Since our first day back to school, my blogs have been eluding to a big project that I didn’t go into much detail beforehand.
If you don’t know, it’s a metaphor machine about (in this case) the Russian Revolution all while using a steampunk aesthetic to give the machine more life. The machine also has to have a circuit which we’re learning about in science.
So how we started the whole thing was by actually picking out our revolutions. There were enough so that everyone got a revolution and there weren’t any left over. Evidently, some people wanted the same revolution for whatever reasons they had. They would then do a trivia battle and whoever could answer the most questions about the revolution would get it. Our group was lucky enough to know about the Russian Revolution which is why we chose it. After picking our revolutions, we would work on a timeline that had three different components:
-Metaphor
-Historical Events
-How it relates to Crane Brinton’s theory
Once we were approved, we had to draw out our machine and get that approved. Once that was all done, we could start working on the project, using the timeline as a guide for how we were going to build the machine. For my group at least, we had a little bit of trouble getting momentum with our work and were pretty slow on the first few classes, still trying to get all our materials to class and getting them sorted.
After that, we started to get work done, building and painting the structure of the machine.
That’s not really the complicated part. The tough part it realizing that some of our ideas for the machine don’t while we’re building it. For example, we’re building a top-hat scale for the beginning of the machine, but it’s fragile and doesn’t work the way we want it to. Other than that, we don’t have too much progress in terms of the rest of the machine since our machine is sequential, we have to build everything in order and fix the problems as we go.
On top of that, we also have to make a video to go with the machine that explains the process of how we built the machine and the metaphors/history that goes with it. 
Before that though, we have to make a storyboard to give us a better idea of how to make the video. It’s a little complicated for me because I’m more open with changes while editing and filming videos, so it is kind of a challenge to work with it for me, but my group and I are making it work. Currently, we’re still working on the storyboard making small changes to it while another person starts working on the parts of the video that are good to go on the storyboard.
I definitely think that we’re going to come up with something great, but our progress on our machine could be much better than it actually is. We’re going to put a lot of focus onto the machine but also focus on the storyboard as well as I’m still having trouble with it. With some time, we’ll be on our way but until then, To Be Continued…
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