When you think of October you typically think of spooky things, like ghosts, goblins, and of course, monsters! So it is only fitting that the main project focus of the month has to do with one of the most famous monsters in history, Frankenstein. In order for us to learn about adaptation, natural regions, and story telling formats, the teachers put together one big collaboration project, known as Frankenstuffies. It was quite the fun, interesting, and chaotic assignment (like most PLP projects), but I’m very glad I did it and now have time to reflect on the hectic month the has come to be known as The Month of the Frankenstuffies.
The early stage of my frankenstuffie
The Project and Unit:
Like I mentioned earlier, this project is a collaboration between all of the PLP classes except for math, and has many different aspects to it. To sum it up, we were tasked with creating a stuffed animal that was a cross between two different species, and demonstrate how it could adapt to a new environment through varied story telling formats. Some of these include a epistolary story, a storyboard, and a video. Now as you probably would guess, as soon as we heard about this project we wanted to rush right in and begin tearing the heads off of stuffies and sowing them back together, but we first had to learn some of the unit basics. We started off by talking about the geographical and physical regions of Canada. This is crucial because we would later each choose a region for our Frankenstuffies to live in, and must know which wildlife, abiotic features, climates, and more come with it. We also read the book The Martian in order to learn about adapting, as well as what an epistolary story format was.
A region commercial we made in the unit
After that, we were given groups and tasked with choosing the regions we felt would be the best for our projects, and our group chose the arctic lowlands. After this, it was time to begin the project. The first step was to create something known as an epistolary story, which is a story that is written in log format. This was also the time we’re we started to develop our frankenstuffie characters, and some of the basics about their personalities, lives, and the challenges they would face. It was then that I created my creature, Scafir, the raven, and came up with my story’s main conflict. We started off by writing the first 3 of the 6 logs and then got them critiqued by classmates. Then we wrote the next 3 and we were ready to move to the next stage of the project.
If you want to read my epistolary story, click here
Now it was time to begin the transition to the video aspect of the project. Of course we were all quite eager to get filming and bring our stories to life, but before we could do that we had to create a script and a storyboard to figure out what shots, sounds, and effects we wanted. Writing my script was not much of a challenge, for I followed closely to what I had written in my epistolary story. Then we moved on to the story board, and I personally found this part of the project a little useless at the time for I usually create my story boards in my head. But afterwards, I came to the realization that it is a good way to get my ideas across to other people, and will come in handy for future group projects. Once that was complete, we were ready to get to the funnest part; filming.
The Video:
Each year in PLP, there is a main format focus, such as photography or podcasts, and this year’s is video. As such, the final and biggest part of the Frankenstuffie project is a video which tells the story of your character in a new and intriguing way. Now before I could get to actually making my movie, I had to create my stuffie. My creature is a species I created known as an Ornaku, and was a cross between a raven and an orca, but the problem was there aren’t many cheap raven or orca stuffed animals. To fix this, I decided to create my own from scratch. Because it was nearing Halloween, there were many things in the stores that I could use to create it, so I bought some materials from the dollar store. I created my base from some black fabric, then added marbles for the eyes. I then used foam and black tape for the beak, and pipe cleaners wrapped in tape for the feet, and my creature was ready.
My final frankenstuffie in action
Since my movie is set in the arctic, I needed snow, and a lot of it. At first, I tried going up to mount Seymour, but they didn’t have enough to make it look realistic and there were too many people. So, I decided the best thing to do would be to switch to green screen. I set up a massive filming type studio in my basement (which my parents did not enjoy too much), and used a small green poster board as my background. Before I started filming, I thought it would be easy; just position a stuffed animal around a camera and your ready. But then I started filming, and realized just what I had gotten myself into.
I had some quite ambitious plans for my project, and soon came to the conclusion that I would needed more than a half hour to get this done. One of the reasons for this was how I has planned out my camera angles and stuffie movements to be elaborate, Some of the tricks I used to make my scenes realistic and to look like I wanted them to was to create a mini raven for far long shot scenes as well as use a raven puppet for the opening part of my movie, use thread and a ruler to allow him to fly, and even have a fuzzy hat replace him as a stunt double for some scenes where the raven was used as his mom. Another reason this was challenging was due to external factors, such as lighting and sound, so I decided to add filters after to change the look of the lighting and add sound affects and dialogue after as well. I decided to film my movie in two parts; one where the raven has not evolved and then the part where he had, and this definitely helped break the project up and make it more doable. Yet, filming was not the most challenging part of this project…
The raven puppet on a green screen
After the green screen was put away and I had more than enough footage of my raven from various angles, came the time when a project would come to life; the editing. The first step of this was to transfer my green screen footage to having actual backgrounds. To do this, I see some of my own photos and videos, as well as downloading some from Creative Commons Search. I also sometimes used a mix of the two and created my own backgrounds by mixing Creative Commons images. After that was done, it was time to add some special affects. Some of these include snow storms, rain, filters, and more, and were primarily done in Keynote. I also discovered I really handy way to pan a video to make it look the a still camera is moving, which is screen recording and zooming in photos. Then, it was finally time to import into iMovie and put everything together. This was were I recorded dialogue, sound affects, added transitions, and cropped clips to officially make my movie.
The Raven in a finish scene with FX
What I have learned/would change next time
The frankenstuffie unit has definitely been a major opportunity to learn many movie making and project building skills. Personally, this project has also been huge for learning about planning skills and goal setting for me. This is because I has set my expectations of how I wanted my project to turn out way to high at the beginning without considering how much time I would have and how important this one assignment really was. I have come to the conclusion that working hard is good, but it is also important to decide what you need to work quite hard on, and what may not need as much time. Other than that, I have also learned more about the camera angles in video production and where they can be used, some new features and apps that can polish your clips and add special affects that really add to your video, and some useful tips and tricks with a green screen (also that our teacher, Mr. Hughes, has a jar of lollipops in his drawer). If I were to do this again, or give some advice to a younger student, I would make sure to narrow down some of my ideas sooner in the project, and make sure that my goals were more realistic. I would also make my story more concise so I wouldn’t go over the time limit of the video.
The Final Draft of my Video
Overall, this project has been a crazy one, but also fun, and I’m glad I got to do it.