Changing Is Always Awkward…

Fifteen hundred years ago the idea that God wasn’t real was insane. In the 1950’s the idea that someone could have a portable mobile phone capable with more storage than a fifty ton computer was simply out of question. Yet here we are in 2017 and not everyone’s life is dictated by God, and if you don’t have a phone with you wherever you go you’re in the minority. This just goes to show, that no matter how outrageous change may seem, it will end up being normal if pursued.

For the past couple months, our humanities teacher, Ms. Maxwell, has been leading a course titled “How do advancements and change cause tension?” We started off learning about the Middle Ages, and what life was like back then. We learned all about the church and how it affected everyone and everything. After some background information, we watched a documentary on Martin Luther, and wrote a paragraph as well as answered some questions. I think most of the class struggled with this assignment as we mostly learned about Luther’s life, and how it ended up influencing him to write his 95 theses to the church. These theses were 95 ‘stinging bullet points’ that he nailed to the church door in his hometown, explaining how the church was wrong and that God didn’t come from a book or a building, but that it came from within. This put a target on his back and forced him to flee in order to escape death. As we learned from this story, many years ago, the idea of change was not taken lightly.

As a part of this unit, we were given two large assignments. The class was split up in to six groups, that all had a different topic to focus on; Transportation, Communication, Art & Design, Science & Medicine, Defence, and Agriculture & Environment. I was put in the Art & Design group with Luca, Lucas, and Maggie. I was really happy with my group because it was the right balance between friends, and hard workers. The first assignment was a “Notebook” style representation of our groups topic throughout the ages. We decided to focus on portraiture. More specifically, our driving question was “How have people been represented by artists throughout time?” We had four people in our group and as we were displaying how portraiture has changed over time, we picked four different time periods to showcase; Middle Ages, Renaissance, Victorian Era, and Modern Day. I was tasked with completing the Victorian Era quarter and I also volunteered to create the Keynote.

I learned a lot about Keynote while doing this project. I had this idea in my head that we could make the Keynote like an art gallery, and each “painting” was a different time period. As I began to construct it, I was worried that this idea wouldn’t work. Then magically, I discovered the effect, Magic Move! This was exactly what I needed to complete the vision I had. This got me super fired up and from there on I was trying really hard to make this a memorable presentation. I was extremely glad when Mrs. Willimse complimented me on it, as I was very proud of the work I, along with my group had accomplished. The apps I used to create this were Keynote, Phonto, SuperImpose, and Pages. (Most slides are missing due to the fact that transitions don’t work).

The second assignment was to create a theoretical, revolutionary new product that would forever change our group’s topic (Portraiture). We had to think of a company that we would pitch this idea to. We quickly decided we wanted to do something camera related as we knew that’s what the current portraiture market needed. As we got deeper we came up with the idea of putting a proper, extendable camera lens on a phone. We decided it would be called the iPhone HD and we would be pitching to Apple and Canon, to do a collaboration. I’m not gonna lie, I wasn’t as motivated with this project as I was with the other one because I knew that there was a reason this product wasn’t already a thing. Theoretically it would work, but thank god we weren’t actually getting deep in to the logistics of this thing because jeez would we have been in trouble. This didn’t mean we had a bad project or anything, I believe we actually did a very good job.

Halfway through the time we had to complete the project, Ms. Maxwell told us that we would be pitching to people from Apple. Our whole group nearly had a heart attack. For every other group this wasn’t as big of a deal, but for us it was huge. At the start we were only pretending to pitch to Apple, but now it was like we actually were! We were so worried we would embarrass ourselves with this hopeless idea. Right up until a couple hours before we were set to pitch, Mr. Hughes came in to the class and told us something amazing. Long story short, we weren’t gonna be presenting our products anymore. I was so happy. And this just goes to show, sure change can sometimes cause tension, but when it doesn’t, it can makes things great!