Today is going to be a post all about the many revolution videos and posts that I have been creating over the last six weeks. This has been a very interesting project that has taught me a lot about how people, places and events changed rules, rulers, and law to change the common way of living so that everyone could thrive. Our task this time was to create four videos each in a unique style that shows what happened during a different revolution ( French, American, Russian, and one of our choice). Now that you know our task, here is how it all went down and our final product.
Although this is our last video there are still three more that we made to get to this point.
Russian revolution:
American revolution:
And finally the first French Revolution video:
The first part was working with my group( Anthony ,Rhiann and Kaia) this was harder at the start since we only knew a little bit about each other’s strengths, but as time went on we learned what each other was good at, this made working more efficient. What I did to help my group was voicing my ideas and creations to the group and also sharing ideas and things we could do to make the video better or push it to the next level. Also when I was editing the videos I would find problems but show others within my group what was going on and propose possible solutions, but if someone had and alternate idea, then it would be the groups decision on what should be done.
The next part of this whole project was the book we were given to read. It was about a girl called Andi who had recently lost her brother, her father was never around, her mother was in mental depression over the lost son, Andi’s was about to fail all her classes, and she has to take these drugs to keep her own depression down. It doesn’t sound to good until it gets to the part where she finds a diary, reads about a girl named Alex who lived in the 17th century, after that it got complicated so ill stop there, but the twist was that every week we met in small groups to discuss the book and what we thought about it. We also had to do certain roles like, art, summarizer, and things like that, so it was key that we kept up with the book and understand everything that was going on. I feel like personally I accomplished all these tasked and understood the key concepts and plot lines very well, then I was also able to translate these ideas from myself and the book into creative forms of art to show others what I understand.
Next we have the actual videos themselves, this part was very fun and allowed us to show what we understood through I different form of media. I think the hardest part and the thing we have to work on the most is pre planning, that means everything like story boards, screen play, call sheets, things that told us what to do and how to do them. Although we could have done better on those few things, overall I believe that my group showed clear evidence of our understanding in our videos, and we had some background research going on as well, for example during the Russian Revolution Anthony found some extra information that we included within our video, and as part of the planning for the latest video we did some deeper research into some of the events that happened during the French Revolution.
Lastly here is how each of this groups members contributed contributed toward the project to help us get to the final stage which is our final video. Everyone pitched in giving ideas but when someone did something that did not follow the plan things sometimes slowed down or messed things up. It would happen when someone would either create and add something without the others knowing or not do something that was necessary for the completion of a video, and I feel that as we started nearing the end of all our videos this became more apparent. Even though we had these set backs everyone still got over it and kept going so we could meet the final deadline.
Now to help you understand some of the things we did to complete each and every video I am going to explain how we started, built on, and completed every video ( but specifically the last one). It started with us choosing a revolution and we knew we had to chose French so that we could have some redemption for the first one ( which did not turn out the best) then a story board, screen play, but this screen play was different because we added something called Crane Brenton’s Theory of Revolution which basically states that all revolutions must have these four stages: incubation stage, moderate stage, crisis stage, and lastly recovery stage. I drew a small picture down below to show this. Then we had a call sheet, and since the this last video was a song, the screen play was less necessary because we had not need for people to know the exact sound FX and things like that. However the screen play was better for this because we could plan what each scene was going to look like and what type of lyrics we wanted to go with it. This beginning processes is always the longest part but something that needs to get done to make sure the video runs smoothly non the less. Next part was making the content for the video, this part is where we would put the main acts like the dance that was going to be preformed, some animation, and of course the song track. In my case the song was the biggest part since it was my job to get it done, but I helped out with filming and animation anyways. after about one week of creating this video, our teacher Ms. Maxwell looked over our video so that she could give advice that we could work on in the coming week, the only problem was that she said the dance did not fit the mood of the revolution at all, and this is something I had to agree with her on, but this dance made up 1/3 of our entire video so scrapping it left a big gape in our movie.
So here is my group, 24 hours until this video is done and we now only have under one minute of content and 2:54 of song that needs to be covered, so we decide to split the work between all of us. Anthony would be creating more lyrics, Kaia said she would do 20 animation, Rhiann said she would possible redo her rap piece so it wold be louder, and I would editing whatever they gave me and create some animations myself. Then four hours later I only had Anthony’s new lyrics which now matched the song much better than before, I was able to match the pictures with the new lyrics so it made sense. I also made some more animations for the kings escape, Louis Charles 17th in his tower, and some dates of which important things happened.
Then nothing else came through.
Kaia had sent some descriptions for the video very late so I did not get the chance to upload them until then next day, but nothing else for the video got to me, so I had to work with what we had. In total five hours of editing later the video was finally done.
Looking over this whole project I think that my group did a successful job at meeting due dates, using our given technology to the fullest potential, and not giving up when things did not work the way they were supposed to.
With that I will conclude this post.
That’s all for now.