It was horrifying, heads and limbs everywhere…

Hello everybody, for our first Humanities project of semester 2, I have created my own story to tell, and film to show! I’m excited to finally share it with all of you!

To start off, we actually made our own Frankenstuffies! As everybody brought in 2 – 3 stuffed animals, we dismembered them, shared parts, and we sewed them together! Some people’s were very messed up, I kept mine simple though. His name is Oswald Wiggles.

After some very questionable sewing on my part, we then filled out some forms, such as a character resumé where we gave details of our characters, such as their job (if they had one), and all of this was to help us later when we actually began to create our story!

We began the creation of our story with the heroes journey outline, where we actually started laying the groundwork for our story. We then decided which part of the heroes journey our story would focus on, as this had to be a short story. Over the next few days we then began drafting for our short story, I think in the end I liked my short story.

Afterwards, we moved on to the production of our films. Our films had to be a maximum of 3 minutes long, we did have a lot of flexibility on what to use which I think was a great idea. I created my film in DaVinci Resolve, with some parts of it being drawn by me in Procreate, and most of it being animated in Keynote. In the end the process of making the film was fun to me, I enjoyed it.

Here’s my movie:

Then last but not least, we also read a book during this process! We read Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld! We read it because it really defined the idea of transformation, along with it being helpful for answering the driving question (more on that later).

Now that you’ve heard what we’ve done, you must be wondering what we actually learned.

This project heavily focused on the competency of communication, along with our big idea being communication. Our goal was to be able to have the abilities to tell our story across different forms of media, whilst being clear and engaging. As every single skill we went over in this project could be used in the future, such as explaining your actions to your parents as an example!

Like in Let’s Get Riel!, this project also focused on our writing skills, as we had to create a short story for our film. We had to plan out the plot, character, and dialogue to effectively convey our story to our audience whilst keeping them engaged.

The first page of my original storyboard.

 I always like these projects that have a bit more of a focus on writing than others since they give me a chance to improve my writing ability.

Now to wrap up this blog post, with our driving question and a little summary!

“How do we as writers make our message clear and engaging to an audience?”

As writers, we must first understand our story and which audience we want it to appeal to. Then we need to make sure to capture the attention of the readers early on, one example of this is maybe saying something that happens in the future then cutting to the “official” beginning of the book which is let’s just say maybe 48 hours before that. Such as:

As Austin struggled to get back up, it was slowly walking towards him. 2 days earlier: Austin was just getting out of bed. Excited to start a new day!

Assuming you’ve at least read my written short story, you know it ends on a cliff hanger. So I’m curious, what do you think? This QR Code below will lead you to a Padlet created by me, where you can answer the question. “Do you think Oswald will make it?”.

In the end, I liked this project. Since first of all I love when we get a chance to write and learn how to improve at writing, and it’s always fun when we need to write a story, or shoot a film! That’s all from me today, have a great spring break everybody!