I don’t know about the rest of you but this last week has been riddled with one surprise after another, some more welcome than others. For the last five weeks or so my class has been working on our first project of this year for Humanities which was to create a trailer for a podcast we will be producing throughout the rest of this year. (Mine’s called Society’s Waltz by the way…)
Shameless plug out of the way, this project was pretty stressful since not only did we have to make our trailer we also had to come up with the whole concept and feel for it in the span of about a couple of weeks. And even with that added amount of pressure I still managed to procrastinate enough and left writing my script for the final draft of the trailer until the day before it was due. I know really stupid idea but that was how I usually worked, I spend hours just thinking and planning what to do for whatever assignment I needed to do. Going over certain parts in an endless cycle until I finally come up with something that is to my satisfaction then I finally sit down and create whatever I had made in my mind. This process however, has lead me to some close calls, like this trailer. I ended up finishing the script the night before but I was too out of it to be able to record a good version of the trailer so I left it until the morning. Once I had woken up I did some final edits to my script and recorded the trailer, all that was left to do was to make the music. The only problem was that I had to leave for school in about half an hour so I spent 20 minutes working on the sound design and feel of the music and handed it in but I wasn’t super happy with it. To me it sounded rushed.
I ended up trying to completely redo the music in the trailer in class and put more thought into it but I was struggling to get a grasp on what would sound good. Then Ms. Willemse decided to start playing our trailers in class and give us feedback. This freaked me out since like I said before, I wasn’t super happy with the way the draft had turned out and I did not want to have a disappointed Ms. Willemse telling me that this wasn’t good enough and not up to standard when I already knew it. But to my surprise that was the opposite of what she said. Instead she gave me notes about levelling the volume of the music not the actual music itself, apparently my use of the music actually gave a certain depth and thoughtfulness to the piece. With this info I went back to Garageband and remade the music this time almost the same as what I had before with a few adjustments and better audio.
That was a welcome surprise but the next wasn’t as enjoyable as the first. Since we had just finished our project it was time to begin a new one, this one taught by none other than Ms. Maxwell herself. If you know anything about Ms. Maxwell it’s that she loves Canadian history, to an extent that all her projects always lead back to Canada in some way. So it was no surprise when we learned that our new project was based around the driving question “Who is the Greatest Canadian?”. What was surprising, however, was the actual content of the project, we knew that this project would surround the creation of our first episode of our podcast. What we didn’t know is that we would have to include a Canadian who is relevant from 1982- today in it and explain why they were the greatest Canadian while still holding true to the nature of our podcasts. I was shocked, how was I going to do an episode about a Canadian who is related to dance when my whole show is about the things that affect dancers not the other way around? Luckily, I have an idea but you won’t know what it is until I finish my next project and post the blog post about it. So stay tuned!
– Grace