With the speed that school is moving at I’m going to be writing a lot more blogs, like this one. I’ve never written a half-way blog before so I’m going to try my best. This week we’ve already completed half of a project which may not seem like a lot but let me tell you everything we’ve done so far.. How do revolutions transform societies? That’s our driving question for our project. So to start answering this question we had to start with the basics. So what is a revolution?

Well now that you know what a revolution is let me introduce you to this awesome guy named Crane Brinton. Crane Brinton had this theory about revolutions, he said that evolutions were like a disease and that there are 4 stages to every revolution. I won’t go into detail about his theory but if you want to know more about it check it out here. Learning about his theory made revolutions make a lot more sense because now we had a general idea about what most revolutions were like. But something very important I learned during the lecture was how to take good notes. My notes in this project have been my saving grace, without my notes I would have fallen apart already. I find it very helpful to use blue text to make notes. I also find it helpful to start new lines often. I’ve never really had to write notes before, who knew in a lecture I would learn about something as simple as taking notes. Here’s what my notes look like:

This is a really helpful skill for the future too so I’m really glad we learnt how to do it properly. 

For the first milestone, we were asked to represent this theory of revolutions with a simple machine, video and paragraph… in two days. My group came up with a plan really quickly and we all agreed on metaphors to use for our machine really easily and we were all contributing really good ideas so by the time we left school we all felt good about building the machine the next day. However when we got to school the next day we realized that not everyone knew what they had to bring so we were missing some stuff. They the rest of the day didn’t go well because we did not manage our time well. In the end, I was happy with how our video turned out with the amount of video we got (close to none). Here’s our video:

 But let me tell you what I learned in our *almost failure. I learned how useful storyboarding is. Now I know the teachers are always telling us how helpful they are but some things you have to learn for yourself. But it helped me because even if our machine didn’t work at least we could get enough shots to make it follow a story. For our second mod of the machine, I made the storyboard and I enjoyed it because I could plan the video very clearly to demonstrate certain important aspects like our metaphors. Here’s what our storyboard looked like:

Another thing I learned is that I work most effectively when I have a very clear schedule with tight time frames, which I why when I work individually I procrastinate way too much. Because when you are in a group the people in your group are almost like your accountability partners.

Something that helped me in this project was a stepping stone. In this stepping stone, we had to watch a children’s video about camera angles and we had to take notes on it. This video had some really helpful information that I think helped me storyboard. Here’s the video:

Before we could continue our project we had to learn about the American Revolution. We did have a lecture where we took notes but something that helped me again was a children’s video. It was just a simple animated song video but it had a lot of information in a short time. It was also as I said a one which is helpful for me because I’m good at remembering music so it was easy for me to pick up. 

The second mod of our machine had to represent the American revolution. Our group was more prepared this time with supplies and filming. We also had more realistic expectations of what we could build. Our second machine turned out better then I thought, for the most part, we had pretty good time management. And we showed good metaphors through a simple machine and I was really proud of my group for pulling it off. Also when we did the second mod everyone was more clear with what we were doing. When filming time came around we brought the storyboard over so we could see the shots we had planned out earlier. We also did more art to represent the revolution instead of more complicated machined. This was a really good decision because it saved us a lot of time and stress. It also made our machine LOOK good. Here’s our video:

Now I’m off to finish Milestone 2…….see you at the end of the project!

– PLP has felt like a marathon that you have to sprint the whole way.

    -nyajs