The Driving Question: What does James Camerons fantasy world of Avatar reveal about society today?
In this project, we had to create a documentary centred around a theme in the movie Avatar. Here’s the trailer if you want to see it:
We started off by watching Avatar, and then discussing what themes we thought were shown. Some examples of those themes: corporate greed, colonialism, racism, militarism, spirituality, and sustainability. After that we chose our theme and started thinking about what was going to be in our documentary.
I chose sustainability for my theme. I decided that my video was going to be about the impacts of old growth deforestation, because that theme was very present in the movie (the Home Tree being destroyed by the humans for access to resources, with no thoughts on how that would impact the Na’vi people). We also had to interview someone for the film, so I had to come up with some questions for my interviewee, here are the questions:
- What are your thoughts on old growth deforestation?
- What environmental impacts is this causing?
- What do you think we should be doing?
- Has this impacted you at all? If so, what has it done?
Before I had my interview, it was hard to get the video together, because I had nothing to edit, but after the interview, I filmed some ‘B-roll’ (background footage) and got my documentary together.
And now… the moment you’ve all been waiting for- my documentaryyyyyyy
This year’s Winter exhibition theme was Avatar! We worked with the gr.8’s, they also had to chose a theme from Avatar, but they made models. We were divided into groups for exhibition rooms, my group was Gr. 9’s – Sydney, Jupiter, Tom, Charlie M, Magnus, Frankie, Gr.8’s – Kennedy, Neko, Izzy, Kaia, Lila, Evelyn, and Mateo.
Each room had to have snacks/drinks, some interactive game sort of thing, and we had to make it look like it wasn’t a classroom.
We were in the Annex, and the theme was Nature/ Spirituality. We decided to make the Home Tree (the big tree that the Na’vi lived in) in the middle of the room around the giant pillar. We also brought in a bunch a fairy lights, and decorated the room with those. Ms. Kadi had some blacklight bulbs, and we used those as well.
For the snack table, someone made cookies, and brought tonic water (which glows under blacklight), and I brought blue gatorade powder. All of us Gr.9’s had to make view boxes so that people could watch our videos. I painted tree on mine, then added some green strips of fabric for leaves and fairy lights.
We also had a face painting station, and before the exhibition started everyone had their face painted a blue design to fit with the vibe of the room. Here are some photos:
Overall, I’m really happy with how the room turned out, the lights and tree looked really good, and the atmosphere of the room was nice and fit the theme we were assigned. What I think could’ve been better was the presentation of the documentaries. A large part of this exhibition was just people coming up to your table, explaining what you had made and then people staring into your viewing box for 5 minutes. I think the exhibition itself was good, but I think it could have been a bit more engaging for people watching the films we’d made.
To end this project and the year, all of PLP went to see Avatar: The Way of the Water in theatres! It was very fun, and afterwards, some of my friends and I wandered around Park Royal for a while. Kira, Gwendie and I got matching penguin stuffies.
Mine is named Monty Python.
Thanks for reading!