Project Frankenstuffie

“May chaos always keep us on our paws, for adventure is life’s greatest adventure” -Tiny Bear

Frankenstuffie, a project where you take the normal, mess up some science and make a normal world abnormal. Flying bears and bears with moose antlers, the world turns crazy. Allow me to explain~

Project Frankenstuffie is a project where you take a region of Canada (eg. The Canadian Shield) and you choose an animal that lives there (eg. A bear), you choose a cycle (eg. Water Cycle) to mess up (eg. Flood everything because water doesn’t condensate properly) and have the animal adapt over time to its surrounding it, making it have features like other animals (eg. A bear that grows wings and a beaver tail). Then, you make a video. Well, many versions of a video until you have a final copy and an amazing video. Using green screen, stuffies, and animation, you create a video telling the story of your Frankenstuffie animal, the story of before the world changes and after it adapts.

All those examples are what I did for mine.

The overview of my story–

My bear wakes up one day, and finds himself in Wabakimi Provincial Park. He is in an examining room, but the people examining him decide to send him into the woods to survive on his own.
He doesnt understand how he got there but he decides to leave that question for another day.
He finds a place to sleep and eventually finds a place to hibernate for the winter.
When he wakes up, he finds that there is a mess up in the water cycle and everything is flooded. He falls into a river and almost drowns, but manages to survive. Over the next few weeks he grows wings and beaver tail that helps him survive in the muddy, wet new world he lives in. It skips to a year later and he has a family and him and his family are moving from place to place managing to survive. The story skips to a few years later where him and his family (including grandkids now) head towards a meeting site for bears where they go when summer is over and it’s time to start the journey of the rest of the year surviving the crazy rain. When he arrives he finds that it is the place he started his journey and finds his original hibernation cave, hits his head and has the memory of how he arrived at Wabakimi. He wakes up with closure and heads back to his family, ready to start another year.

 

Draft 1–

Well to start off, part of this video was missing. The first scene of the video wasnt filmed fr my first draft!

And then there was the voices. I didn’t know what else to do! I fixed it eventually…

The feedback I got for my first draft was as follows:

 

Draft 2–

I added the first scene! I didn’t fix the voices though… oops. I shortened the video a bit, most noticeably the drowning scene was shortened. I also fixed the animation part that wasn’t working.

My excuses/explanations and critique was as follows:

 

Draft 3–

I fixed TBs voice! Thanks Jessie for doing his voice! I also fixed the voice of the news reporter by taking the extremely deafening filter of megaphone off and switching it with a filter that made it sound WAY better! I removed the rest of the cartoon bear parts that were telling what he was doing at the time, and instead made the animation specifically for flashbacks and talking about the water cycle. I also removed The Rude Lady Bear who was great in the script, but didn’t make as much sense in the video and was just extra time on an already too long video.

Explination:

 

The Second Half–

So those videos were actually just the first part of the video. There were two parts. I was lucky with my second half and was proud of it and happy with it on the first draft!

There was an issue when making this half where iMovie decided to move ALL of my audio to the beginning of the video. So there I was, so close to finishing the video, and iMovie made it so that I had to spend half an hour to 45 minutes fixing the audio. I also had to remove all of the music from the video, save the video, add it to a new iMovie and then add the music on top. WHYYYYYYY DOES iMOVIE HATE MEEEEEE?!!!

I was quite proud of this video as soon as I was done with it and I knew it was the better half of the video right away (Im still proud of my other half of course but this half was just easy right away and I liked it as as soon as it was done).

 

The Finished Product–

I watched through this video and was like “yes, this is the best I could do on this video. Its fabulous as I can make it! Cool”.

It was weeks of work with dragging a bear stuffy across a green screen and a green sheet (my substitute green screen at home), recording voice over, animating and creating background music put together into greatness.

And thats not even including studying the Canadian Shield, writing the script, revising the script, making the story board.

This was a crazy project but in the end there have been some AWESOME outcomes and some great videos.

 

What I would do differently–

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA there are things I knew I would’ve done differently from the beginning! And I knew it as soon as I thought back to it.

1.) Filming. While the filming was good, I just know that I could’ve been more organized when I was recording the video. Like there is the flashback scene at the end of the video that I had to use Explain Everything to make because I forgot to film it before I sewed and changed my bear for the second half of the video. I was filming as I went- meaning, scene by scene from the story board, and since that scene was at the end, I missed it.

2.) The Voice Over. I did a lot of voice over I couldn’t end up using and I could’ve used that time to be doing something better for my video. And example would be, all of Tiny Bears lines. I originally recorded them and filtered them not to sound like me, but I couldn’t use that in the final copy and ended up having Jessie re-record all of his lines.

3.) The Animation. I originally had animation showing some of the things that TB was doing at the time but I was told that was unusable. Meaning that some of the time I spent making those unusable animations could have been used to film the video itself. Live and learn I guess. Although I should have known that using the same animation as the Water Cycle explanation for showing what TB was doing wouldn’t be usable in the video.

 

There are more, like things about the script, pre-recording and things like that that I coud list but that would create a big wall of text and no one really wants to read that much about whats not good about my video so… I’ll save you the reading!

 

Shout outs to:

Melanie– for letting me use Humphrey for Rude Lady Bear and critique

Luca OG– for critique

Daniel– for critique

Ms. Maxwell– for teaching us this unit and critique

Jessie– For voicing Tiny Bear

 

 

 

That was the Frankenstuffie project!
Thanks for reading!