Imagine that you are in a completely white room. White walls, white floor, and the lights are dim. You are wearing all white too and it is cold. And all around you, is chaos. Stressed teachers, students fighting over the last pieces of clear tape. Everyone hurrying to finish whatever task they had deemed important. This is where I found myself one December 19 2019. Ladies and gentleman, the PLP exhibition has struck again.

As you may have noticed, I am writing in quite a descriptive mood. That is because the main topic for this years exhibition was story telling! I loved it! The project itself is a little complex to describe but I will do my best to break it down for you. First of all, let’s start by saying that this Exhibition was Star Wars themed and that played a big role in making our groups and deciding our planets. Basically we were divided into planet groups based on the planets in the Star Wars universe. The planets were; Tatooine, Endor, Hoth, and Death Star (not really a planet but whatever). I was put into the Hoth group along with my fellow storytellers; Ciara, Julia, Kaden, Felix, Brenton, and Angelo.

I say fellow storytellers because that was our task. To write a story about one of the minor characters on our planet. We decided to chose the Tauntaun that died and ended up saving Luke’s life. We also named him Pudge. Then to make it more complex we put our collective story on a story chart, and assigned each part to a group member. Then, that group member would take their part and write a story. To top it all off we created an object that is symbolistic and connects to our story.

The part I got was right after the climax, where sadly, our charector dies. My story;

For this project we were focussing on our ability to create, and our literary skills. So I will be talking about my literary skills first than what it is I created. In our class we talked a lot about a cycle that all stories go through called the hero’s journey. The cycle goes something like this; Call to adventure, committing to the journey, some tests, allies and enemies, the supreme ordeal, reward and road back, and finally crossing and final life. I found that this was challenging to do because finding the climax of the story and matching things up isn’t always easy. Luckily we had a lot of practice thanks to the short stories that we had read.

After a lot of practice I think that I can analyze stories fairly well. I find that when I am writing I have one of 2 problems; the first is that I can’t think about anything to write and the second more common one is that I have too much to say and can’t narrow things down. I managed to get over this struggle by taking feedback from my group, and incorporating more that fit with the others stories. Since I am not that big of a fan of Star Wars, I relied a lot on my group members to make sure that my story made since.

Now, as much as I love story telling and books, I must say that the create part of this project was incredibly fun. As I explained briefly before, I made an object that helped represent my story. That object could be anything; physical or digital, as long as it connected to the story in some way. The object that I ended up making was a paper mâché heart. In the beginning I was planning on making the heart as realistic as possible but I soon realized how inconvenient that would be. My main charector is a fictional animal so the closest example that I could come use would be a cross between a horse and a lizard. So, in the end I decided to make a more symbolistic representation of a heart so that it would be easier for the audience to understand what they were seeing and I could put more time and detail into the heart itself. That was part of the reason why I made a paper mâché was so that you could see the past of the Tauntaun through a filter.

Throughout this project we were documenting our learning using an app called Explain Everything. This app allows me to make annotations on pictures and add videos. It is great for animating and explaining things which is why I used it. Check out my video below.

In the end after talking with the audience I decided that our group did a good job of making an interactive experience that elevated our stories. I had a lot of fun with this project and I am looking forward to the next. Check out some pictures from the exhibition below.