This title might seem random, but there’s context to it, I promise.
A little while back, we started working on a geography unit that would be leading up to a big project that most of us were anticipating throughout the year as it made us think very out of the box for some portions of the project. I’ll talk about that in a bit. The geography unit was one of those things that reminded us of normal class as it was a lot more factual and less “abstract” than the majority of units we’ve done in PLP. The learning we did that unit was essential for the mystery project that I was talking about. What is this project you may ask? Well, it was the project that many of us were waiting for after the Florida project.
If you haven’t guessed yet, it’s the Frankenstuffy project that we’ve been working on.
There are three parts to this project.
-The epistolary story
-The Frankenstuffy and Math Monster
-The Frankenstuffy video
As we did start off the whole project by writing the epistolary stories, I’ll start with that. Epistolary stories are stories that are written like The Martian as everything is split up into letters, documents, etc. We started off by getting assigned a specific region of Canada to base our story in which meant our characters had to be characters or things that are generally around the region we were assigned. I got the Southwest Interior Planes, so I decided to do some research and pick an animal to be the protagonist. The driving question that we had to tackle for this project is “Who’s in Control? Us/Frankenstuffy or the environment? That stuck around the back of my head when I was writing my epistolary story.
After doing some research, I decided that I would choose a badger. I didn’t really have a particular reason to choose a badger other than that they are pretty much generalists and when writing about one, I have a lot of creative freedom. I actually did a lot of research on land masses, climate, etc because I really wanted to make sure that what I was writing about was accurate. Once I had a grasp on everything, I did my storyboard.
Once I did that, I got to writing.
Looking back on it, I’m actually pretty happy with how my story went. It was definitely a different style from what I’m used to so it was good to get me back on my toes for the writing.
Ok, so I’m happy with my story and committed to my animal. One problem. Have you ever seen a badger stuffy at a Toys R Us or Walmart? Me neither. I had just finished my story and decided to get moving on making my stuffy. So I looked, looked again, and looked some more. There weren’t any badger stuffies at home. So I go look online to see if any stores nearby have it or if anyone can ship one. On top of taking way too long to ship, the prices went well over $60 for a stuffy that I’m going to cut up. So I improvised. I found an old polar bear stuffy that, luckily, had a head very closely resembling a badger’s. The body wasn’t as similar but hey, I took what I could get. Using only the finest Staples sharpie, I filled in the parts of the polar bear that were supposed to be black as badgers are striped. I finally had finished the stuffy and even had a spare dragon head laying around that fit around the badger’s head like a sock. It was pretty great.
We did a mini project in our Scimatics class as well which involved the Frankenstuffy video and that was the making of our main antagonist, the Math Monster. We started off by drawing a rough draft of how our Math Monster would look like. We had made these monsters way before we had even started thinking about writing our stories, so I had the idea to make my monster a little more metaphorical by making it a corporate greed monster over an evil snowman or something along the lines of that. It was probably a little better in theory than in practice…
I tried thinking of ways to make my monster seem more human-like, even though we had to actually make it a monster. I had originally made it with cardboard which acted as the body and a layer of paper over it so I could draw the details of the monster. When I finished it, I put it in my little green-screen set-up that I made in preparation for my video. I made it in my room and it required a lot of light. When the light hit the monster, the paper would become translucent and the details of the monster were impossible to see. I then moved on to making my monster out of styrofoam. I used different shapes as we were told to do and put it together. I then colored the monster in and wrote out the dimensions of everything on the monster as it was part of the monster portion of the project. Overall, I would say that it probably could use some improvement, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever made, so I wasn’t upset with it either.
Finally, my favorite part of any project, the video. I don’t know why, but I love making videos so much. With all the work we’ve done on videos too, my progression over the past two years has been crazy, so when we came into this video, which was probably one of the hardest videos to make for me as of now, I felt really ready.
I knew I didn’t want to make my video and animation. Although I had no idea how I was going to do it, my video was going to be live action. We were closing in on the deadline at an alarming pace to be learning green screen effects on my own, better yet, a whole video with green screen, but I knew I had to do it. Robbie had originally given me the idea of using a green screen and even gave me ideas on how to make my Frankenstuffy move without putting my hands on it, so I definitely have to give him big props for helping me like that so go check out his blog! He even showed me an awesome app called Green Screen which made the whole process of making my video a thousand times easier.
We were fortunate enough to have full classes to record our videos, whether it was going outside and getting some nature shots or using the very professional set up in the PLP room. I spent all my recording time getting nature shots as for some reason, I really wanted to record my stuffy at home. When I did get home, I was welcomed by my Mcgyver green screen set up inside my room.
I had rearranged my whole room to get this to work and started off by finding a large empty wall in my room. Next, I moved my desk all the way to the empty wall and pushed it against the wall, Now I had my backdrop and floor. Now comes the weird part. I got the sheets of my bed which are blue and hung them on my wall. I then drooped the sheets over the desk so that everything was covered by my solid blue sheets. The Green Screen app is cool enough where I can choose any color to be my green screen which meant that my blue sheets turned into a forest once I started recording. To get my stuffy to move without touching it, I tied two long strands of white thread to the top of my stuffy so I could move it off-screen like a puppet.
I did the same for my Math Monster, but my sister wouldn’t let me do that to her woodland critter stuffies, so I had to move them by hand which was troublesome at times. I had done my voice recordings prior to filming, so I quietly played the voice recordings while I was filming so that the movements were timed appropriately with the script. When I was done recording, I put the videos into Green Screen where I was able to make my blue sheets into the forest outside of Seycove where I did my nature filming. It took quite a while as I also trimmed my video while putting the green screen effects together as I found some errors in the process of green-screening my video.
I also added a cool little fire effect which I did by downloading a free fire effect on YouTube which was surrounded by green. I then added that as a video into Green Screen and layered it behind my Frankenstuffy so it looked like fire was coming out of his mouth. I also downloaded flame-thrower noise effects to give the fire shooting out of my stuffy’s mouth a realistic feeling.
I had finished doing all my Green Screen shenanigans, so I put everything into iMovie, put in background music, added transition slides, cut up the video, and used the audio I recorded earlier which I also cleaned up. I made two drafts of the video. Here they are
Draft 1:
So like I talked about earlier about the transitions and background music, I originally didn’t do that. This is basically the “bare necessities” draft that I made. I was pretty happy with it when I first made the video but upon looking back on it, I realized it needed more.
Draft 2:
For this draft, I added a lot of minor things to the video that would help improve the quality. I added transition slides, inserted intro and conclusion slides, put background music in, and added effects to the video. On top of that, I edited the rest of the audio as it sounded kind of hollow.
Well, that’s what the Frankenstuffy project is in a nutshell. I actually really enjoyed this project as it had two things that I really like to do. There was writing which I love to do and there was video making which, as I said earlier, really enjoy making. Since we’re coming very close to the end of the school year, I can’t really expect more of these projects for the ending of grade 9. So I really hope that there are more projects like this once I get into grade 10 because I’m sure that I’ll be even better at video making by then. But that’s grade 10 so until then, thanks for tuning in!
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