RUN

Our task was to recreate RUN short horror film. Here is the original:

My group was me, Evelyn, and Marcus. Recreating a video from scratch can be very hard as I learned… But here is the process and how it went! Our teacher told us one day to wear warm clothes because we were going outside. None of us had any idea what we were doing. When we got to class, the video up above was on the screen. We watched it over and over again until it was embedded into our memories! Every single shot and detail. That very same class, Evelyn, Marcus and I went out and filmed a remake of the video. Here it is!

https://youtu.be/ub4hLgaflAY

After showing this to the class, we got some helpful critique and the news that (like usual) we would make another one but this time it was the final draft. On the filming day, we had to be prepared. In order to be prepared, we created story boards and screen plays.

Here is my screenplay ⬆️

Here is my story board ⬆️

Final Video

We wanted to match the original video and the final video almost exactly, so it had to be the same time, sounds, clips, shots, and costumes. I tried to replicate the man’s costume as best I could.

When the film day rolled around, one of my group members was sick so she couldn’t be our film person! That was a little bit difficult, but we perservered and got most of the shots as best we could. I was feeling a little discouraged, but we tried our best and made do with what we had. When we showed the class our video I realized how it was not very good at all because we were missing some clips and forgot to add the ending… Our group editor did her best to make revisions and it turned out a bit better! Here is the final video.

Reflection 🤔

I think that since the second take was very rushed and disorganized, the first draft was better. I did learn a lot about switching plans last minute though. In the future I will be more prepared for any circumstance that comes in the way of set plans. Now for the driving question!

How might we learn video skills by recreating a short film?

To answer this driving question I think that I learned so many more valuable videography techniques from this one short film. Although I did not film most of the clips, I learned how difficult it can be to make an exact copy of another film. It was also hard not to smile, and that is something that I can work on with acting skills. Overall, assignment was more difficult than I expected it to be, but I worked with my group members to accomplish what we got!

Thank you!

Driving Question 🚙: How does experiencing a workday shape our view of career choices?

At the start of November, all of the grade 9’s had Take Your Kid To Work Day. I was invited to go to Xenon Pharmaceuticals with my friend Julia. Her dad is the CEO of the company!  I am really glad that I got this opportunity, and got to experience so many cool new things.

Xenon Pharmaceuticals 🧪

Here are some things that I learned about Xenon! I learned that they develop drugs for epilepsy, depression, and anxiety. Mostly epilepsy. Epilepsy is a brain disease where your nerve cells in your brain don’t always signal properly, which can cause seizures. Seizures can be very dangerous if you are swimming, driving, or in any situation that could be a hazard if a seizure did occur. I did not know about any of this, so it was cool to learn about.

How the day went….

We started by getting an introduction presentation. Julia’s dad Ian and some of his coworkers introduced themselves to all the kids there. I think there were about 10 kids there. After the intro, we got into pairs and did a scavenger hunt to get to know the facility.  Throughout the day we got lots of different presentations from different position. We heard from scientists, the technology department, and so much more. We got to watch experiments, and go into the lab. We got fed a really good lunch and there was a snack bar open at all times!

Our Task

Our task was to capture a bunch of footage and photos throughout the day. Julia and I interviewed 3 different people about their jobs and how they got into them. We asked about what university courses and jobs they had before joining xenon. We asked them about what was challenging and what they loved about their jobs. I put all these clips together to create a iMovie. We used some new techniques like using Ken Burns, and freeze frames. Sadly, due to privacy I can’t share the final video to the public, but I can show some pictures.

IMG_4093

Sending thanks!

To send thank you letters to our mentor for the day, we constructed an email. It is very important to thank people who took time out of their day to teach us about their jobs! Here is a screen shot of my email:

Answering the driving question

How does experiencing a workday shape our view of career choices? I think learning about this field of work and brain science showed me all the possibilities in life. It is a very hard job, but I learned how much it helps people. Getting to experience the workplace gave me a good idea on how different jobs have so many good things about them. I got to experience being in an office, which was super cool because so many companies has office spaces. I think I will always remember what this day taught me, and how many possibilities there are in life!

Welcome back!

I have not written in my blog for a while because it has been summer, but I am back at it! To start off this blog post, I will talk about the many steps we took to working towards answering the driving question this project. Part of this project was interviewing people, and we interviewed people from the tops of mountains, to tea houses in the middle of the wilderness! Keep reading to find out how and why…

Driving Question

The driving question for this project was “How do we become the best versions of ourselves?” Throughout this whole project, we pieced together an answer for this question. Read on to find out!

Banner in the Sky

To prepare our class for our Alberta trip and the hikes, we read Banner in the Sky. After reading the book, we were assigned a character to make a character sketch from. Here is mine for Emil Saxo.

Reading this book was helpful to prepare mentally for the hikes and mountaineering we did! Personally, I didn’t really enjoy this book that much. It was a little hard to read at times because it felt a little repetitive, But I am glad I stuck with it.

Interviewing Skills

To practice our interviewing and video making skills, we started out by making an interview video with a classmate. I interviewed Tyler! I will put in this video to show the progress I made in editing and interviewing people from before the trip to Alberta to after the trip to Alberta. 

Alberta 🏔️

As you may know, one of the main parts of PLP is field studies. You can go and check out my Oregon post from last year. Our class hopped on a bus, and drove all the way to Alberta! I never realized how the climate and landscape could change so much over a short-ish distance. I was so lucky to see the beauty of British Columbia, and how breathtaking the sight were so amazing. I am a hiking pro now after some of the long and crazy hikes we summited! Here are some photos from the trip.

We had to ask ourselves many times, “How can I reach my peak potential today?” Whether it was getting super early for a hike (despite going to bed super late), to summiting a mountain, to trying a new food!

Viral Video

One of the tasks on our trip was to create a TikTok video with a travel theme. It could be a transition video, a photo dump a dance, or any other trends. The one criteria was that it had to show the scenery of Alberta. I chose to do a photo and video dump format, where I pieced together lots of videos of my trip.  Here it is!

Silent Film

This was the video I enjoyed creating the most. For a silent film, you have to really emphasize movement and emotions. We went to the Three Valley Gap Ghost Town to film this. If you have ever been to the ghost town, you know that it is a bit creepy… Especially near Halloween with the ghost trains and decorations 👻! It was a very cool setting to film our silent film. We were allowed to think of any plot for our video, as long as it had a beginning, middle, and end. Here is the story spine we created before the trip. I was in a group with Elsa, Julia, and Lian.

Here is the final video!

Something that our group could have revised on was adding music all the way through. That was the main feedback. And to our surprise, our teacher said that the rizz party scene could be taken out 😂. In the end though, we got a mountain climber meaning we were almost there but it was time to move on. 

10 Essentials Video

All the practice interviews led up to this moment! The task was to create a large blended video with interviews that we made with strangers we came across. We asked them questions about the “10 essentials of life”.  We asked questions like “Who is somebody who lifts you up in a hard time?”. The questions were meant to teach us life lessons in order to live a happy successful life. My group members were Elsa, and Maya. Here is my 10 essentials of life video.

How Can We Be The Best Versions of Ourselves?

To reflect on this ⬆️ driving question, I think that every little assignment we did for this project contributed to the answer. I don’t think you can ever be the “best” version of yourself, and I think that every day you should wake up and try your best.

Listening to other people’s stories and personal experiences helped give me perspective that everyone goes through hard times and struggles, but there is always a way out. Even just going to Alberta with my class was super challenging and exhausting at times, but I tried to reach my “Peak potential” every day.

This whole project taught me so much about Interviewing skills, editing, hiking, history, life lessons, and so much more!

Thank you for reading!

What do you like to draw? Shapes, words, robots, emojis, logos?

Well, in this project we got to draw all of those things in Maker!  It was a very fun week because I love art and drawing, and I find it very relaxing. I will show each drawing, and explain the process of each one. The app that we used was Sketches Pro. Keep reading! 🎨

SHAPES

Shapes can be hard to draw, especially when it comes to 3D shapes. But once you can picture them in your head, it gets easier. Here are some of the shapes that I doodled:

Drawing these shapes was fun, but it was also frustrating because I couldn’t quite get the shading right. I used the ruler tool in Sketches Pro to make the lines in the triangular prism and the cube. There is even a ruler tool for circles.  If you angled your Apple Pencil a certain way, you could shade using the pencil brush. You can see the blue in the background, which was water colour. Drawing shapes isn’t my favourite type of drawing, but it is good to come back to every once in a while.

WORD ART

I have actually always liked word art. I think it is cool to take a word or a name, and then turn it into a creative piece of art. I chose to draw my name in bubble letters. I used bubble letters a lot in previous years, and they are getting easier to do.

In the background I drew flowers using my favourite brush (Watercolour). Then, I used the pastel and the pen to draw lines that curved around each bump. I think doing that adds interest to the letters, and it makes it pop. This was very fun for me because I feel like there were lots of ways that I could show my personality through the art.

ROBOT 🤖

This assignment was actually harder than I thought it would be. I just couldn’t think of a good design that would be unique, and have different shapes in it. But, every time I think of robots, I think of the cookie robots from the movie Despicable Me.     

So I made a modified version of those! I did it from memory, so the details aren’t perfectly accurate. We had to use shapes in our robot, and I used rectangles, circles, and squares. As you can see, The background is watercolour. I used shading in my robot, and I think it turned out pretty good, considering that we only had about 15 minutes to draw this.

FLOWERS 💐

As I mentioned before, my favourite brush to use on sketches pro is the watercolour brush. You can choose from different types of sizes, shapes, and opacities. This was not an assignment, but I did this on my own time.

I found that it was a very relaxing and fun way to use the watercolour tool. I have done flowers like this on real paper before, and made cards out of them. Anyways, back to the school work!

EMOJI

As you probably know, Emojis are used on apple devices. Emojis are an effective way to show your thoughts, feelings, or add emphasis to things. In this assignment, we were told to draw an emoji. We could make one up, or draw one that already exists. I chose to do this one: 😬.

I am not very proud of the way that it turned out, and I think I could have made it neater. I could clean it up a bit. But like many things, there is room for improvement. It was hard to make it match the inspo picture in the top right corner, but I think it still resembles the original emoji.

LOGO

This was the last drawing of the week, and I was excited about this one. We were given an outline, and told to fill it out. We had to think of a business, the purpose of it, a catchphrase, and most importantly, a name! My business was called Surf’s Up, Merch Up. It sells merch my favourite movie called Surf’s Up. The merch features Chicken Joe. He is, in my opinion the best character.(He is!)

I was quite proud of this actually. I liked the vibe that I chose, and the colour scheme. I feel like the vibe matches the movie. I think that it also looks like a sticker, because of the light blue outline. Overall, I think this was my most successful drawing so far!

THANK YOU!

I hope you enjoyed that summary! Make sure to stay tuned for more posts!

WHAT IS WORLDVIEW? WHAT IS MY WORLDVIEW?

Don’t worry! You’re not alone. Those were some of the big questions that I had before this project. But along the way, I learned what worldview actually is, and I learned how experiences, beliefs, and actions are only some things that shape a person’s worldview. It is a confusing thing, and everyone’s worldview is constantly changing. In example, my worldview has changed in so many ways since the end of grade 7. I went on a trip to Europe (check out my blog on that), which really gave me perspective on how different people live in the world. Reading the outsiders taught me how bad some people have it, and how fortunate we are here. 

THE OUTSIDERS

The Outsiders was set in The 1960s, and it is about of gang of boys. Three brothers live alone, and they face many challenges, and have to fend for themselves. Many of the gang members are thief’s. And the gang vandalizes, steals, and much more. I thought that this book was a good read, and I do recommend it. It taught me a lot about perspective, and how things were back then. Every week we had to do a role sheet about the section that we read. 

 We had to do many other small assignments that helped us think deeply into the idea of worldview in the outsiders, and in general. Here are some of the projects we did along the way: Worldview MindNode, Song lyrics, and finally, the end result. You can watch the final result here 👇

MUSIC VIDEO

Keep reading to learn about the other assignments, and the process of creating the song 🎶 

DRIVING QUESTION

The driving question for this project was:How can a text help me understand myself as my worldview is changing? Here is the paragraph I wrote about the driving question.

WORLDVIEW MINDNODE

This was one of the first assignments, and it was mainly to help us understand our worldviews. For each section we had to write down a statement, and a personal experience or connection that we have with the statement. The sections were: Time, Geography, Society, Beliefs, Values, Economy, and Knowledge. This task really helped me piece together the idea of worldview. I think it was very helpful. Right now I don’t think that there is anything that I would do differently in this project, and I am proud of it. (This image quality is not very good) 

ROLE SHEETS

Every week we had to do a role sheet. It was reflecting on the section of the book I read, and it helps go into depth with your thinking. This was one sheet called the coder. We had to draw two mini drawings and paste in the quote that we based it off. We then had to explain why we did it, and why we thought it was fitting. These role sheets were designed for our group discussions, and they are interesting to share with your group. Everyone always has different opinions and ideas, so it makes a good discussion. I feel like doing the role sheets every week and hearing my group member’s ideas helped me understand the book way better.

SONG LYRICS

As we got closer to the end, we created a draft of our song. We had to re-create ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It’ by REM. The lyrics had to represent our transition into high school, and our changing worldview.I created my first draft, dreading the moment when we had to make individual music videos.I did NOT want to sing it alone. The day we handed it in, we were told that we were going to be put into groups to make a music video together.

Group: Chloe, Marcus and Madeline (me)

I was very relieved 😅! But that meant that we had to create new lyrics, to be a mix of all our previous lyrics. It was pretty challenging to blend it all together, but after lots of thinking we got it all figured out. I have to say, it was way smoother all blended together.  

To hear the lyrics all put together, watch the music video up above!

MUSIC VIDEO

Finally, after all the work, we were on the final stretch. The most challenging part was recording on garage band. I think we re-recorded about 4 times. It was hard to all be on time, and we were having technical difficulties so that also set us back a bit. When we finished recording we inserted the song into iMovie. My group and I sent pictures of us all the way from toddlers to now. We used a shared album on the photos app, and shared that way. We added the pictures to the song, and finally, our group had successfully created a movie video!! 🎉 Check out my Youtube video above! Overall, I really enjoyed the process of this project, and I feel like I understand my worldview a lot more.

THANK YOU

(Click on the video above to check out my Youtube video! It is my Keynote presentation about Becoming a PLP Learner)

This is my very first reflection post, and I wanted to share it with you.  The project was called Becoming a PLP Learner, and I wanted to show you guys! The driving question was:  Who Am I As A PLP Learner. The project consisted of many smaller assignments. I learned to use many tools, and applications that I have never used before. I really enjoyed this project. I could definitely improve on things in the future, but for now this is what I have done. Click on the video above to check out my Youtube video. It is my Keynote presentation about Becoming a PLP Learner. Here are the assignments:

ME-EMOJI ANIMATION

We were assigned to make a Memoji that looks like us, and insert it to our keynote presentation with a laptop. On the laptop we had to make digital stickers of images, logos, or things that are important to us. After that, we had to animate the stickers so they spin, bounce, e.t.c. I had some difficulty with making the stickers animated, but after some troubleshooting, we figured it out. Here is a picture of my Memoji:  

WORDPACK

The next thing that we did was make a Wordpack in the Wordpack application. It is an app where you type in words, choose a shape, choose colour combinations, and change the font. It is useful if you want to use a creative way of displaying words. We had to pick words that describe us in ‘I Am’ statements. I thought that this app was pretty cool, and I will definitely use it again.

I AM DOODLE

This assignment also tied into the ‘I Am’ statements. We had to take a selfie of ourselves doing somethings that we love, or something that describes us. We then had to add doodles of the thing we were doing in the selfie, and write an ‘I Am’ statement. Here is mine:

USER MANUAL

One of the tasks that we were assigned was to create a user manual about ourselves. We had to refer to ourselves as a ‘device’ and create the ‘instructions’. It was a cool thing to write about, and I enjoyed it. Check it out here:

About Me

REFLECTION

Who am I as a PLP learner?
I think that I am curious, open minded, and determined. There is more work in PLP, but I am learning how to manage my work with my extracurricular’s. At the start of the year, I thought I would have to spend way more time on homework, but now that I’ve been in PLP I’ve come to realize that I can use my time wisely and complete tasks. I think that I bring some good skills to the PLP learning team, including my sense of humour, my creativeness, my ability to concentrate and listen, being encouraging, and more. I have had to refine and learn many skills so far. Some of them have been learning how to use all the new apps for drawing, presenting, music making, and lots more! I have had trouble it’s a few of the apps being confusing, but I troubleshooted and figured it out. My teachers have been quite helpful and patient, so that helps with my work. This will change throughout the years, but for now this is how I am reflecting on this project!

(Ps. Check out my blog!)

THANKS!