Here we have a wild documentary

Internet!!!

I am back and better than ever.

 

Now I have a question for you “what does James Cameron’s fantasy world of avatar reveal about society today?”. It’s a big question but that’s what I set out to answer this project. So let’s look back on what we learned in the past few months.

So first of all I hadn’t watched avatar so I was very scared when I learned that’s what the project was about, but then we watched the movie over the next four classes. Once we had finished the film we analysed it and extracted different themes like racism and colonialism and oppression, but what I chose to work around was corporate greed. I thought it would be a relatively simple and easy topic to do until I realised I had no idea who to interview luckily my teacher suggested a good person (who later cancelled on me but hey we don’t talk about that) that I could interview. Oh yeah that bring me to my next topic.

We had to schedule an interview to put in our (drum roll please) documentaries! I know how is a random kid gonna make a whole (donkey) documentary, well it isn’t one of those hour long David Attenborough documentaries it’s only 3 to 5 minutes. So now you know my task, make a document on corporate greed in avatar right, wrong we also need to link corporate greed in avatar to the real world. But that’s about it. No more surprises I promise.

First up we made a sheet saying what we would do and where we would film but most importantly who we would interview. My first choice was somebody from the museum of anthropology however when that didn’t work I remembered that one of my friends mum is indigenous and unbeknownst to me is a professor of anthropology at Capilano university so that’s even better. This is good because many of my points linked avatar to being like the Europeans taking the land of the indigenous populations of Canada. 

To help with our films we learned about b-roll and storyboards. B-roll is basically footage you show in a video or film to help explain the topic or just make things more interesting, and a storyboard is a series of boxes that you draw in that tells the story in a more rough sense. This is what mine looked like although I kind of abandoned it because of its simplicity. 

B-roll is sort of background footage that relates to what’s happening in our film, it is often pastes over a video that has speech in it. An example of this could be an interview of somebody speaking about McDonald’s and then without them finishing their sentence you cut to a video of a McDonald’s restaurant while you can still hear their voice speaking about the topic. It is essentially a video with audio over the top.

Finally it was time to build our documentaries after (not so much) planning, a little bit too quiet documentary was produced. This is what came out of those stressful hours.

Isn’t it just beautifully scuffed. 

Anyway we aren’t finished yet, we have to do an EXHIBITION!!! Now for the new people of my blog an exhibition is a stressful time where family and friends come I to the school to view the entirety of PLP’s work. Now this was the grade 8’s first exhibition ever so we had to walk them through the process, luckily most of my grade 8’s wanted to do well however my other grade 9 was not very helpful in the planning so there was a lot of weight on my shoulders. Luckily for our group I had an lac block when the other grade nine class was talking with the grade eights so I was able to take charge and try and have our group do well. But there was one more surprise (sorry I lied about the no more surprises). I didn’t know it yet but we would have to be cooperating with grade 10’s that none of us knew (and if I’m being honest I was a little bit scared of) so when exhibition day came around it all went to (poop).

On exhibition day most of our stuff mage it but then our execution was a bit of a flop. The grade ten’s took charge and I didn’t know any of them so I was too scared to take charge and keep everything according to plan. We managed to cover most of our class room but the person who was supposed to make the board game didn’t have it, he apparently lost it and someone took it but I wasn’t buying it so we had a key part of our rooms missing and he wasn’t there for the exhibition so he wasn’t much help. Although with help of the teachers we had a somewhat adequate room that I was happy with. 

 

Now this blog is coming to an end and the driving question must be answered. So lets look back at what we set out to answer and that was “what does James Cameron’s fantasy world of avatar reveal about society today?”. Well I think that it read also how society is imperfect in many was that we must fix. We may not be able to make everything right in the little time we have but have to at least try, all these thing like global warming, deforestation even racism are things that we humans are causing while not all of us are doing these things we can still try to stop them. We can make a difference, we can fight off the bad guys of the real world and we can fix what’s wrong with our ways.

But I’m just a kid on the internet so what do I know.

BYEEEE!!!