Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post. This one is going to be about my most recent project in Humanities…which mainly took place at….DISNEY WORLD!!!! Very cool. The end product was a video essay which answer a certain question about a topic that we got to pick. We chose to focus on how Imagineers influenced Disney. In this post, I will be talking about the ups and downs of this project as well as answering the driving question. Stay tuned for some cool bonus pictures that I got from Disney World at the end of this post. I hope you enjoy it!

To start this project, we learned about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). We made a template in Craft to make it easier to take notes on various texts. I found this template very helpful because I would go back and use it many many times. During my time writing PMKs during this project, I feel like I learned a lot about making notes rather than taking them. I also learned a way for me to enjoy making notes which will be helpful in the future. We practiced the PKM strategy by writing 4-2-1s. The 4-2-1’s were helpful for me because they taught me good ways to narrow down my thinking. It also helped me make my writing more concise.

The first Keystone for this project was a collection of 5 PKMs. The PKMs had to be a collection of your knowledge on the topic that you had chosen. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, my group’s topic was Imagineering and how they helped shape Disney’s world. I spent a very long time (maybe too long) researching topics and making sure that I got the most information out of them that I could so that I could fully understand my topic. I even watched an hour-long documentary on the process of imagineering. Below you can see all of the PMKs that I made during this project ⬇️

After getting a good understanding of our topic, it was time to start putting together our video essay. We started by brainstorming on the whiteboards to get a general understanding of what we wanted the outline of our video to be. You can check out everything we did on the white boards ⬇️

After getting a good idea of how we wanted everything to be laid out, we had to put it together in our document. This part was individual and it was a good thing it was. Even though we had done all of the whiteboard activities together, we were still unclear on what the whole thing was going to look like. So, by doing the pitch boards individually, we were able to reconvene and revise our original plan so it included everything that everyone was thinking about. You can see my original pitch board below ⬇️

After handing in the pitch board, we started working on the screenplay. This would help guide our shots once we were in Disney World. We spent a lot of time perfecting it to make sure we had the right angles and transitions. I enjoyed getting to work together with my team to write the screenplay because we were all building off each other’s ideas and super excited about writing it. My favourite part that I helped write was the intro because I came up with the idea to have the Disney intros throughout the years mashed together. Next, we worked on the storyboard. Sabrina and Ava took the lead on this part. You can check out everything I mentioned above in the link here.
Finally, we got to go to Disney World and film. To make sure that everyone was on top of the shots, I made a call sheet along with Zach. This call sheet would set up times and places that coincided with the times and places that we would be as a group. I spent a lot of time making sure that everything was planned and properly time blocked so that we wouldn’t miss any shots. This plan would eventually get turned upside down once the flight got cancelled and we had to rearrange the days. But it’s the thought that counts. Anyway, you can check out the call sheets that I did (pre-flights cancelled) below ⬇️

After all way said and done, we ended up getting all the footage we needed. We had a little mix up with which way we filming – portrait or landscape (even though we all very clearly agreed to film in landscape). Besides that, I would say all of the filming went according to plan, mostly. When we got back form spring break, we worked in class to get all of the voice overs done and making sure that all of the editing was in. We had some issues with the audio quality of some of the things that we filmed at Disney World, but I was able to put it through an audio-enhancer which cleared that issue up. Below, you can check out our final product ⬇️ 

In the end, this project was super fun. I got to work with a great team and I’m really happy with the ideas that we came up with. It was so exciting to get to go to Disney World and get to film on-site. I learned so much about teamwork and collaboration. I also learned a lot about the importance of planning out shots when you film and how useful call sheets can be. Overall, this was a super fun project!

Thanks for reading!

Best wishes,

-Dana

P.S. Here are some cool pictures from Disney World