Want to hear a metaphor for the British government in 1920? Potatoes and PVC pipes! Okay, but really, that is basically my groups metaphor machine. What is a metaphor machine, you ask? If you’ve come from my last post, you may know, but either way keep reading and you’ll hear the whole scoop.
To begin the exciting journey of Flight 9 at the beginning of the year, Mrs. Willemse presented the Metaphor Machine project to us. We had to create a Rube Goldberg machine that followed a steampunk aesthetic. The driving question of this project was “How Does One Idea Drive Change?” We were assigned groups (as per usual…) and given a revolution to research. The revolution would be the backbone of that whole “idea driving change” thing.
My group was Micheal, Aiden and William. We got to research and base our machine around the Irish Revolution (or the Easter Revolution, either works.)
The Easter Revolution was the cause of the independent State of Ireland being formed. The Irish were fed up with the British government because of their lack of leadership skills, and their selfishness. A disease called the Great Famine is what really kick started this uproar. The Great Famine was a deadly crop disease that killed over half of the crops in Britain. Farmer’s crops were wiped out leaving them poor, and citizens had no source of food to thrive off of, leaving them starved and sick. The government saw this happening and didn’t take action, they decided that they had their own riches and the poverty wasn’t a cause for concern. This made the citizens really angry, but it wasn’t until the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was formed that action took place. The IRB was an anti government group that believed that Ireland deserved to be its own independent state.
Over time, more and more people joined anti government groups and protested the government, trying to get their point of view into perspective. Eventually, they took the situation to war, which ended brutally with the leaders of the rebellions being executed.
Even though it was a bloody and gruesome war, it only lasted five days, passing over Easter, which is how the revolution got its name! Following the war, the battle overall was resolved when the British government signed the treaty determining Ireland to be its own independent state, which was the rebellion’s ultimate goal.
Once the war was done, the Irish built themselves back up. To pay respects to those who made their home a possibility and died in the process, they created and displayed statues in memory of the soliders.
Now that you have some background on the revolution, let’s take a look at the process of creating the machine. To begin, we had to create a timeline to show our understanding of the revolutions events, the metaphors we would use and Crane Brinton’s theory. My group actually ended up restarting ours, because we got off to a rocky start when it came to concentrating on our task. In the end, our timeline ended up being pretty good, with the exception of my laziness causing me to misspell a couple words which resulted in using a bunch of white out.
After we completed the timeline, we had to make a diagram of our machine. Our diagram didn’t end up turning into an exact reality, but it came close and it was quite pretty (props to me for being a perfectionist.) The lightbulb, for one example, was way too big and we ended up having to use little lights because of the voltage. Other than that, it ended up basically according to plan!
Finally, it was time to build. This was the most fun part because we were actually hands on with the project and we could be inventive and creative. We began with cutting the pipes up, then we moved onto making the base, and painting the little different pieces. It was difficult to cut the pipes because of how thick and tall they had to be to work with the machine, and when we drilled them onto the wood, they didn’t line up, but we ended fixing it later with plastic mesh so our rolling potatoes wouldn’t fall of the circuit!
As we built, we also had to work on a story board for our iMovie that would basically explain our projects story. The story board had different sections to fill out for each scene, like the dialogue, an image of the screen, FX, etc. This was a bit difficult because we all had different ideas about how we wanted the iMovie to look and be like, but we ended up compromising and put all our ideas together.
Without sugar coating anything I must say our first draft was rough. We still weren’t completely sure on our metaphors, the lights didn’t always work, and there was absolutely no steampunk aesthetic to our machine what so ever. Our video was all construction, no information on anything else, and there was APPLE. SIMPLE. DEFAULT. IMOVIE. MUSIC. Not cute, not cute at all.
For draft two, we actually painted the base which was extremely difficult because of the pipes I had to paint around, plus we couldn’t tilt the machine without risking breakage, so I had to paint it vertically and it sucked, enough said. Our video was a lot better, we actually had a voiceover and information on the revolution, and the machine looked a lot better.
Finally, our third and final draft is here and ready to rock. After two months of tears, we have a finished product that works. It’s a very simple machine, however, it has a pretty great story metaphorically. If you watch the iMovie below, you’ll be totally filled in on each part and how it works and why it’s there.
I think after every struggle and success my group went through, we have made a pretty good metaphor machine. Of course there’s always room for improvement, so I decided to recap what I think we could have done better.
First off, the steampunk aesthetic was very weak. My group didn’t focus much on it because we were so concerned about it just working. I think we needed to add some more steampunk aesthetics into the machine.
Second, I think we could’ve added more to the circuit aspect. Our machine is very quick, and if we added a couple other pathways or barriers it could’ve been more intriguing.
Lastly, I think we could’ve added more metaphors! Our machine would’ve been ten times better if we had a metaphor for basically everything. A better metaphor for the war other than the funnel could’ve represented it better.
Overall, I think my group ended up pulling ourselves together and we created a short but pretty neat metaphor machine! I learned so much about not only the revolution, but how to power through lots of failures and how to think outside of the box with making metaphors up, which I could see helping me in the future with my writing.
This machine is a first kiss, short and sweet, not the best or in first place, but overall you’ll never forget it. 😉
Until next time,
My Pretty Blog