Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. Today, we will be talking about our most recent humanities project, which we did in DisneyWorld. In this project, we would be creating a video essay answering the question, “How do Disney theme parks shape and influence the cultural, economic, psychological, and social experiences of visitors?“ through the lens of a topic that we would get to choose. Our group(Sepaus, Sylas, Declan, Brooke, Xander and I) chose The Magic of Disney Entertainment. Let’s get into it.
Personal Knowledge Management
To start this project, we created a personal knowledge management system. This is an interconnecting system of summaries of different texts, all connected by tags and links. We created a template in craft to do this, which looked like this
After practicing summarizing a couple of times, we moved on to our first keystone, which was a collection of 5 entries in our PKM. These entries would all be relating to our chosen topic(the Magic of Disney Entertainment). My entries would be focused specifically on the storytelling of Disney entertainment. You can see all my entries here.
“Space Mountain Storytelling Techniques”
“How It Works: Guardians Of The Galaxy”
“Details Bring Pandora to Life”
“The Magic of Disneyworld’s Storytelling”
Preparation
Prior to our trip, we had to plan out our video essay. We did this by brainstorming what we wanted our video to be, plan what we were to see on screen, write a screenplay, create a storyboard, and create call sheets for what we needed to film and when.
Where Everything Went Wrong
The morning we were scheduled to leave for DisneyWorld, our flight gets cancelled. This moved the dates of our trip back, meaning we had to move around where we were and when. This also meant we didn’t know where we were going until we were going there when we were in the parks. This rendered our call sheets essentially useless. Because of this, we ended up not getting all of the footage we needed. We also didn’t end up going to the Beach Bash, where we had planned on filming our interview. This meant that we didn’t get an interview, and we didn’t have all of our footage, meaning we essentially just had random b-roll that people had filmed for other purposes to work with.
Salvaging The Project
After getting back from spring break, we compiled all of the footage we had to see what we had to work with. Although we didn’t have all of the footage we had planned to get, we had enough to create some sort of video. After this, we recorded all of our voiceovers. Thanks to the amazing editing skills of Sylas, we got a video made. Although it didn’t have an interview, it turned out way better than I expected it to. You can watch the video here.
Conclusion
If I had to describe this project, I would say that it was a train wreck that somehow got back on the tracks. I learned a lot about adaptability and working with what you have. I think that this project could have gone way better, but I am still proud of what we managed to create. I learned a lot about the magic of Disney, and Disney itself. I learned about teamwork and collaboration, about planning and preparation, and about finding learning in things, even when they don’t go as planned. Overall, I think that this project and trip were some of the most fun I’ve had in my life, and I’ve learned a lot. Thank you so much for reading this post, and I hope you have a great day.
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