Hello everyone of the Internet.
Welcome. It’s time for yet another blog, and we had finished another project. The driving question for this project is: what does James Cameron’s fantasy world of Avatar reveal about our society today? This project was a video, and it’s the project that’s we would be presenting for the Winter Exhibition of 2022. This was kind of my first exhibition. I had a mini exhibition before this, but this is a real, full exhibition.
Video
For the exhibition, we had to make a documentary style video, and in the video, we had to have an interview. We watched James Cameron’s Avatar movie and extracted a few themes from it. We had to choose a theme that we wanted to explore. The theme I chose was corporate greed. After I had my theme down, I connected to the real world. The one I came up with was when the Europeans first came to North America. Then I found someone who I could maybe interview, but they never got back to me. My second interview person was one of the teachers, Ms Maxwell. She’s is the socials teacher for PLP and I got an interview secured this time. The interview went well, but it was only a few days before the video deadline, so I wasn’t able to meet it. Just a few days before the exhibition, I was still not done the video, and I became really stressed. I have never been so stressed before in my life, and I wondered if I was going to finish in time for the exhibition. Luckily, I was able to finish it right on time.
The original video was around 6 minutes long. The second half of the video was me talking about how corporate greed still exists today. I had a bunch of background footages that I filmed and got deform the internet. All that second half hard work was deleted, because the video was too long and it got kind of boring.
The teachers had this idea of a viewing box that we would use in the exhibition. while most people were working on their viewing boxes, I still had to do my video. when I finished the video, I didn’t have much time left to make my viewing box, so I just covered it with some black paper. Most other people had more decoration to their boxes, but I felt like the plain black box matched my room theme and vibe.
Exhibition
On the week of the exhibition, we used all of our class time to prepare for it. A lot of people had the theme corporate greed, including my self, so the teachers split us up into three groups under three sub themes. For my group, we got exploited resources. During some of our classes, we fathered with the grade 8s in our group to come up with ideas on how our room would look, what drinks and snacks we should bring, and who would bring the necessary resources to do all that.
After some discussing, we decided that we could have a clear cut forest background or just bedsheets to cover up the walls and windows. For the food, we had purple Rice Krispie bits to represent the unobtanium that the humans from Avatar want. For the drink, we had iced tea to represent gasoline. We also needed a game, and the idea for the game was dart. The dart board represented the forest and the darts were axes. The next thing to plan was the layout of the room. Our original idea looked like this:
But in the end, when we finished setting up the room, it looked something like this:
The decoration at the center of the room were a few stumps and branches. The grade 8s were being crazy when we told them to grab some branches. Instead of bringing in branches, they brought a whole tree! The lighting of the room was darkened with orange paper covering it.
As the room was being set up, I went to grab my viewing box from the PLP room, but it was gone! I double checked it again and I triple checked too, but it wasn’t there. I told Ms. Kadi and she told me to check again, carefully. So I did, and when I still couldn’t find it, I went back to her and asked what I should do. Luckily, one of the grade 8s wasn’t here and they had a decorated box that I could use.
Around 15 minutes before the exhibition began, we were called down to the cafeteria for pizza dinner. By that time, our room was almost done. We just needed to set up the game station and organize a few things, and that’s what we did afterwards. Before everyone got back to their rooms, Mrs. Willemse and Mr. Hughes gave us a speech on how to behave, like what to do, and what not to do.
With the room set up and ready to go, all we could do was to wait until the exhibition started. The grade 8s in our room started going crazy. They were yelling and running around the room. The grade 12 in our room tried to calm them down, but they didn’t listen, if they even hear her. It was only when the first parents showed up that they settled down.
Over all, I think the exhibition went well. Lots of parents showed up, but most of them just hung around the front. I got to have a break in the exhibition, so I went around to my friends and ate the food in the other rooms. Each break was only suppose to be 15 minutes long, but some people went on breaks and just never came back. The thing that sucked was the rule where we couldn’t sit at all throughout the whole exhibition. Half way through it, my legs were already getting tired, but I managed to make it through to exhibition without sitting once.