Ever heard of a Rabbit, frog and alicorn all mixed together? Until 2 months ago it wasn’t a real animal. But thanks to me and my frankenstuffie school project, you can all be blessed by the wonder that is Benjamin Garrett Brog!
To start off our projects, we had to take 3 or more stuffies and use them to create one mega stuffie. This process started off with me cutting the heads off of my stuffies, just from fun (signs of a serial killer) and then using different body parts from each of them, to combine into the best creature ever. After creating our frankenstuffie, we then got to create a resume for our stuffies, which basically was to help us imagine the smaller details about our character and some of their background information.
Our other section of our project involved us reading a book called “Leviathan”. This book related to our project, because it was also about makeshift animals that were formed together and were different the the animals we see in our world today. This book helped us with learning how to create interesting questions, and taught us about gathering and containing information from a book. Although ‘Leviathan’ isn’t my typical read, I enjoyed the book and thought it had some great messages and creative thought to it. Our teachers used this book to help teach us about theme, and how to find the theme statement. Throughout the book, we would get small quizzes that helped test us on our knowledge and keep everyone at the same spot in the book.
Our final project for frankenstuffies, was to create a short story which we would then convert into a film. I struggled a lot with this project and especially with writing a short story. Creative writing has never been a strong suit of mine, and I really struggled with also coming up with the idea for my story as well. At the start of this project, I discovered a shocking fact. Scandinavia isn’t actually a country, its just a region with countries in it. I had no idea about this, and since I was lacking ideas, I decided to use this to create a story. Once I had part of an idea going, I really took it and and tried my hardest to be imaginative with it. Once I got my story done ( not exactly the best work), I went on to work on my storyboard. I really liked making the story board, because I was able to add in more details by creating drawings to go with each section.
My favorite part of this entire project had to be either creating the stuffie, and actually making the film. I got to learn some new skills using green screen and apps on my iPad, I didn’t even realize I had. I used keynote and SuperimposeX to cut out Benjamin, and then created backgrounds to put him on. I liked the creative aspect, of making my own backdrops and animating each scene.