The Industrial revolution… and plushies?

Sources: the industrial revolution explained

Hello! I’m Simon, welcome to my blog post. As of writing this, I’m on winter break, which is very exciting! Today, I’ll be reviewing my learning from my most recent project called “Rise of the Frankenstuffies.” This was one of my favorite projects that we’ve done to date and I really enjoyed it. Today, I’m going to be telling you the story of this project and I’ll be reflecting on my learning throughout. Let’s start.

The story of this project

The story of this project started November 18th. We had just finished up a project, which you can read about here and we’d been given a strange set of instructions; I quote “Bring one to three stuffed animals or old dog toys and a pair of scissors for Monday.” Probably the weirdest homework my class had ever been given, but Monday 18th we were there in class, each student carrying some stuffed figure. We learnt that for our new project we were going to cut apart our stuffed animals and sow them back together using different parts from different stuffies, thus transforming them into “frankenstuffies”. Once we finished sowing our creations together, we had to create a dossier on them. This described their dimensions, relationships, quirks and other important details to bring our character to life. The reason all of this was necessary is because we were going to build a story, and our frankenstuffies would be the protagonist. Our story also had to tie into the Industrial Revolution. We had to use our story to answer the question at the center of our project; How do revolutions transform the world. Well, I’ll answer that right now. Revolutions transform by changing the balance of power for different countries, which then affects the world when they expand their territory. They transform the world by affecting the distribution of wealth and ideas as well as trade agreements. Without them, we wouldn’t have some of the ideas we have today, such as the idea that “All men are created equal. We hold these ideas to be self evident.” They have also affected our social structure and how our government is organized. They impacted the spread of people, such as the french nobles who immigrated to other countries to escape the revolution.

After we created our character dossier, we wrote a short story of our character during the industrial revolution. This helped us to learn on how to apply a scenario to our character and adapt, as well as how to build and create text. We also learnt how to show our character changing throughout our story. Our next task was adapting our story to film. We planed out our story spines and changed our story, or the sections we showed. I had to change my story and what part of it I was showing. Without that, the film I created would have been to long and too complicated. This task taught us how to decide what was important and what wasn’t, as well as how to highlight the interesting parts of our story. It taught us how to analyze and evaluate our own work. Our final task was recording and editing our film. You can watch mine here! I had to adapt to the situation, since my original plan for filming wasn’t going to work. I had to edit my script on the fly for it to seem natural and smooth. Overall, this project has taught me how to design and build stories, how to highlight my work and how to incorporate the setting, time period and themes into a story.