Hey people!

In this blog I will be going over the project I have been doing for the last month.  I hope you enjoy!

What is the Renaissance and what were you learning?

I have been learning about the Renaissance, a time period around the 14th to 15th century.  More specifically, the innovations and innovators that were during that time period.  It was a time of prosperity and novel ideas.  Some things that were invented/painted were the Mona Lisa, printing press and musket.

What is a triptych????

For our final projects, we had to create triptychs.  What are triptychs?  Triptychs are images/paintings showing 3 different panels each one usually having a meaning behind it.

The first thing we did was to research multiple different topics from the Renaissance.  We were assigned to write a paragraph on a chosen subject and explain why it was significant.  I chose human anatomy because it helped progress art and medicine.  Here is the paragraph I wrote:

In this paragraph, I have learnt about various renaissance topics and I deem that human anatomy was a significant and key point in history because of it’s effects and consequences.  Human anatomy allowed us to further improve our medical abilities, doing surgery without knowing what the human’s structure is very challenging.  Not only that, it also made art a lot more easier and prettier. During the medieval times, drawings of humans use to be inaccurate and was not proportional, however, during the renaissance the drawings of humans became a lot more realistic because of their understanding of human anatomy.  I think that these reasons explains why I think that human anatomy was very significant.

Not only that, we also learnt how to use SuperimposeX proficiently.  During our time in Loon Lake, we were taught how to use Super Impose by Mr Harris.  We then demonstrated our knowledge by combing two different images.  Here is my creation:

For our final triptych, we had to research four different subjects, one innovator, one innovation, one artwork and one societal change.  The innovator and artwork had to be on the right panel whilst the innovation and societal change is on the left.  Within the middle of the triptych is a photo/memoji that shows how it affected modern day society.  I chose the musket, Galileo, the rise of currency and the Mona Lisa.

My innovation – The Musket

On top of making a triptych, I had to make a paragraph explaining the significance of one of my topics – the rise of capitalism. I have researched multiple different topics and I believe that the rise of capitalism was one of the most historically significant changes in society because of it’s uses in modern day society. What is capitalism? Capitalism is an economic system where things are privately owned instead of the state owning everything. Not only is it one of the most used economic system in modern day society, rivalled by communism, it gave people the freedom to choose what they would like to buy instead of always getting the same item. Not only that, it motivates people to work hard and try to innovate new things to create money.   However, some negatives that capitalism had lead to was inequality and poverty.  The people who do not have any money due to low wages have to live on the streets whilst the rich people could live in lavish mansions. If a company got to powerful they could also challenge the authority of the states government. An example of this happening was when the Medici family managed to take over Florence.  They were famous wool/ silk traders and bankers who was one of the richest families of Italy.  Through there wealth, they conquered other states or allied with them.  People will also get jealous of one another and might try sabotage them. These reasons I have stated in this paragraph explains why I believe capitalism was is significant.  

Sources of my information:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

Advantages of Capitalism

Thanks for reading!

-Chris

Hello people!

For the last project in the semester for Humanities, I have been working on a poetry unit.  I had to create different types of poems (such as simile poems and haikus) that related to my worldview.

Driving question:

How might I construct text that shows who I am right now?

The first poem that we created was a simile poem.  Simile poems are poems that compare your worldview to something different (uses like and as).  We also had to rhyme the 2nd and 4th line in every verse. (E.G: The runner was as fast as lighting.)  Here is my poem:

The Different Layers

Life has many different layers, like an onion,

Some parts are like a butterfly, bright and nice,

Whilst others are like a moth, dull and grey,

Life is like a bullet, fast and concise.

It can also be as unpredictable as the weather,

At times, it can be as challenging as a duel,

And can also be as fragile and fleeting as ice,

So you should protect like it is as precious as a jewel.

And when you feel it slipping away like sand,

You will look back into the past like your elderly grandpa,

And remember all the memories you made that are beautiful and grand.

The next poem that we had to create was a metaphor poem.  Similar to simile poems, a metaphor poem is a poem that compares my worldview with something else (uses is).  Here is my metaphor poem:

Life is a Concerto

When a concerto starts, it can begin with a booming roar or a soft whisper,

Either way it is the start of something surprising and new; it is the creation of life,

And when it starts, it doesn’t stop, it is a stampede of elephants, mighty and unstoppable,

The notes are your friends, harmonious and rarely full of strife

A concerto has different movements that correspond to the different stages of life.

The first movement is fast and lively, mirroring an active child, 

The second is full of depth and meaning, similar to a mature adult,

And the third movement resembles an elderly person, mellow and mild.

The third poem I created was a haiku about seals.  A haiku is a poem that uses a specific pattern, 1st line 5 syllables, 2nd line 7 syllables and 5 syllables for the last line.  Here is my Haiku:

Red and white

Beautiful and bright

A seal stands in the light

A man with a gun

A shot echoes

The seal lying on the floor

Blood on the snow

Seals rush to aid

Only to be taken out

Man smiles with glee

The next poem was a found poem.  A found poem is a poem that takes a passage of text from a book and cuts some parts out to create a poem.  I chose to use my text from The Lord of the Rings.  Here it is:

A world long ago

They all listened of the world long ago.  A part of his tale was known to some but the full tale to none.  Many eyes were turned to fear and wonder because of their eagerness of knowledge.  For in that time evil received aid and grew mighty in craft. – Chapter 4, Lord of the Rings,

After finishing my found poem, I wrote an imagery poem.  An imagery poem is a poem that appeals to all 5 senses (words like sticky are good when writing imagery poems).  This is my imagery poem:

The difference in life

The birds caw in the distance as they fly around in the night sky,

The sweet smell of sap flows into my nose,

I feel the breeze rustle through my hair,

I watch as petals fall off a rose,

I can taste water as it trickles into my mouth.

The cries of hunger from children echo the street,

Grey smoke billows into my nose filling my lungs,

The heat of the sun blazes onto my face,

Homeless people wander around begging for money,

I still can taste the rancid leftover meat that I ate awhile back.

One moment you can be living a decent life,

The next you could be begging on the street, 

Cherish every moment of your life.

I then proceeded to create a sound poem.  This poems uses onomatopoeia (sound).  This is my sound poem:

The Ambience of My House

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr,

Chhhhhhhhhh,

Click, tick, click,

Burple, burple, 

Drip, drip, 

Creak, creak   

Wrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

The 7th poem is an experience poem.  This poem talks about a past event/ experience that a

was significant in your life and changed your world view.  Here is mine:

Stage Fright

The vast audience is in silence,

Eyes staring at me like darts,

I feel the keys under my hand,

The lights glitter like sparkling eyes,

The vast chamber echoes like a grand cathedral.

My hands dance like a professional waltzer in a ball room,

My heart thumping like a drum,

My head spinning like a ballerina,

Sweat drops from my fore head like rain falling.

Finally I finish,

The crowd claps and I leave,

I feel relieved and proud,

And most of all,

Accomplished

The next poem I made was a personification poem.  For this poem, I had to personify my worldview.  Here it is:

My worldview

My worldview slips into my mind,

It lurks around,

Sometimes it’s full of life,

Bouncing about,

Sometimes it stares at me ominously,

Like an x-ray scanning through me.

It is a mirror of who I am,

A combination of all my past experiences,

It is what made me who I am today,

It is me.

For the final poem, I made it all about me.  I made it so it has all my interests and hobbies.  This is it:

A 13 year old boy,

Who enjoys different subjects,

Ranging from the clicks and clacks of mechanical keyboards

to the wonders of the world of D and D,

A semi-competitive swimmer,

And a piano player,

An enjoyer of video games,

And an avid reader.

Student in a school called Seycove,

In a program called PLP,

And finally,

The youngest of a close-knit family.

Here is a book with all my poems that I have created.  It includes multiple drawings I created and audio recordings that explain each poems:

https://read.bookcreator.com/2sh4X41LA4UJ8RtEZi8eDap7BZ82/ICJILusKTmeYisQ0pVO5Zg

After finishing my book, we had to perform inside a coffee house that we did online.  We were assigned different poems and had to merge our poems with the other team members to create one final poem that we would all recite.  Unfortunately, I do not have any videos/photos of us performing.

To answer the driving question, I think I created text that shows I am today.  My poems all relate to worldview and shows what my past experiences and who I am today.

Thanks for reading!

-Chris

Hello people!

Driving question: How does the Outsiders impact out worldview? 

Check out my group:

Charlie

Seth

Cameron

Keenan

Sydney

Today I will be discussing my latest project that we were doing for the past 6 weeks, the Outsiders.  It was a novel by S.E Hinton that showed the different lives and worldviews of different people.  To showcase our learning, we did two tableaux of an important scene, the first one being a recreation of the original (1960’s) and for the second one, it is a transposed version that we think it would look like in 2021.  I quite enjoyed the novel, it really exposed me to how different my life is compared to Ponyboy (main character).   

The first thing we did was to read the book.  At first, I found this books a bit boring but eventually started liking it.  In summary, the book is about a character named Ponyboy.  He lives with his 2 brothers (his parents are dead) and is part of a group called the Greasers, a group of poor teens and hoods who cause trouble around town.  Greasers would probably The Greasers rival gang is the Socs, a group of rich teens who wear madras and drive around in mustangs.  Nowadays, I think Socs would be the rich spoilt kids with blazers and polo shirts. The story starts with Ponyboy meeting with his friends (Johnny and Dally) and going to a drive in theatre.  If they lived in our time, they would have most likely not visited a movie theatre due to Covid-19.  They meet 2 girl Socs and start talking to them.  They walk both of them home but gets stopped by the girl’s boyfriends.  They manage to escape from them and return home at 3 am.  His older brother gets really mad and slaps him causing him to run away with Johnny.  If this was set in 2021 he probably would have been They decide that it isn’t smart to run away and decide to go back and cut through the park.  The girls boyfriends ambush them on their way there which forces Johnny to kill one of them.  They go on the run and meet up with a Dally who tells them to go to an abandoned church in the country side.  They take the train and manage to make it there.  After a couple of days, Darry comes by and visits them.  He treats them lunch to lunch and go back to the church.  However, when they arrive, they find it on fire with bystanders outside.  They ask what was going on and find out that they were on a field trip and there is multiple children inside.  Without hesitation, they jump into the church and save all the children.  While escaping, Johnny gets hit on the back with wood making Dally save him.  Dally manages to save him but is injured.  When they arrive to the hospital they are hailed as heroes for saving those children.  However, Johnny is gravely injured and if he survives, he will be paralyzed.  After Ponyboy leaves, he meets up with his brothers and learns that there will be a big rumble against the Socs.  While wandering about, he finds Randy, one of the Socs that jumped him in the fountain.  He says that he wishes this never happened and apologizes to him.  After that, the group of Greasers meet up with the Socs and starts the rumble.  People in 2021 cannot have big rumbles because of Covid, I think they would just argue online.  During the rumble, Dally sneaks out of the hospital to join the rumble and manages to help drive the Socs out with the help of all of them.  He tells Ponyboy that Johnny is about to die and that they need to visit him.  They make it to the hospital just in time and watch Johnny perish.  Through modern day technology, he may have not died because of our medical advancements.  Dally is devasted and runs of while Ponyboy goes in a trance and walks around for hours.  Eventually his other gang members find him and he tells them about Johnny’s death.  They all grieve and reminisce on old times.  Soon later, they get a call from Dally that he has robbed a store out of rage and now is on the run.  They agree to meet up at the parking lot so that they can help him escape.  As they arrive, they see Dally running from the cops but sees one of the cops takes out his gun and shoots him.  In this day and age, instead of Dally getting shot, he would have most likely been tazed and detained.  In 1 night they lost 2 of their close friends, 1 as a hero, 1 as a criminal.  At the end, they have a trial on whether or not Ponyboy is guilty and if he is, he will be taken away from his brothers.  He is found not guilty.  This is a summary of The Outsiders.

Moving on, what is world view?

World view is how you perceive the world through past experiences.  If you were a homeless person then you would probably have a spiteful world view.  The worldview 7 elements are economy, geography, values, society, beliefs, time and knowledge.

After finishing the book and learning what world view is, we started planning on how we were gonna do our final project, a tableau that we would be presenting inside our winter exhibition.  The first step we took was recreating a trailer for The Outsiders.  I was put in a group with Charlie, Sydney, Keenan, Seth and Cameron.  We started by assigning roles and getting costume.  I was a Soc and had to wear a fancy sweater.  The software we chose was iMovie a video editing software provided by apple and used the adrenalin filter.  While creating it, we had some difficulties with some people forgetting the costume.  Here it is:

When we finished creating the video, we moved onto creating a poster for our tableau.  At first, we created separate individual posters so that we could see each others ideas.  I decided to split the photo in half to show of the difference of the Socs and Greasers life.  On one side it had Ponyboy in his brick home while Randy is in his penthouse suite.  You can view the poster at the top of the Blog.  We decided to go with Charlie’s poster, it was very similar to mine but it looked slightly better.   Below me is the poster:

Finally, we started working on our tableau.  We had to create 2 tableaux, the first one being a recreation of the scene and the second one is  transposed to what we would think this scene would look like in 2021.  The scene we got assigned was when Ponyboy being slapped by Darry.  We decided that instead of Darry slapping Ponyboy, he takes away his phone because in 2021 that is a form of punishment.  After that, we assigned our roles, Keenan and I were the house, Sydney was a bush, Seth as Sodapop, Cameron as Darry and Charlie as Ponyboy.   Then we started decorating our stage to make it look more like a house.  Here is a time lapse of us putting up the props:

When we finished putting up our stuff, we started rehearsing our tableaux.  We start the tableaux by introducing the scene and talking about the 2 different scenes and what there world view traits are.  We believed that this scene portrays 2 worldview aspects, geography and economy.  If Darry wasn’t stressed about his financial situation he may have been nicer to Ponyboy.  They also live in a really rough neighborhood and house.  Here is a recording of us performing:

To answer the driving question, the main world view elements that are portrayed inside The Outsiders is economy, the reason why Socs and Greasers are divided, society, like economy, the Greasers are in the lower class while the Socs are in the high class, and values, the Greasers value everything they have but the Socs are spoilt and are more selfish.

In conclusion for this project, I found it was fun and unique.  It was cool learning what different drama techniques such as tableaux.  I think our performance for our tableau went pretty well, we clearly explained our scene and performed well.  For the performance, I think we could have added more props because our background was pretty plain.

Thanks for reading!

-Chris

Hello people!

In the past few weeks, I have been working on a project called “medium is the message”!  It has been a fun and interesting journey going through this project.  While doing this project, we did many mini milestones and one big project (our advertisment).  

Our final group ad.

My other group members that help make this ad:

Keenan

Naomi

Kira

Caden

Hayden

The driving question:

How does what we hear, see and read influence us?

My first creative media:

The big project was to create an ad for a randomly assigned company.  My group and I, was assigned to a company called “honey doughnuts”.  As you can see above, those were my different drafts I made for our company.  When you continue to go through the different drafts, you can progressively watch as the improvements of the ad.  In total, I created 4 different drafts. 

The first thing that me and my group did, was to contact the owner of Honey’s doughnuts to ask her preferences for the ad.  After interviewing her, I created my first draft.  The first ad I created had a simple background consisting of yellow, brown and black with the doughnut having a bad transparent background.  I also drew my own bees using an app called Procreate.  When I did the second draft I changed the background colour because I found that the black and brown did not really fit with the aesthetic.  Also, instead of using instant alpha that keynote has installed, I used the transparent tool that Canva provides so that the donut’s background is fully transparent without any weird dots on the screen.  On my third draft,  I decided to remove the red circle behind the doughnut because it was diverting the attention of the reader.  While making the third draft, I made sure to add all of honeys doughnuts contact information and that the doughnuts had no preservatives,  fresh and was made with free ranged chicken eggs.  After getting critique from my teacher, I revised and tried again.  I finally created my final ad that I though was pretty good.  I changed the bees and shortened the text that the bee said.  After finishing my individual ad, my group and I proceeded to choose 1 ad out of all of us.  Unfortunately, my final ad did not get picked to be sent to Honey doughnuts.  After deciding what the final group ad was going to be, we got professional feedback from a real advertising company on the ad.   When we revised the ad after getting advice from Mr Hepburn (the owner of the advertising company) we sent it of to Honey’s doughnuts.   Unfortunately, she has not reached back to us.  In conclusion, I learnt many different advertising techniques and how I can create an ad if I needed to in the future.

My second creative media:

On top of this body of text is my advertising photo journal.  I had to travel to different places like down town so that I could take photos for this media.  I found it quite interesting going to different place while taking photos for this media because I do not usually pay attention to ads I drive by.  All in all, I found this project pretty cool.

My third creative media:

For my third creative media, I had to analyse an video advertisement made by apple.  This was our first real milestone for this project since joining PLP.  This ad was advertising a product called “the home pod.”  I had to talk about the different aspects of the video was like who the target audience for this media is for,  what the message they were trying to send and how they used that message to reach the target audience.  I really enjoyed watching the video and found it very intriguing.  If you want to watch the video, here it is below:

My fourth creative media:

Design Principles Workbook Medium is the Message view 

Before, creating our individual ad, we were given a workbook of different advertisements techniques.  It also included areas to try the methods that they displayed.  It taught me many methods for the project.  These are some terms I learnt:
The first term I used was relationships.  It means making connections between colour, patterns, shapes and text.  I implemented this term into my individual ad by using colours that fill well with each other.  The next term I used was alignment.  It means that everything is evenly aligned and is spaced well.  I utilized the term by evenly aligning all my photos and text well.  After that, I used another term called proximity.  Proximity means to make your ad easily interpreted.  I think the ad I created is easily distinguishable and can instantly tell that I was advertising a bakery because I had a big photo of the donut in the middle.  The last term I used was contrast.  Like relationships, it means to use nice colours that fit together.  I used a nice bright yellow to represent honey and white to contrast it.

In conclusion for this project, I learnt many new terms and how to create a proper ad.  I found it very fun and would enjoy to do it again.  Some things I think I did well was creating my final ad.  I made sure to include all of the requests made from the Honey Doughnuts owner like that the doughnuts were fresh and had no preservatives. The colours I picked out also fit well with the aesthetic.  I also added a honey comb background on top of the yellow so that it was not to empty.  Some things that did not go so well was the interview with Ashifa (owner of honey doughnuts). My iPad kept on disconnecting during the call when I was talking because of some weird tech issue.  I was quite embarrassed to miss most of the interview and apologized to the honey doughnuts owner through the chat.

What I took away from this project:  I now know different techniques used for advertising and how to create an ad in the future if I ever need to.  If I every do it again in the future, I think I will probably use the same idea as I did for this ad but ad more doughnuts to show the wide variety of flavours that Honey Doughnuts has.  I now know that what you hear read or see can really influence our choice of decision.  Subconsciously, if you see something that looks aesthetically pleasing or eye catching, you are more likely to notice and might subconsciously remember it.  This makes it really important when making ads because you are trying to sell something.

Unfortunately, this is the end of the blog post.  I really enjoyed creating it and hope you enjoyed reading this blog!

-Chris