Hey,

In this post, I will be talking about a very big project that has taken a long time to finish, Project Frankenstuffy. This project has integrated units from math (geometry), textiles (sewing), and science and humanities as we talked about ecology. First, i’m going to talk about the geometry math aspect of the project. Here we learned about surface area, volume, and the perimeter of different objects, and we used this information to help us make our Math Monster. The Math Monster would be later used in our final frankenstuffy videos to represent the villain of the story. I liked interrogating math into the project because then we were focusing on the same idea and topics in all the different subjects, it just made everything a little less stressful. This is what my final math monster looked like:

 

You can also look at the blog where I specifically talk about the Math Monster here.

Next, we did a novel study in humanities on the Martian by Andy Weir. Every six chapters or so we basically had to prepare a chapter summary on what we read. The main topic and question for the unit was, “who is in control, the environment or humans,” and as we read we had to always keep this question in mind. I really enjoyed reading the book because I think The Martian is a very unique story and I loved how Andy Weir used certain words to explain how the characters felt during the story. This is an example of one of the novel reflections we had to do:

Then it was time to start working on the Frankenstuffy video. First, we learned about geography. We learned about climate, the different zones of the world, the different biomes, and all about land shape. After we had a good understanding of geography we had to choose a region of Canada that our video would take place. I chose the northwest side of the St. Lawrence Lowlands Regions, and more specifically Lake Nipigon. The whole unit is called Frankenstuffy because of the animal adaptations to the changing environment. These adaptations cause the animal, or in our case the stuffy, to grow new limbs and different body parts. In the end, the stuffy looks like a totally new creature. The changing environment is caused by our math monster, and frankenstuff adapts to deal with him.

First, before we made the video, we had to make an 8 episode long story of our frankenstuffies battle for freedom. Each episode had to be 200-500 words long, this was definitely one of the hardest parts of the project.  In our story, we had to list the changes to the environment, what it did to the surrounding nature and animals, and how the problem is either resolved or not. Here is my story:

Although it was personally very tough to write the stories, I enjoyed it a lot. I forgot how fun it was to write and develop your own story, and it let my imagination and creation run wild.

The next part of the project was making our frankenstuffies. I used a combination of a brown bear, a heart with hands and opposable thumbs, eyes, and a homemade cheetah leg. I couldn’t find a cheetah that matched the size of my original stuffy, so as my final resort I made a pair of legs at home. First, I cut the heart with hands in half and sewed them on where the bear would originally have his arms and hands. Then I added the extra eyes, and last I sewed on the cheetah legs. After I added a body part to the brown bear I made sure to take lots of photos from different angles so I could use them in my video. Here are some of the pictures:

Now that I had made my stuffie it was time to make the video, I started by making the video storyboard. This was to help me understand the different shots of my movie and to help me remember the storyline. This is mine.

The storyboard was a very rough sketch on what the actual video was going to look like, and even though I didn’t use it very much at all while filming my video, it always helps to put your ideas down on paper first.  To make my video I mainly used two apps. The first app is  Explain Everything. This app allows me to edit animations, add voiceovers, and it lets me join video files and pictures together. I use this app for a lot of my other assignments, and it is a very helpful app, and tool to have with me. The second app is Photoshop Mix. This app allows me to remove the background of photos, and it allows me to edit and layer pictures. I used this app in my video to remove the backgrounds in all my frankenstuffy pictures and video clips. It is very easy to use, and I would recommend it to anyone that needs to edit pictures. I took most of my pictures of the internet but also took some of them myself. A variety of apps allow me to make videos and projects to the best of my ability.

So, once I had finished my first draft of the video it was time to hand it in and get some critic. I have to admit my first draft was not very good, and I had a lot to improve on for my next draft.

This is my finalized video, I hope you enjoy:

I spend a very long time making the video, and I am proud of it. I learned a lot of valuable editing skills, and also a lot about geography and ecology. I put my sewing skills to the test and have really enjoyed the creation process of the whole project.

In the end, I think that in my story the animals are in control. The monster destroys the ecosystem and it’s only because of the frankenstuffies bravery that Lake Nipigon was restored to its natural being.

Thanks for reading.