Before I start this post I want to mention that my geography class takes place in the same room as my English class, and today we were sitting in geography when my friend pointed to these projects taped to the wall and said they creeped her out. When I told her that they were made by grade 12, she was seemingly even more creeped out.
That’s all the proof you really need that my class isn’t really full of artistic types.
Anyways, for this assignment, I worked with Stanfield, Spencer, Maria, and Luciano. When tasked with picking a character to do our metaphor man on, we picked quickly.
And then other groups picked our top 3 choices, so we got stuck with Mr. Charrington.
We actually had a benefit in this project, that both I and Luc had already read 1984. That means we should have avoided the second mistake that we made in originally building. We made two large mistakes.
I’m not really sure who to blame the first one on. Basically, we used green paper for a green screen project. Although we didn’t know it was a green screen project yet, so…. more on that later.
Anyways, we when we first started this assignment, we hadn’t finished the book and didn’t know Mr. Charrington was actually a member of the thought police, so when we had the second class period, we had to erase everything and start again.
What we ended up with was splitting Mr. Charrington in half. One side shows his fake “prole” side that we see for most of the novel, and the other side represents his secret identity as a thought police member.
What Each Part Represents
Cane: Mr. Charrington is passing himself off as a frail old man.
Outturned Pocket: He has no money.
Patches on Clothes: He cannot afford nice things/they’re not available to him.
Cutout on Hand: This was supposed to be the blue antique paperweight Winston buys, however, we had to use a blue screen so it cut out.
Cutout of Heart: This has a few representations. The heart is on the wrong side of his body because his heart is “in the wrong place”, and Big Brother is peaking out because his heart shows his true self.
Tears: Mr. Charrington is lonely because his wife died.
Ball and Chain: Like the rest of Oceania, Mr. Charrington is trapped in his boring routine of life.
Red Fist: The red fist of oppression.
Face: On the left side, Mr. Charrington has a kinder face, and on the right, it’s much more stoic and somewhat resembles 1940’s and 50’s dictators.
The video is shaky and kind of awful, but it’s because we had to make a tiny blue screen….I am sorry.