Food, Filming, and Freezing Fingers
As part of our Cray Cray Yay Yay unit, PLP 10 took a trip down to Seattle to explore what it had to offer in terms of craziness. From crazy mindsets to crazy innovation, this city just south of us had everything we could have asked for to help us get a grasp at what ‘crazy’ really means. Over the course of our 4 day long field study, we were lucky enough to experience some once in a lifetime opportunities that I will never forget. Having to film a video throughout the trip made for some pretty stressful times, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, these field studies never disappoint.
As you may know, our driving question for this unit is “Why does it take a crazy person to change the world?”. Our main project surrounding this unit was to produce a video that answered that question, taking examples from various Seattle figures and companies. Groups were tasked with formulating a thesis and writing a video around it. My group consisted of Logan, Luca J and I, and by the beginning stages of the our video brainstorming, we had already been studying the driving question for a while. We had all created our own theses for previous assignments, so our first idea for our thesis was to combine each of our theses. This was still very hard, and it didn’t end up working, the teachers didn’t like it. I won’t go too in depth because hearing the word “crazy” drives me crazy after hearing it so many times. It took a while for us to come up with a thesis, in fact up until the night before we left, our thesis was still not finalized…
Crazy Person Essay we did before the Seattle Field Study.
The actual trip itself was jam-packed, we hardly got to rest. I’d love to talk about everything we did but I’m afraid you would be reading this post for about 7 hours, and more importantly it would have taken me 12 to write it. That’s why instead I’m going to share with you the highlights of the trip for me.
On the first day, as much as my parents would prefer otherwise, the highlight was definitely eating lunch at Din Tai Fung. Surprisingly I’d never had dim sum before and I was so pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. This post isn’t supposed to be about food reviews so I’ll keep it short but wow, I could go for some Xiaolongbao right now.
Day 2 was crazy busy, we really made our way around the city. I’d have to say that my favourite activity out of them all was probably getting a tour around CenturyLink field. Even though I’m not big in to football, getting to see all around the stadium and taking in the sheer magnitude of football in general was super special. I’d love to see a game sometime! I was also filming a lot at CenturyLink because one of the people our groups was focusing on was Pete Carroll, the head coach of the Seahawks. It’s at places like these where I can really see how the CRAZY aspect of our unit ties in to the trip. There were lots of cool things to get footage of, and finishing off with an interview with our very kind tour guide (although the poor audio ruined it) was a great way to wrap up the whole experience.
Our third day was probably my favourite, we did a lot of walking and saw some really cool things. In the afternoon, after walking ‘round downtown on our self-guided Amazon HQ tour, we visited the Museum of Pop Culture. We were there for 3 and a half hours, which is quite a long time to be staying in one place in these trips. Inside there were plenty of fun activities to keep u engaged and unique collections for just about anyone to find interesting. There were countless people represented throughout the museum, all of them were figures with crazy mindsets that possessed the traits we are learning about in our unit. After our time inside though, we were all super hungry and lucky for us we were headed to MOD Pizza for dinner. I’m a sucker for a fresh, simple pizza and this hit the spot. I was also addicted to milkshakes this trip for some reason, and MOD makes a killer one.
For our final night in Seattle, we had to spend it right, so we went up the Space Needle and got to see the city all lit up, it was amazing. Most of my time up there was spent taking timelapses of the cityscape, and I loved it. PLP has taken me to so many cool places and I’ve always had one photo/videography moment that stands out, for Seattle, this was it. It was a really nice way to end the night, we were pretty much the last ones out and we were all ready for bed.
Day 4 was also a contender for my favourite day. Shortly after waking up were at iFly just south of Seattle suiting up to go indoor skydiving. This was an event that I noticed everyone was either super excited for, or super nervous for, nothing in between. I was one of those who were super excited, and when it came time to hop in the wind tunnel it was so much harder than I was originally expecting. Imagine a drunk giraffe trying to ice skate, and that’s pretty much what I looked like. I’ve never felt so less in control of my body in my life. It was definitely an awkward experience but a really fun one none the less.
Later that day on our way home, we stopped at Boeing to take an absolutely amazing tour that I found extremely interesting. This was definitely one of my most favourite parts of the trip and I’m so glad I got the opportunity to do it. Seeing the largest building in the world was cool in itself but getting to see how planes are made was pretty astonishing. I didn’t think I would be so intrigued by a plane factory but I really did find it cool. I bought my grandpa a big book from the gift shop for Christmas because I know he is really in to that kind of thing. One day I hope I can go back with him.
Anyways, that’s about it in terms of my favourite parts of the trip, now to talk about the actual project that goes along with it. All the while we were visiting these places, I was filming just about everything for our groups video. Going in to the trip we knew what we wanted the video to look like, but obviously there are always variables on these trips and certain things weren’t possible. Having the storyboard and script finished before leaving was definitely a huge help to me when I was editing once we were back. This doesn’t mean that editing was an easy job however. I spent a long time surfing through all the footage and turning them in to a story with audio and titles. I volunteered to film and edit though, as I know that they are a couple of my strengths, and I enjoy doing them.
All in all I’m not quite sure how to feel about this project, I’m proud of the way our group functioned and how filming and initial editing went, however I feel like we sort of gave on this project. I’m annoyed at myself for letting this happen, seeing as our group spent so much time and effort on this whole unit. I understand why this happened, with the new year and new units, sometimes it can be hard to cap off projects properly. If I was to look back and say whether this project went well or badly, at the end of day, I would say it went well, because I am proud. Anyways, that’s that, another field study in the books…
danielw • January 20, 2019