We have been doing this metaphor machine Blogpost for the whole school year so far and it’s finally coming to an end. In this Blogpost I’m going to go through everything we’ve done from beginning to end and show you some of the work we’ve done. When we first started this project Ms. Willemse gave us some different countries to chose from that had a revolution in their countries history. My group wanted to do the Russian revolution but we couldn’t name any facts on the revolution so we lost that round. Oh well, maybe next time. Anyway we then got the Easter rising also known as the Irish revolution. I think we had more fun with this one and better time learning so I’m happy we got this one.

The first thing we had to do in this project was create a timeline explaining everything that happened in Ireland during the revolution. This gave us a better understanding of our revolution and what happened during the time. It made it much easier to come up with metaphor a design for our final product. On the timeline there were three parts to it, an actual timeline of our revolution, a line where we would put metaphors for our machine and line on how the revolution relates to Crane Brinton’s theory. I’ll link a Blogpost to his theory here. It took a lot of research to get all of our facts straight and we wrote down plenty of things that didn’t happen during our revolution. But finally we got it right and it was time to move on to our second line which were the metaphors. We came up with some pretty corny stuff like how an egg breaking would represent the economy braking. Eggconamy, get it ha….. well we thought it was funny. Anyway we came up with some ones that we could actually use like potatoes to represent the great flame which was a disease at the time. This was the event theta kickstarted the whole revolution and is probably the most important part. I’ll link a post here so you can learn more about it.
Finally was does it relate to Crane Brinton’s theory? We found this to be true as it followed his theory nearly to the letter. The only thing that we found didn’t match his theory was part of the third stage. In his theory the radicals gained control of the government of a short while, but what actually happened was they lost the battle and loads of people got executed. I know it’s pretty different but everything else was the same. All this also had to be a part of our video which I will explain in a moment. That was the whole timeline and it took us a whale to do it but over all it greatly helped with our project.

After the timeline it was time to start designing the our machine. We didn’t really know what we wanted at first so we brainstormed a couple of ideas. We then used some of our metaphors that we had created previously to design our machine. We found this to be a much easier way and we quickly came up with design of our machine. We were always adding some small things to make it better and more meaningful, like adding a extra pipe or chasing the direction of the potatoes. All of these minor tweaks overall gave us a better representation of the revolution. Then came the building stage. It took us a while to get all of the materials we needed to start building. We started off swaying some pipes that we would use as the pathways for the potatoes. We then had to glue them to to the backboard which we had sawed to a perfect length. We didn’t know if glueing would be enough so we nailed them in for safe measure. There were other things we added like lights, a funnel and a statue to represent all different things and finally we were satisfied enough with what we had done. But then came the real test, does it actually work.
As you can see it does work and it does that about 85% of the time which we think is pretty good. When we were making the final few tweaks on our machine it was time to start making the video which we would use to explain everything about our project. And some of the slides we used the app Explain Everything, ha another good pun…… I hope. In this video we explain the working of our machine, how it relates to Crane Brinton’s theory, what the metaphors are and what they mean, the whole process of creating the machine and the steampunk aesthetic. If you don’t know what steampunk is I’ll link a Blogpost here that I did on it. Anyways back to the video. The first thing our group did on the video was make a layout of what we were going to put in the video and in what order. We then decided to make a couple different scripts describing different parts of the project. For example we have one explaining the revolution and what happened in it and one explaining the metaphors of our machine. We have some more but I’ll stop writing now and you can look at the video for yourself.
We tried to cram as much information in there as possible and we think we did a pretty okay job of it. This as a really long project to start off the year and I had a lot of fun with it, building, filming and writing are things I all love doing so I was happy that we did this start off the year. I also learned a lot about Ireland and its history and even more countries by watching all the presentations and iMovies in class so overall I liked this project a lot and I can’t wait to see what we are going to do in the rest of term.