“What draws us to Imaginary Worlds?”

Since the beginning of this year (in January) our class has been working on a unit based around one question “What Draws us to Imaginary Worlds?” With this question, we learned about how wonder sparks a person’s curiosity and creativity. It is often interpreted as a thing that only children do but it’s not, it is what makes the world go round. We then learned about fantasy such as in novels and how authors bring the imaginary world to life as in Alice in Wonderland . During these first few weeks of starting this unit we read this book and learned about how Lewis Carroll creates the childish personality of Alice going through Wonderland.

Shortly after we started the new unit, we began a project called the Fantasy Video project that was the basis of our entire field study to Florida. We based the question “What Draws us to Imaginary Worlds?” around one ride we chose located at one of the four parks at Disney World. I decided to choose ‘Soarin’ around the World’ which is located in Epcot. Throughout the process of creating the video, we started off by writing down what draws people to our ride and how it creates a magical experience.

I decided to mainly talk about how ‘Soarin’ is a fully immersive experience that engages all five senses. After brainstorming and researching about our ride, we then created a story outline for our video showing what we were going to show and talk about in our videos. We planned the video starting with an exposition, then a rising action context, followed by a rising action scope, after that a climax, a falling action and finally an impact.
Here is the story outline I created:

After this, we then took all the plans for our video and made a storyboard. This outlined each clip of the video as well as show all the different pictures and videos we would be taking on our Florida field study. It also showed what happens throughout the movie including audio and sound effects. My storyboard ended up being 6 pages long when creating and editing my first draft which made the video much too long. We made these storyboards right before we left on our trip to Florida and they were an essential part of making the video.
Here is my storyboard:

When making the storyboard, I needed to add some details to the audio so I wrote up an outline of what I would say for my script. This is the audio outline I created:

Following the creation of the storyboard and planning for the video, we left for Florida where we would be visiting all four Disney parks and filming our ride. This was very exciting as it was our first big excursion on a plane as a class. The plane ride took around six hours in total to arrive in Orlando, Florida ( if you would like to read more about the Florida trip then click my blog post here.) The nine days were filled with fun activities including visiting the Disney parks, Universal studios, getting surfing lessons and were an experience of a lifetime. I took so many great photos that would be used for the video as well as documenting this amazing experience. Also, one of the requirements for the video included interviewing a few individuals who were visiting or working at the park. These interviews were to be added to our videos to enhance the reasoning why the ride we chose draws people in.

When we returned back to school from our field study, we started on the first draft of our video using the clips we filmed. The one problem with my ride was that I wasn’t allowed to video or take any images throughout the ride so I didn’t have many images of the actual ride except for the ones I found online. However, I managed with the images and videos of the park as well as different photos I found. After writing a script and recording the audio, I came up with my first draft.
First draft:

After handing in my first draft and getting some feedback, I cut out some parts of the videos to make it shorter as well as recording some of the audio another time to make it more clear. I also cut down the interview.

Here is my second draft:

When I got feedback this second time, I cut down my video by a lot as it was way too long. I also incorporated the interviews into different parts of the videos to help relay different points I was trying to make as to why ‘Soarin’ is such an engaging ride.

Here is my third draft:

Finally, we were working on our final edits for our video. The feedback I received suggested to add music to the start of the video, shorten unnecessary parts as well as introducing the interviewer within the video. I made these changes for the final draft of my video.

Here is my final draft:

(will be uploaded soon)

This was a fun project to do and gave us the opportunity to show our creativity in our videos as well as show “What Draws people to our ride?”. Although this project took quite a long time to finish I am very happy with the final results and I am definitely looking forward to using y video making skills in the future within different projects and work.