For the last month we have been working on our frankenstuffie project in socials and science. This blog post will go through the process that I went through to create it.

This project started with us reading the Martian and learning the core concept of “Who is in control? Humans or the environment?”. If you haven’t read it yet I would highly recommend it.

For the next piece I will summarize the book to help give my answer to the question.

The book is set not too far into the future and follows astronaut Mark Watney. Mark is left stranded on Mars after a storm interrupts the mission of Ares 3. The movie follows Mark, NASA and the Ares team as they try to bring Mark back alive. As you can probably tell this book revolves around people vs the environment or Mark versus Mars. For the entire project I was one of the few people who said that people where in control. One of the things I stated was “Mark is still alive after being impaled by a dish, left in the almost vacuum of the Martian atmosphere, being left on Mars for years, not having enough food, having the hab blow up, crossing the Martian dessert and having his new supplies being blown upon. Yet, He is still trying to get back to earth with the help of NASA and is still alive despite all of the problems he has encountered.” This sums up my entire argument when it comes to people vs the environment.

Anyway, this all transitions into the next part of the project where we began working on a video. We researched different regions of Canada and chose one to put an animal of our choosing in, the animal in question being a stuffed animal. This animal would then, after experiencing an extreme change in one of a few mater cycles, transform into an animal with some new parts from other animals to help it adapt. 

Here’s the example from my video.

Scientists create a genetically modified otter which they release into the Hudson’s Bay Lowlands, this Otter falls off a cliff breaking his tracking collar and making the scientists unable to find him. He lives comfortably only to have a dam built up stream from his lake. The dam causes the lake to lose water which causes the fish to die. Because of the lack of fish there isn’t enough nitrogen in the surrounding plants, this puts the otter at risk. The otter travels upstream to investigate only to narrowly avoid being hit by a car. This causes another injury leading to his body adapting to the new situation. He grows a beaver tail and travels down stream. He discovers a group of beavers and learns how to build a dam. Now he builds a dam at his lake which fills it up bringing back the water supply. This brings back the fish which supplies the soil with nitrogen which brings back the plants.

We originally wrote a story which covered most of what you see up there. However the story was written in the first person. So we saw the story from the otters perspective. This story later turned into a script which had to be written in the third person. This proved to be a bit of a challenge because switching the story from first person to third person meant we had to introduce new characters and write about about the events from a different perspective. Then we turned it into a storyboard where we got the basic camera angles sorted out. As the final step in the project we converted everything into a video. If you want to watch it I’ll link it below. However I will tell you that I was sick when recording audio so it sounds a bit off.

Overall I really enjoyed this blog post and I think I learned a lot in both humanities and science. Thanks for reading my blog post, this video took a lot of work and I enjoyed making it.