Frankenstuffie. What is it you might ask? It is the name of one of the biggest projects we’ve done all year. We were tasked to pick a region, matter cycle, and two animals in our region to create a short video. The video was about how an interference in a matter cycle caused an animal of your choice to basically take on the features of another animal to help its chances of survival.
My region was the interior plains, a beautiful place with diverse ecosystems and a wide variety of different species of wildlife. One of those amazing species is the white tailed deer. I had chosen the white tailed deer to be the main focus of my story. Considering that I had previously done a project on white tailed deer, and had also recently visited Calgary (which is in the interior plains), the research portion of the project was quite easy for me. Some things I had to know about my region were things like it’s overall climate, the wild life that inhabited the region, and it’s vegetation. Once I knew all that I needed to know, I could move on to creating the story episodes. The story had to be written in episodes, and all the episodes were part of an overall story board. For example, episode one was the exposition, which established what was happening. Episodes two and three were the rising action, which introduced some sort of issue. The fourth was the climax, where some sort of major conflict occurs, and the last two episodes were the falling action and the impact, where they show the reaction and consequences of the previous events.
I really enjoyed writing the episodes, I felt like I could get really creative and was very proud of the end product. When I was done writing them up, I had to edit them and then change them to be past tense instead of present. This was hard to do for me, mostly because I felt like when I was making it past tense, it took away from the story and made it a bit more challenging to understand. With this in mind, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be in the end. The most difficulty I had was when I had to make my story into video footage. This was because I wasn’t particularly happy with the footage that I was getting, and being the perfectionist that I am, it was hard not to focus on the tiny details instead of the main ideas. The easiest option when filming, was to use the green screen and film your stuffy using this method. When I was using only the green screen, It felt like I couldn’t capture all that I wanted to. Then I decided it would be easier to just make animation. Little did I know that animation were really annoying to create when you have a time constraint, and it didn’t help that making one second of an animation took me like twenty minutes. It would also get on my nerves when the app I had been using would lag out every two seconds. I had lost my work several times while using it, RIP all the scenes that I worked so hard on but accidentally got deleted. Even with this, I made it through and finally finished it.
One thing that I haven’t yet touched bases on was the creation of my actual frankenstuffie, it is the name of the project after all. Like I have mentioned, the animal I picked to be the main focus of my video is a white tailed deer. A main component of this project was to take a stuffy version of the animal you chose, and cut it up. Then, I needed to add parts from another stuffy. In my video, a white tailed deer morphs into a deer wolf hybrid and has the legs, a tail, and teeth, of a grey wolf. Knowing this, I got both a deer and a wolf stuffy to recreate this hybrid from my story. I know what you’re thinking, a deer wolf hybrid? That’s not the slightest bit realistic! Let’s just say that we’re not being marked how believable it is. Well, I lied, that isn’t completely true.
Yet another big section of this project was learning and incorporating the matter cycles. If you don’t already know of the matter cycles (nitrogen cycle, phosphorus cycle, carbon cycle, hydrogen cycle/ water cycle) then I suggest you click on this link and learn all about them. I was given the nitrogen cycle, and was tasked with finding some way that there could be a disturbance in that cycle. After giving it some thought and talking with the teacher, I decided that there would be a massive drought and that would be the disturbance. Without the rain, the nitrogen in the air would never reach the soil. Without the nitrogen in the soil, the plants couldn’t use it as food and they would die off. Because of the lack of plants, the deer would have no other option but to eat meat, like a wolf. And this worked perfectly for me because deer actually would actually become part wolf.
This project was quite challenging but also very fun. I have learned some valuable skills about time management in the process, and learned some new things like how to use a green screen and making animations. Although the end product didn’t turn out exactly as I hoped, I know that it’ll just make me want strive for better on all my other projects to come.
