Have you ever met a bird that is also a pig, giraffe and bear/dog thing and has a rainbow tail? It’s not as ugly as it sounds, in fact, Ursula is very coquette with her bow.
As I was saying, she’s very aesthetic and gorgeous (and sideways for some reason).
In our latest humanities project, we have been answering the driving question of How do we as writers make our message clear and engaging to an audience?
To do this, we first started by reading the book Leviathan, by Scott Westerfield. Every week while reading this book we also had a quiz about the previous reading section and then had a discussion in small groups, where we asked both closed and open ended questions. I think that this was helpful for understanding the book because me and others found it kind of confusing and these conversations also gave everyone the ability to share different perspectives on the book.
While we were reading the book, we also created Frankenstuffies – stuffed animals made of body parts of other stuffed animals. I used some stuffies that I found on Facebook marketplace since I have emotional attachement issues to my own :P. To make Ursula, I used the already falling off head of a bear/dog, a giraffe neck, a pig’s body, the wings and feet of an owl and a tail from a rainbow poodle. Then I sewed everything together and added a pink bow around her neck, because Ursula has a deep love for fashion. Here is a video of the process of making my frankenstuffie.
After making our stuffies, everyone started planning out their stories. To begin, we wrote short stories about our characters. Before starting the actual writing process, we first filled in character files:
After developing our characters, we created a plot overview with a format called the hero’s journey. I think that this was really helpful because it made it easier to think of ideas because I knew what part of a story to write in each section. Both of these organizers helped me learn how to plan out a story better because in the past I’m not always sure what to plan out. This is my hero’s journey planner:
Along with that, we wrote theme statements for our stories, try to guess my theme in the padlet at the end.
Next, we chose a section out of the hero’s journey and started writing our stories about it, which I mostly enjoyed because I really like writing. However, my first draft was over 3 000 words and it had to be shortened to 1 000 words max. Here is my first and final drafts:
After writing the stories, we starting planning to turn the short stories into a little movie. To do this, we created storyboards. This is my storyboard.
Then I started making the video. First, I found all my backgrounds on mainly Pinterest. Then I removed the background off photos of Ursula and added them on top of the background images and animated the characters in Keynote. As well, I used some 3D models online and took photos of them at the right angle. Then, I recorded the talking audio and added music from Capcut, where I edited everything together. Here is my video:
In conclusion, this was a really fun but also challenging project. This project was really important for helping me improve on my clear and effective storytelling, through both writing and video. Here is my padlet, try to guess the theme of my story!
https://padlet.com/KaiaWagner/rise-of-the-frankenstuffies-kaia-w-hzo6gfxd5iol0f2q
That’s all for this post
Kaia out hehe