Ahoy matey
We have finished another project! This project is called Argh Matey. It was a fairly short project that lasted only around two weeks, and I’m here to tell you all about it.
Argh Matey was all about the Age of Exploration, and of course pirates. We started off the project by watching the movie, Captain Philips. Captain Philips is a movie based off real events, and tells the story of modern day pirates, who pirated and took hostage of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama.
If you want to learn more about the Maersk Alabama and the event that the movie was based on, you can read more Here.
After the launch, we started work on learning about Cause and Consequence. Cause and Consequence is a way of thinking that some historians use to figure out what happened in the past. In a simple Cause and Consequence chart, there are typically five different events. The underlying cause, the immediate cause, the actual event, the immediate consequence, and finally the long term consequence. The hardest part of Cause and Consequence is figuring out where each event goes on the chart.
For example, If somebody fell into a pool, the event would be falling into a pool. That’s pretty simple, but then what’s the immediate cause, or the long term consequence? The immediate cause might be that someone pushed him, while the long term consequence could be that the person is now wet. With simple examples like this, figuring out where each event goes isn’t that hard, but once you started doing more complex events, it can get quite confusing.
For milestone 1, we were also introduced to a new app called AR Makr. AR Makr is an app that lets you create scenes in Augmented Reality. It actually works better then I expected, with the ability to create 3D scenes that you could walk through and around, an aspect that I tried to use as much as possible in the final project.
Our first real attempt at using Cause and Consequence and Ar Makr was when we were tasked with making a short film in AR Makr that follows the Cause and Consequence event line. I made my main event a tsunami that destroys a city, and the Causes and Consequences of that. The video turned out okay, but the scene that I made didn’t include any reality parts which I would change for the next video.
Now the main bulk of this project was learning about the Age of exploration. I took a lot of notes, which actually seemed to have helped, as I aced the online quiz. (Totally not bragging)
After learning all about the Age of exploration, (and a few bad pirate jokes), we started writing our script of Cause and Consequence all about the age of Exploration.
I quite like my script, and think it covers the main points that we learned about. Although, like I talked about earlier, because the overall subject is a bit more complex, finding the right events for each part was pretty challenging, and one of the harder parts that I struggled on.
You can see my final script here: Age of exploration Script
Finally, we took our script, AR Makr, and our drawing skills to make a video covering all of our learning. You can watch my video here 👇.
Like I said earlier, something I tried to do in the video was to use as much movement as possible. I’m quite proud of some of the camera movements and the blending of reality with the virtual parts. For example, I put a AR boat in a puddle of water, put an AR sign on top of a small rock to symbolize America, and moved the camera through a virtual sugar cane field.
In the end I think my video turned out pretty good. I think it could use a lot of polishing, as there ended up being a slight time crunch with all the other stuff going on. Now the driving question if you forgot was “What was the impact of global exploration?” Global exploration, impacted basically everything, and greatly shaped the world moving forward. For one, the exploration lead to the “discovery” of the new world, otherwise know as the Americas, which is now home to 10% of all humans on earth (Including me🙂) Global exploration also kicked off the Columbia Exchange which led to all kinds of food, animals and diseases being traded across continents. Did you know that we wouldn’t have apples, carrots, or beef if they weren’t traded in the exchange. Grocery stores would be a lot smaller. Quite the bummer, (except for the carrots, they can leave.) The world would be a very different place if people didn’t start exploring.
Anyways, thats it for Argh Matey. I had quite a lot of fun, and I hope you learned something new.
See you next time,
Nolan
Actually there is one more thing, we all got Pirate Packs from White-spot! I got a little burger and some chocolate ice cream, although it was interesting seeing how pirates have been so commercialized after learning about how ruthless they are. It’s funny how it can go from pirates being kidnappers, thefts, fighting each other to the death, to children’s toys just with different branding.