This was the most recent project we have done in humanities this year. One of our main focus Our main focus in this project has been communication though story telling. We did a lot of reading, creative righting and we even created our Frankensuffie by hand.

To start off, we read a Novel by Scott Westerfield called Leviathan. We read it mostly outside of school for around three weeks. Every week we had to answer a quiz in different formats each time. This taught me to comprehend the reading material better. At first, I was really lost in the book and couldn’t understand and follow any of it, but then I started writing summaries for every chapter and I began to understand it a lot more clearly. 

While we where reading the book we also made frankenstuffies. Each student brought 1-3 stuffs of their own to school and then we traded. Each Frankenstuffie had to be a cross between three or more stuffies. Mine was sewed from a Pandas head, a Pigs body and a Dogs tail. This was my favourite part of the whole project.

The original stuffies:

My new creation:

Then, I practiced my creative writing and formed a story to go with my Frankensuffie. 

My story:

From here, we began the process of making a short 2-3 minute movie. We started by creating a storyboard like every other story we make into a movie. This part was challenging because I had to really think of the most important scenes to add in. 

My storyboard:

After I felt like we had a strong outline, I started learning about some different videoing techniques and ideas to film with. I chose to use the app Keynote. With Keynote you can add photos and backgrounds, you can erase backgrounds of photos and you can even add actions to your characters. I found this app worked best for me because I was already familiar with it. I began finding backgrounds from Ai image generators, Safari, Google and some I made myself. Then I just added the characters, gave them actions, added speech bubble and then all that was left to do was add a voice over and then edit it.

Here is my finished video:

From this project, I learned how to communicate across different forms of media and convey my message purposefully, engagingly, and effectively. Over all, I really enjoyed this project because it helped my improve on many new skills including; editing, filming, sewing, creative writing and most importantly it helped me answer the driving question. “How do we as writers make our message clear and engaging to an audience?”

My answer to that is:

We should use simple and concise language to avoid confusion. It’s also important to organize our thoughts and ideas in a logical order. Adding some storytelling elements or examples can make our message more interesting. And of course, don’t forget to consider the audience’s perspective to make the story more relatable.

Click here to give a response and engage with the film.

Thank you!