During the first week of school, our class took a 2 day-1 night trip to Camp Capilano, which is a cabin with a pool in North Vancouver. Before the trip we didn’t really know what was going to happen at the camp but we were only told that we would be staying up late and doing projects. This made me a little nervous about what we would be doing as it wasn’t even until the night before leaving that we were told what we needed to bring.
Camp Capilano
Prior to leaving for camp on the first morning, we watched a video at school that our teacher had put together consisting of different reality show intros. We then had to write down the characteristics of one person or team on one of the reality shows that caught our attention. I chose Sam and Paul who were on the Amazing Race Canada. From the short 2-second clip of them in the intro, I wrote down some characteristics:
They are both very Athletic and play volleyball.
Participate on the amazing race Canada meaning they need to be fit and have good endurance.
They are committed to sports and experience in volleyball.
They are playing beach volleyball which is 2 people per side which probably means they have a lot of trust in each other.
After discussing how people are portrayed in these very short intros, we then got assigned our first assignment, which was to create our own reality show intro in groups. To complete this assignment we left for Camp Capilano with a stop at a park along the way where we would be filming these reality show intros. We were then split into groups and given an hour total to create this video with ten characters that were easy for people to identify who they were, without talking in the video. During the creation of the video it took us a while to think of the characters to portray as well as what type of reality TV show to make up. But once we came up with an idea we got going pretty quickly and filmed all the different characters. We called our video the Brosef Bunch and all of our characters names started with B.
Some Of the characters included:
drama queen
Shy
Fashion diva
Nature enthusiast
Athlete
Artists
Children
Here is our video:
After creating this video, my group realized that we could have used our time more effectively by splitting up the jobs. Towards the end of the video, we were pressed for time, didn’t get the best audio and some editing was a little rushed. To solve this problem, we could have split up the jobs – maybe had a couple people working on the video while others worked on the audio and some others doing the editing to make production smooth and less rushed.
When we finished completing this project, we left for Camp Capilano. Here we started our second project which was a little different than the first camp project (which was similar to last year when we focused on video projects). This new project was all about audio and voice recording to tell a story (which is actually what we are going to be focusing on this year). The project consisted of coming up with a story with 10 different characters and making sure that their characteristics are visibly different from the other characters.
Photo of where we were filming during our first video.
After our last project, we knew we had to use the time given more effectively as this project was given the same 1 hour-time limit as the last one. We came up with a plan to work efficiently and effectively and decided on the roles evenly. For this audio project, we did a recording about a family called the Bakers with 10 family members. Here’s what we came up with:
After finishing this project with more time, I think we could have made this video more engaging by possibly adding in more funny moments but overall I’m proud of what my group accomplished with this audio recording.
Following the audio project, we were then able to take a break; play some basketball as well as swim in the pool and relax. This was a lot of fun and it was good to have some cool down time from doing projects with a time crunch.
After this break and dinner, we went to work on our final project, which was in smaller groups of two or three. The goal was to create a four-minute podcast about identity. We had until the folllowing morning to complete the project and we would stay up as late as we needed to, to make sure it was a great podcast.
The challenging part about this project was to come up with a story to tell that isn’t too broad of a subject but can be still talked about for four minutes without becoming boring. For my group, we had multiple ideas about friends, family and ourselves but the story we ended up sticking with was Izzy (one of my group members) moving from England to Vancouver and how that changed her identity.
We came up with the story idea now it was just about finding a way to tell it. At first, we decided it would it would be a good idea to make the podcast into an interview. So we wrote the script, recorded the whole podcast and thought it was pretty good so decided that it was the right time to get feedback from the teachers. After talking with the teachers, we received constructive feedback about what to improve and then changed it from the interview for Izzy telling her story. (If you don’t already know feedback and constructive feedback is a big part of PLP and is always a learning process with projects.) We then wrote another script, recorded the audio again and put the clips together. However, when we did this the video was way too short and not very engaging for the audience so we decided we needed some other opinions. To get these opinions we then asked questions to some of our friends who knew Izzy when she first moved. We then added in pauses between certain sentences to make the audio not so mashed together, as well as adding in some music. Finally we did quite a bit of editing and we were done.
Here is our final draft of the podcast:
When the time of completion was up after listening to the recording out loud on the speaker, what I probably would have changed is the music as it cut off at a weird time as well as was very repetitive. Also, if we had more time we might have scripted more of a story as sometimes we just have random people talking. If we integrated the people into places where that made sense it would be have been better.
Overall this was a very fun experience with making funny and entertaining video projects. It was cool to see what groups came up with. As well it really kicked me back into school mode and made us really need to use our time effectively and efficiently as a group.