Metaphor Machines. Since I last spoke about our metaphor machines, we were about halfway through finishing the project. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a quick recap. For those who dont WANT to read that, here’s a link for the post.
We started the whole project by learning about steampunk and revolutions. We did a few mini projects like the EEs we made on railways in the Industrial Revolution.
This was all building up to a bigger project which I talked about in my previous post which are the metaphor machines. More specifically, we had to make a metaphor machine that used a steampunk aesthetic and was about the events of a certain revolution in history. In my group’s case, we did the Russian Revolution. We did research and put everything onto a timeline.
We then started building the machine and working on a storyboard for a video that talks about the project itself and the different aspects of it, going into detail about the metaphors, events, etc.
That’s where I left off in the last blog post, now to what we did after that…
In terms of the machine itself, we already had really good progress and had all of our parts on the machine. The problem was getting the machine to work. We had a few different issues, one of them being that our some of our ideas were much easier said than done. For example, we were working on a scale that a domino would land on, tipping a ball through a hole in the scale. The problem was that the marble would go high in the sky once the domino hit the scale, and usually only worked due to luck. We fixed it by building a makeshift cage to keep the ball from jumping off the scale. There was also the problem that our machine didn’t look too appealing. That’s still one of the problems that we have, at least in my opinion. I definitely think that it’s much nicer now though than before the halfway mark.
For me, the machine wasn’t really the hard part considering I spent more of my time working on the video and the “writing-stuff.” I’ll be honest, I wasn’t in love with the timelines as I like to be flexible when making my videos. I also have trouble with those type of things because of how I make videos, which is essentially many quick cuts of pictures that are relevant to what the narrator is talking about.
Once I finished the storyboard, I worked on the video. That was definitely complicated because we had to record in a storage room and use Robbie’s phone for the script. I then put the video together and experienced a pretty fun thing late on sunday night. The whole video was corrupted, which meant I had to record the recordings onto my phone and then record THAT onto a new project file, which meant the audio quality took a swan dive. After all that though, I think the video worked out pretty well.
And that’s it. The class is now going to be moving on to another subject, which I’m guessing might have something to do with Blue Sky again, but after a few months of working on this subject and project, we finally finished.
The project was a good learning experience for us, and I think that we learned some important things, like not depending on iMovie. Until then, see you later!
Leave a Reply