We made it! It is officially winter break, and we have finished our last project of 2020. This will be my second post on it, you can read the first here. The driving question for this project was, How do revolutions transform the world? Now that we have fished the project my understanding of the question and the answer should be more developed.

 

Revolutions cause major change in a society. This can have an impact on places around the world. Whether the impact is small and stays nearer, or reaches farther destinations, it will always cause change. When one society has a Revolution, the ideas that sparked it never stay still, ideas are constantly spreading. People would pass on the information they received, it would travel through trade, and when transportation became bigger, through immigration. These ideas and stories of a country that had been through a revolution, stuck with a lot of people. As they grew tired or were upset at the way their society was run, these ideas came back to them, and it would start spreading within their society even more. It starts with one revolution within a society, the thoughts and ideas behind the revolution will always travel and spread, causing more people to take action or want change in their own society. Revolutions transform the world by spreading ideas that alter a country’s, social, economic, and political structure.

I think my understanding of the driving question has grown. I now fully understand how the revolution effected the world, and the smaller details that contribute to that. As well as answering this question, we also made a video based on our short story.

 

This past week was all about planning and creating the movie. We started off with a screenplay, this let us write down everything that is going on in our film. A screenplay has a very specific format, and something we all had to learn. I found it really interesting to learn all the different ways sound and picture were represented, then thinking how I could apply it to my own film. I really liked that I got to write down all my ideas, and have one document where they were all combined. When I started, I sometimes found it difficult to chose how I wanted my film to be shown. This was the first time I was thinking in how I wanted to take my written story, and create a visual out of it. In my story I didn’t have a lot of dialogue, it focused more on describing the surroundings. At first I thought I could try and make a silent film, but as I thought more on how I could do that, I realized to get my point across I was going to need some dialogue to help make it clear.

 

There were a lot of points in my story that were confusing and difficult to understand. All of it made sense to me, and if I explained it to someone it was easier for them to understand. I needed to take the explanation and turn it into narration and character dialogue. This was one of the first things I did while planning my film, writing dialogue that was clear, understandable, allowed my message to come across, and showed some significance of the Industrial Revolution. When I finished this I moved on to the visual aspect of the film. I knew this was going to be harder to actually create, but because in my story I wrote descriptive scenes, it was easier for me to imagine what I wanted everything to look like.

As I moved into making the storyboard, everything got more detailed. The drawings had colour and multiple angles in one scene, I added more description on sound, and if there was going to be background noise. I was personally surprised at how easy this was for me, a lot of the time it takes me a while to decide how I want to make/create/build things. This time it all just came out at once. I think it really helped that I wrote the short story first, while I was writing I would picture the scene my character was in and would think about smaller details. A lot of the time I would do this without realizing. So as I was drawing a rough sketch on what the scene would look like I didn’t have to pause and think, I already knew what I wanted.

 

We now hade two days to actually create our film! This was a very short amount of time, and I honestly had no idea where to start. While I was planning I knew I wanted to use as many different tools and apps as possible. I was thinking I would take a photo of my stuffy and edit it to move around on backgrounds I had drawn. This was a lot more work than I thought it would be, and I wasn’t even close to being finished on time. I kept working and as I was going I tried out different apps to see what worked better. I found one app that I had never really known how to use and actually had a lot of fun using it. The app is called superimposeX, and is an app used for photoshop. I found it was really helpful when I wanted my stuffy in the background and something else in the foreground moving.

During the process of making this film, I really learned about all the different steps that go into making a film. In previous projects I was working in a group where we would split up the work, this time it was all me. I learned how to take a topic, such as the Industrial Revolution, and put a creative twist on it. Taking facts form the Industrial Revolution and integrating them into a fictional story. This was something I found more difficult, as I wanted to write a lot more creatively, but as we worked on this skill I think I have gotten a lot better at it. This project was a great step in film making, teaching us how to make the decisions on our own, and put our own time and effort into everything.

 

“If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.”

-Stanley Kubrick