About a month ago we were assigned the traditional plp project called Frankenstuffie. The project is humanities and science based. The humanities part was mostly all about the physical regions of canada and the science part was animal adaption and (for me) the nitrogen cycle.

First read the Martian, this book is about an astronaut (Mark Watney) who is stranded on the unlivable planet, Mars. He is forced to think fast and use his strengths but I won’t spoil it for you. One of the main reasons for reading this book was to give us inspiration for frankenstuffie because the book was written in journal form and so was ours. We also read the Martian to answer our on going class question “who is in control? Humans or the environment”.

For more preparation we all split into groups and researched all the physical regions of Canada in which our frankenstuffies story would based on.
We each created a movie about the adaption of our animal in Canada and had about a month to write a script, create a storyboard, film, edit and sew. The project taught us about storyboarding, editing, exploration of different apps, creative writing and cinematography.

 

 

The Episodes

 

We were asked to write our story in episode form first, just like Mark Watney.

 

Our teachers gave us this page which personally really helped me organize my story. I’m pretty sure everyone wrote their episodes in different forms, some people wrote theirs just as a few paragraphs, some wrote them in story board themed paragraphs but I decided to write mine like a journal entry and that form of writing really helped me organize my ideas through out writing it.

 

 

Here on the left is episode 4 of my story and as you can see I also wrote in small paragraphs to separate each day.

 

 

 

 

The Script

After we had finished our episodes 1-6, our next task was to take those episodes and transform them into a script for our stuffie.
This part of the project required a lot of peer critique, because personally I had a lot of trouble transforming them not a script instead of a journal entry.

 

Here’s an example of how I transformed my episodes into a script. I also added shot numbers which really helped me later on.

 

 

 

 

The Storyboard

The third step to our project was to create a storyboard out of the script.

Some of us did ours on paper and some of us did ours on our iPads. As you can see I decided to do mine on my paper and I’m not completely sure why I did mine like that, but I guess that’s what felt the most convenient at the time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The storyboard probably should’ve been the easiest part of the project but I decided to spend three hours colouring all seven of them.

 

 

The Film (and editing)

What I decided to do was take my pictures and videos and then use explain everything to move the picture of my stuffie (made with superimpose) across the screen.

 

 

 

Reflection/pros & cons

I’m going to get straight into the negatives. First of all, if I could go back in time (a few weeks ago) I would’ve told myself to manage my time better along with trying harder to finish each of the steps on the project on time. ( episodes, filming, e.t.c )

Now for some positives. I’m glad that apps like superimpose and explain everything worked out well for me because I had only used superimpose once or twice before this project and I had never used explain everything until now.

 

And here’s the video

 

 

In the end, this wasn’t the most enjoyable project I’ve ever done but I’m glad I completed it. This project taught me a lot of new things, from apps to Canada’s regions to growing potatoes on Mars.