School only started two weeks ago and we have already gone on our first trip of the year. Last year, our smaller trip was Seattle, this year, it was Camp Capilano and it was the most different from the all the trips we’ve done so far, regardless of being an overnight trip. I’ll get into that in a bit.

Before we left for the trip, we watched a few intros of reality TV shows at school and spent our time in class pinpointing what made these 30 second intros captivating to us, the audience. We also focused on how they managed to portray the characters in the show and kind of the vibe you would be experiencing while watching the show. We kept notes and were told to keep in mind what we talked about on the way to Camp Capilano.
Later that day, we packed the Seycove bus and started our short journey to the camp. Before we got there though, we stopped at the Capilano Dam and were put in groups of five.
Our first mini-project of the trip…

We were tasked to create a reality TV show intro using the knowledge of what we talked about earlier that day. We needed to introduce ten characters in our intro, include theme music, and it had to be around 45 seconds long. We only had an hour to do this, so all of us quickly got to work.
My group consisted of Aiden, Simon, Reid, and Kyle. We quickly decided on a show about the people of Capilano park, spoofed The Park Boys of Capilano. We wanted to introduce two characters at a time who would both be drastically different from each other. For people to know who was who, we used freeze-frame shots for each of the characters with their names across the screen. Once we had our ideas down, we all started taking jobs within the group to get things done more efficiently. Some people were on filming, other were on editing, etc. The characters were made up on the fly as we were just spit-balling character ideas and finding ones we liked. When we came up with a character, we would pair them with a character that had opposite traits. For example, we paired a nerd with a skateboarder, or a sports guy with a clumsy person. We finished the video, and although we handed it in late, I still think it came out pretty good.

In the end, we should have spent more time in the editing phase, but we had spent a lot of time arguing about camera angles and characters, which was our downfall in the end as we ran out of time before handing it in. I made sure to keep in mind that for the next project, we would have to manage our time a lot better.

After that, we walked the remainder of the distance to Camp Capilano, we ate lunch, and got settled in. Afterwards with the same groups, we were given another mini-project which we would only have an hour to work on. This time, we were told to make a minute long recording which would have to introduce ten characters (same as last time or different), using only dialogue, no video. Our characters had to be uniquely identifiable from each other which would be the main challenge to this assignment as the audience should be able to understand what each of the characters are like as people.

Taking our experiences from the last assignment, my group came into this project differently. This time, we quickly created a schedule of what we would be doing and for how long. We knew that the script was the most important part as we wanted to really give each character a whole personality of it’s own, completely different from all the rest, so we gave ourselves around twenty-five minutes to work on that. We then put down twenty minutes for the voice recordings and fifteen minutes for editing and in case there were any problems we needed to fix. We decided we wanted to make a different reality TV show. This time, we came up with a show called “Family of 10” which was about a house full of brothers and their daily lives.Here’s how it turned out.

Although we were told this assignment would be harder than the first, we actually had a much easier time with this assignment as this time we were a lot more organized and didn’t have any camera angles to argue about. We were also all on the same page about the characters and idea of the “video” which helped a lot.

Afterwards, we had some free time, ate dinner, etc. We were brought back for our last project of the trip. Being the perceptive people we are, lots of us though that our last assignment was going to be another reality TV related project but this time with audio and visuals. We were wrong. It turned out that it was something completely different. We were told to make a four minute podcast about identity. We would have until after breakfast the next morning to finish this. We were going to be pulling experiences from our lives which have shaped us to be the people we are today. We were really encouraged just to pull a sliver of a story from just one person in our group’s life and talk about identity using the story as a building block.
This time our groups had been split and I was with Aiden and Adam. I definitely think we as a group had a lot of trouble trying achieve the point of this project as we were constantly coming back to the teachers with new ideas, frustrated with what we were accomplishing at the time. Eventually, we had a pretty good idea about a story in our lives that Aiden and I shared. This is what it sounded like.

We were happy with what we came up with, but once it reached the rest of the class, our balloons got bursted pretty quickly. Amongst a few smaller issues such as me talking to fast or our background music just being one long loop, we were told that our story was still too broad and that what we experienced wasn’t something they’d believe to be as worldview changing as we thought.

All in all, I learned a lot over this short trip, and I feel like we all worked together pretty well, coming up with some decent end-products to our projects. I’m excited to see what else we’re going to be doing with podcasts throughout this school year but until then, ciao!