An Introduction

Crazy, a word I’ve ought to have said about ten thousand times by now but here I am saying it again. From the very beginning of this unit I thought that the word crazy had many different meanings in different contexts, some of those contexts not being too cheerful. But over the duration of this unit, I realized that it wasn’t a dictionary definition we were looking for but our own definition, one that we’ve created. From the knowledge of our Seattle trip, from the people and places, we learnt about as examples and evidence of our definition of crazy.

 

What is a Pecha Kucha?

We’ve been studying the Pecha Kucha style presentations since November and it was something brand new, not just a “stand up in front of the class and read your note cards” presentation but almost like a variation of a ted talk. These presentations can be on whatever topic you want as long as you as have 20 images and they are each up for 20 seconds.

 

So after doing a Pecha Kucha on one of Apple’s “think different” campaign candidates and listening to dozens of other peoples it was time to create one of our own. This entire process was something new, I wasn’t just writing a script and slapping a few pictures into a keynote, each of these pictures needed to represent what I wanted to say during that slide. Without any cue cards or notes, we needed to know the points we wanted to get across and having a strong keynote slide deck was important to have as it was helpful as a reminder for while we presented.

 

The Cray Cray Cafe 

On the day of the exhibition, it was time to create a space in which we would present our Pecha Kuchas in. The space in the school that we were assigned was the library,

this location ended up being the perfect place for the ides we had in mind. We transformed our school library into a cafe themed stage area, with food, drinks, lights, tables and chairs.

 

The Presentation 

Before the library was flooded with our “to be” audience, the room was full of tension, everyone grasping on to their last few minutes of practice. The moment before I went up to present, I could hardly keep myself together, doing something like this is so nerve-racking and it really pushed me out of my comfort zone. I stumbled a couple times in the beginning, but once I got talking I began to feel much better about it all. I feel as though I practiced  enough so I wasn’t “over practicing” and I’m quite pleased with how mine went, but that’s enough of my opinion, why don’t you watch it yourself.

 

Rose and Thorn Reflection

Just like with anything I do within school, I’m always given feedback and the people around me are looking back on what I’ve done in order to give that feedback. But after a project as large as this one, it is very important to reflect on what I’ve done myself. The rose would be that I have impressed myself with how I could adapt to the changing of plans throughout the progression of the project. When the privilege of presentation notes was canceled, I, along with my whole class thought that the exhibition would be The thorn would be the fact that I didn’t take very many pictures while I was in Seattle, which made the whole process of collecting meaningful photos for my keynote a much tougher process than it could’ve been. But, there is always a little bit of good in the bad, because I didn’t have as many pictures as I wished I did, it pushed me to think past the fact that I was talking about Mircosoft or Melinda Gates, I was talking about the effects these people have had on the world.