Or, yanno, the French revolution. That title is a wee bit dramatic. I reflected the final days of the metaphor machine in this post, (and made one amazing video), but I must admit, the actual storytelling video has just a bit more effort put into it.
And now, in the stylings of Brianna and Kirby,
French Revolution Metaphor Machine: The Final Cut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOdvdbyAlvg
So once that god-awful debate was finished, our two teams had to join forces to create a 60 Minutes style video where we considered both sides of the argument. And I’m going to say, right off the bat, our group (which consisted of me, Harry, Spencer, Matthew S, Matthew D, and Jacob) wasn’t working very well together. We didn’t know how to work together to make a video that was good and a product of all six of us. For the next two or three weeks we fought over stuff and didn;t get as much work done as we should. There was a lot of back and forth, but eventually we got our video put together. So, may I present, American Military Taxes Debate: The Movie.
(M. Night Shyamalan directed this movie. The plot twist was that we actually finished.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdL7KpE1O8I&feature=youtu.be&app=desktop
The week after we got back from California, we had to do a debate about whatever topic it was we were assigned. I had aircraft carriers/American military spending. I was on the affirmative side, which means I agreed with the statement. In this case the statement was something along the lines of In these trying financial times, America shouldn’t be spending so much money on it’s military / aircraft carriers.
I was the third up, after Harry and Spencer. We weren’t organized, but we still went in way more confident than we came out. I’m supposed to have the video of me talking, but I actually deleted it long ago, but I looked like a thumb in that video. So, I figured this video would be the next best thing.
Long story short: we weren’t very good. The good news was that the other group wasn’t very good either. We were the first of the debates, and we still were iffy about what exactly we were doing. We didn’t realize exactly how organized we had to be for this. Answer: very. We ended up losing, despite our best efforts. It was pretty much a failure. Although, I did learn that when doing a debate, always and I mean always have a giant list of cited facts supporting your cause.
Yeah, that would have helped a lot.
My blue sky project has actually been coming along pretty well. I have half of the stories written, and have spent the rest of my time drafting out the pages for my “book”. I’m not sure if I will be the one doing the drawings(hopefully not, I’m not very good). But So far I know what all the drawings will be of, and where they will be on the page. I’ve just been drawing them out on lined paper, but my final plans will be made as soon as the stories as finished.
I really need to get going on completing the rest of the stories so I can make final drafts of them and publish them on iBooks. I really need to have everything completed on time and I have such a short amount of time left, so I better put aside some time for this whenever I can.
So last week was the final week for groups to get their machines together. We didn’t completely finish, but at least our machine actually works(mostly) as of right now. We wasted a lot of class time fighting on what to do next which I think took place because we didn’t have a true leader. It was hard to explain my experience working for the past few weeks with this group in words, so I have made a short video to compose my thoughts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYmRr3uqCH8
That music is very immersive.
Anyways, I do regret not having the machine up to the level we wanted it to be at by now, but I have hope that by the exhibition it will be looking good.
Two weeks ago, my group was really set on building our machine. We just didn’t know how to get started. We kept arguing over what should be done first and who was doing what. For awhile, we would just end up doing stuff like this,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8zEhQ_vmOM&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Once we finally started to get to work, things came together pretty well. The main concern is we were moving slowly because as soon as we would finish one thing, we would all argue on what to do next instead of all just trying to get everything we could done. By the end of the week, we had about 2/3 of the machine finished, which was farther behind than we would have liked. It was however, closer to being done than the other groups, so we thought we were going to be okay.
Or at least, if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be the only ones in the gutter.
Week two of our machine projects, we’d started putting together our machine and it’s parts. We started on our guillotine (aka our pride and joy). Our issue now is figuring how to work it into our actual machine, because our original plan may not work anymore.
I was worried we wouldn’t be done on time, but I actually think we might be able to pull it off. The only thing we might have to cut short on is making our machine look nice. Hopefully we can make it not look like a sad pile of wood. And hopefully, we won’t break it before we get to use it.
This week, we’ve began working on our Blue Sky Projects during maker block on Monday. I actually didn’t do any work on my project until Friday because I wasn’t at school the other two days. On Friday, it took me most of the block to figure out an idea, but I finally have one.
My project is based around the fact that I like to write, but I am also seen as a very negative person (I’m actually not mostly I swear). I thought of the most negative stories I could come up with and it led me to thinking of the German children’s book Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffmann.
It’s pretty much a collection of things children shouldn’t do written in cute little rhyming stories. The thing is, they are not cute. A lot of the children end up murdered or horribly disfigured after they disobey their parents. The most popular story is about a boy who sucks his thumb and then gets it cut off because why not? Below is a video I found of the story on YouTube.
My project is write a collection of small stories like these ones, rhyming and unhappy. The catch is mine will warn children about the dangers of the internet, because what is more 21st century than the internet?
I’m concerned about how I’m going to illustrate these, because I was told by my teachers I have to add some illustrations, and spoiler alert, I’m not the best artist.
Let’s hope that sorts itself it out.
This week, we’ve started working on a project for humanities where we take a revolution and use metaphors to create a machine representing it. My group chose the French Revolution and have gotten pretty far so far. First we were told to create a timeline. Ours kind of looks awful but it gets the point across, and we finished pretty quickly after following Britons revolution theory.
After we finished that, we got the go ahead to start planning our machine. I think our machine is actually pretty good so far. We have tons of good ideas with great metaphors behind them, although I am worried we won’t be able to pull them off. Here’s our ideas so far.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDinxaA0zSU