realize what we could satire about these leaders; they are acting like children
We decided to make fun of the leaders by portraying them as children. They would be on a playground doing things that the actual leaders had done in real life. Although each of our videos share this theme, we each created our own ideas, scripts, and edited our own videos.
Now that I knew that I would be making a video of Kim Jong Un acting like a child, I had to think of the most memorable, childish things that he has done. It didn’t take me long to come up with the best ones:
1) His ridiculous arguments and name calling with Donald Trump
2) His parades to display his power to the world
3) His missile tests near Japan which intend to serve as a warning to the world
4) His bizarre relationship with Dennis Rodman
5) And finally, the fact that he claims that he doesn’t defecate
I decided to make the tweets or news headlines appear on the screen while we acted them out to emphasise that they are things that Un has actually said or done.
There were some difficulties with this project. It was very hard to appear and act like children, while doing things that adults had done. Also, we had initially planned to film our projects in a sandbox, however, we couldn’t find one to use.
One thing to keep in mind while watching this is that it is a series of skits. There is no continuous plot.
Well here it is. My satire on Kim Jong Un. Enjoy Playground Politics: Kim Jong Un:
To reflect, I think that there were definitely things that I did well. I think we did a good job of getting our message across, that the world leaders are acting like ridiculous children. I also think that I used many good techniques to make my satire effective. There was definitely exaggeration, parody, and incongruity. I also think that we used humour well to get our point across.
Going back to that driving question How are style and form used to impact meaning? After all these essays and satires, I am much more aware of how relevant that question is. Style and form affect what message and meaning people take from an essay, video, satire, parody, or any other form of communication. Style and form make the viewer stay engaged and can impact not just the viewer but also society to make positive changes.
Well I guess that pretty much wraps it up, my first blogpost of the year. To be honest it was actually pretty fun, making a satire and learning how to make it effective. I will definitely use this knowledge in future projects and endeavours.
Be sure to check out the other parts of the Playground Politics series on Nash and Tom’s blogs.