Hello everyone and welcome/back to my blog!

Hot off of spring break and we’re right back into the heaping pile of work that we left at the end of the semester. For this project, we where making short form trend videos to highlight our big trip to Disney World. We went to Disney primarily to discover the magic of the company, but this was something else we where doing while there. Through this project we built on our knowledge of filmmaking and script design, as well as practicing our ability change our videos on the spot. Today I’ll be talking more about what the filmmaking process looked for us and describing how it went when it got to the time of making our shots in the Disney parks.

Project Path

Before we got into all the video making, we where setting ourselves up for success by learning how to create a personal productivity system. I’m not a very organized person and I usually just “remember things” so I was kind of worried how this was going to go. I quickly realized that my old method or keeping track of things didn’t really work at all. Learning how to organize my documents, to-do’s, files, and emails is helping me be aware of all the pieces of information that are constantly buzzing around me. I followed the instructions on how to tag, categorize, label and deadline things to better keep track of my life.

-insert organized things-

Aside from our digital media, we also cleared our personal spaces like our rooms or desks. I cleaned, reorganized and made a new system for my desk. I now have a set place for everything and I can use my tools more effectively.

Part of the benefit of this process is making a more efficient space to manage school work, which was perfect because the next part of our Maker work. We needed do design and create 5 videos, which takes a lot of organization to keep track of all your plans. We started by using skills we’ve learned like story-boarding and scripting to help execute our ideas. We where doing this tandem with our Humanities work so being able to use our Personal Productivity System helped us stay organized. We took a couple classes looking at examples on basecamp and in TikTok to get some ideas for what we wanted to do. Our only parameters where to show our face in at least one so we all ended up with some unique ideas.

I think my planning went quite well and I had a confident Idea of what I wanted to film so I took the next step of planning out where and when I needed to film. I put all my shoots for all my TikTok’s and our Disney video SA into my calendar. I set notifications to tell me where I needed to be and what I needed to film. Unfortunately, our flight got delayed so I kind of had to redo everything and I couldn’t film everything I originally wanted to do. I feel like there is a skill to show from that though, being able to pivot on the spot is a crucial part in filmmaking and group projects generally. Being able to use the Decision-Making and Communicating competencies.

Decision-Making: I can evaluate ethical implications and make complex judgements while identifying and respecting diverse communities.

Communicating: I can express and reflect for communication by determining appropriate and effective forms for purpose, audience, and message. 

Conclusion

Overall, it was a super fun and exciting project. I mean, we got to go to Disney World – for school. I loved getting to work and collaborate with my friends and getting their thoughts and opinions on my videos. I got some really good feedback from them that helped make my videos much better. I learned a lot about planning and organization. This was definitely the coolest thing I’ve done all year and probably the most fun project that I’ve done with PLP.

Thank you all for reading and I wish you a productive day. -Declan