In September, our class learned about nuclear war.
It was terrifying, but of course I just kind of had to ignore that part and stop being dramatic. Cause I had work to do.
Ensues an adventure/nightmare/learning experience that almost made me drop out of school to become a burger flipper.
Okay, I’m being dramatic again.
The actual trip we went on was great and informative and really fun. Instead of telling you everything we did, I’m just going to insert a really fun looking video that hopefully tells some kind of narrative and lets you know what kind of things we did on the trip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ494qDxiTU
Once we got back is when the real trouble began. We had to make a video, and this video caused me a lot of pain and suffering. My group and I (Spencer, Stanfield, Luciano, & Matt) handed in our final draft a week after everyone else because of our busy schedules and technical difficulties. First of all, it was a lot of editing. I had to fully edit the movie 5 or 6 times, and of I’m being honest, I’m like, barely happy with the results.
The first video we made was a scratch video, so we knew we were going to have to reflim everything we were doing, and we were 100% okay with it, because it wasn’t very good. We were just trying to get formatting down. It ended up not looking great, tbh. You can click here to view it.
The second draft was when things got serious, so I brought in my DSLR camera to film everything nicely. That took about two days. Then, I had to actually start seriously editing. I did my best, but I wasn’t able to complete it how I wanted it in the time I had. I didn’t have the interviews in place, and the editing was only finished for like, the first third of the video. Click here to see what ended up being handed in.
The third draft was when all hell broke loose. I spent hours working on this thing, and THEN IT CRASHED and I had a breakdown and everything was awful.
It actually fixed itself the next day, but it was still traumatizing. I was completely drained of everything I had in me. I finished the video, and then I did my best to forget the whole thing ever happened. In fact, here is a poem from the book Teen Angst Poetry that really represents how I felt in that period of time. Anyways, here is the video we ended up with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEq_feT_2rw
What I’ve learned from this experience seems to be what I’m learning time and time again: effort doesn’t always mean anything. I put literal blood sweat and tears into this project, and it still didn’t come out like I would have hoped. Meanwhile, I can put pretty much no effort into something and it will turn out great.
I’m not sure exactly why I can never feel satisfied with projects like this. Sometimes it’s almost like the more I work on something, the worse it gets. Maybe that’s because I have a higher expectation for things I spend a long time on. I can always confirm that they are objectively worse. I even think that 2 minute video at the beginning ended up better than this video that I spent at least a dozen hours on. Working hard doesn’t mean anything when your end result looks like it wasn’t worked hard on.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop working hard on stuff, it just means the world is unfair.
Agh.