Month: January 2020

My Last MPOL

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Now that it is my final year in High School, I am doing a lot of things for the last time, and now that I am halfway through this year I am doing my last MPOL before I graduate. I am getting closer and closer to having to reflect all of my years at Seycove as opposed to just the past 9 months. I now know that these are my last few months for me to do my best work at this school.

This year has been more of a roller coaster ride than any other year. It has had a lot of failures and a lot of euphorias. We started off this school year super excited to get into the horror unit. It was lots of fun and it wasn’t like any other unit I have ever done. I decided that I wanted to take on more responsibility than on other projects. I decided that I was going to put my hat in the ring for an important position. I didn’t get it but it’s the thought that counts right? I was at least given a position that was close to the one I wanted as I was Line Producer. I was happy to take that position and I was excited about the new opportunity I was given to try and lead my peers. The project didn’t exactly go the way anybody really wanted it to. Nobody expected us to crash and burn as hard as we did. We all were hoping that it was going to be a great project. We were confident up until we realized how well we were working together as a team. Evidently, that didn’t go so well. I think a lot of people worked really well individually but when it came to putting it all together, it didn’t work. I think that I did a fairly good job of being the line producer. My organization skills were about as good as they could possibly be and I think that I did a good job of delegating tasks as well as making sure I was doing everything I needed to do to make sure I got my work done. I believe I could have done a better job if I was given another opportunity, and I did with our second chance as we were forced to restart. The second time around on that project went better than the first time, and I think a lot fo that has to do with how well we organized. Everybody knew what was going on at what time. We executed the best we could and we would have finished if he had one or two more days.

 

We then hit the ground running with our new unit in 2020. I wasn’t very sure what this unit had to do with anything that we were learning as it had a huge disconnect from the horror unit in my opinion. As soon as I figured out how we were getting our topics, I took it as an opportunity to learn about something new. That is why I chose Marlon Brando as my topic. I knew pretty much nothing about him. All I knew was that he was in one of the highest-rated movies of all time. I quickly learned he was involved in one of the biggest and most revolutionary boycotts in the history of Hollywood. I was happy with all of the work that I did on the project and I found that I put a lot of effort into my research. I then started to formulate it into a video. It was going well at first but by the end of it I wasn’t sure what was wrong but I knew my execution was off.  The quality of the video just wasn’t my best. I then had to present something that I knew I couldn’t execute at my best. The same thing happened with the presentation, I felt there was just something off with it. I’d say my presentation was worse than my video. I naturally am not very good at public speaking, so I talked to fast and I was worried about forgetting my information so I looked down for most of the presentation, which if you don’t know, that doesn’t create very good presentation.

This year so far as been high intensity but I think that I have been doing fairly well. I know that I can do better and I am going to use my past experiences this year to do that. I am going to try and figure out what I did wrong in this past unit to make sure I can execute in the next. I think that over the past term and a half that I have stepped up to the plate and I have been working harder than I ever have but I just need to work on my execution a little more. I also have to ask a question for the Presentation of Learning that will help me for the rest of the year as my parents and teachers are supposed to answer it and that is supposed to point me in the right direction for improvement.

My Question Was:

How do I bridge the gap between what I’m actually achieving versus what I am expecting to achieve based on my knowledge, effort and understanding for the course?I feel I should be doing better.

 

A Scary Project… For Two Reasons

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At the beginning of the year we decided to start a unit on Horror. You may have noticed this based on the fact that I had a couple blog posts based around Horror Movies. That was all leading up to the big project that we were hoping to be amazing. It didn’t quite turn out that way. We had high hopes at the beginning but we slowly ran out of steam until we had a large heaping disaster. Guess what, we started again and then we ended pretty much in the same place.

We started off by going down to Seattle and learning about the project and what was going to go on during it. We studied how horror worked and what created a good horror movie. We also assigned roles while we were down there. I applied for producer and got the role of line producer. Two of my friends, Alex and Sam took the role of producer and I was pretty much their right hand man. I was in charge of making sure everything in the project went smoothly and everything finished on the deadline (that did not happen sadly). The script team got together and started putting together a story. They were first call to action, and they were told to do their best to create the best possible characters, and the best possible story.

When we got home, we decided to delve deeper into the world of horror.  By this time we had a general idea of what our story was going to look like. It would be two groups of teenagers who loathe each other. They are forced to work together because while they are locked in a school the janitor decides he wants to kill all of them. At first they blame the deaths on each other until they figure out there is someone else doing these acts. There were several types of characters and they died in a specific order depending on their stereotype. The first to die was the “Woman of Many Men”, or if you want to be rash, you can call her the slut. That’s generally the way most horror movies go. The deaths slowly worked there way through the groups until there were 3. They tried to make their final escape but it was too close so the last person you would expect to sacrifice himself, did. The person I’m talking about is the douche bag who is an arrogant leader of one of the groups and everybody else sees him as an asshole.

At the beginning of the project there wasn’t really much for me to do until the script was done. So I started by making a timeline for the project (That was not followed. I then started taking everybody’s schedules and put them into a document so everybody could see when everybody was available. We then started watching horror movies. It was helpful with understanding horror, but it took up a lot of useful time.

We eventually got back to working on the project. We did casting and I ended up being the douche bag. We then failed and a bunch of people got removed of their positions such as both producers, and the director. Then I was happily removed from my character to be sadly put back in as the janitor, because the other janitor wasn’t intimidating enough.

The movie looked like it was back on track but we just barely ran out of time. I was furious with how this went because we were so close. I take a lot of blame for this because this process should have gone smoothly the first time. If I were to go back and do it again I would have taken more charge.

I felt that the wrong people were taking responsibility and it got in the way of knowing who was actually in charge. The organization skills of all ofus were only good in the end and by then it was too late. I’ve learned from this that in situations like this, you have to do it right the first time. I learned that when I have a lot of responsibility, I have to take charge and organize the people and the things that I need to just to make sure everything runs the way it needs to.

Get Out or Read this Post

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After watching Halloween we decided to watch another horror film, a more recent one at that. This had a very different vibe, and it struck me in a different way. This movie was Get Out.

It was very well known when it first came out a few years ago. It is a lot deeper than most horror movies especially slasher films. It touches on modern society in the United States. It can get confusing at times if you don’t pay attention as this movie has many different layers and you can lose track very easily. It has twists and turns you won’t expect, and forces you to the edge of your seat.

Get Out gains its fear factor from how much is unknown. Most of the movie the main character is in the dark and you are not sure what is really going on. You end up being confused and on the edge of your seat trying to expect what is next. It also uses classic ways of scaring the audience. They use music and audio I effects to scare you before you even see what’s going on on screen. If you watch the movie and think about what was said earlier in the movie, that also scares you as it hits you in a much different way after you know whats going on. Some other things that happen are just mess with your mind, involving hypnosis. You see the main character floating in nothingness while staring back through what his eyes are currently seeing and having no control whatsoever over there own physical actions. The movie is very well written with every piece of the movie being involved with the plot.

It was the exact opposite of a slasher film like Halloween, instead of having a unstoppable killer killing people throughout the movie, you have a messed up family that forces the protagonist to try and survive in confusing and awful circumstances. Nobody is killed until the end of the movie, after the protagonist becomes clever, he is able to outsmart the nuts family.

As I said before it comments on societal problems in the US. It touches on racism, Black Lives Matter and police brutality. The location of most of the movie is in a rural area where there is a mainly Caucasian demographic. The protagonist constantly feels out of place throughout the movie because of this especially when he runs into a cop. The family on the other hand try to seem welcoming but at the same time it is obvious they are trying, also to like they are trying to hard. It creates these awkward scenes in the movie.

You can very easily compare this to Frankenstein as it is not a slasher like Halloween and it is more of psychological horror. They both don’t have many deaths, and the whole entire movie doesn’t focus on death. Both movies also look into what is going on the world at the time. Frankenstein looks at humanity and what makes us human. It has a huge focus on wrong right and how that connects to what makes us who we are. Get Out focuses on the norms and impacts of society. It especially focuses on racism, and how it has gotten better but it still isn’t really gone from the world and probably never will be.

The movie is complex and uses many different disguises for different topics outside of the movie. It is one of my favourite horror movies and it is one of the most engaging movies I have ever watched. This movie is a great example of how horror movies can actually be something besides mindless killing and death.