What is it?! Is it a fish. Is it a unicorn? No its a Frankan Stuffy!
In our most recent project we did something a bit different than usual. We were tasked with taking apart a few stuffies and piecing them into a whole new stuffy. After we had our new stuffies, we made movies that explained how those stuffies came to be. This project tought me a lot of new skills that I’m glad I have now.
Before we even got to making our Frankan stuffies however, we learned about stories. We learned how all stories have a particular algorithm that they go through. This is called the hero’s journey. Once we learned a bit more about it, we learned about how we could incorporate the Hero’s Journey in our own stories. This would help give our characters structure and depth, and would ultimately make a better story.
Before we got to filming however, we had to do a few things first in preparation. Some of these things were story boards, Log Lines, and even writing a short story. All of this was super helpful in the long run because it showed us exalt what to do when it came to actually filming.
My main character in this project was a Parrot Fish with a snow Leopard leg, and a Unicorn horn. Weird right? As you could imagine, I could do whatever I wanted to with this story. I decided to make our friend Bob the Fish a power addicted leader, meaning that he couldn’t help himself, whenever there was power he needed it. This turned out to be a harder topic than it sounds like to write about and even harder to are a movie about, but I made it work.
The driving question for this project was: How do we as writers make our message clear and engaging to an audience. I think that it is easy to write about something, challenging to write something and make it engaging, and even harder to do both of those while trying to get your audience to feel a certain way. This proved to be true this project, but as I said earlier I made it work, mostly by putting myself in a viewers perspective. This is my main strategy whenever I have to communicate my writing in another format. Another thing that helps me is making my product very simple, because simple is easy to understand. However with this method we often lose lots of detail, so it is not my favourite thing to do.
link to my Frankan Stuffy Video.
In conclusion, the Frankan Stuffy project allowed us to explore the Hero’s Journey in storytelling and challenged us to communicate our message clearly and engagingly to an audience. Through creating our own Frankan stuffies and films, we were able to learn valuable skills that will help us in future projects. Despite the challenges we faced, we were able to overcome them by putting ourselves in the audience’s perspective and simplifying our content without losing important details. Overall, this project was a fun and educational experience that pushed us to think creatively and outside the box.