As I woke up at 7am on Saturday, march 2nd, the only thing I could think of was DI. The night before my group had worked tirelessly to finish our pinball machine; with painting, making costumes and finalizing everything, I wished we had more time. But all these lessons I’ve learned through regionals will benefit me in provincials.
Let’s begin from the start. My group consisted of Jackson, Jack, Jasper, Ailie, Matteo and me, which created our team name J.J.J.A.M.M. At the beginning of DI we signed a contract, basically to promise to be nice to eachother. I do think our team worked well together with communication and creativity. There were exceptions though in which at certain times we got stressed. For the future I wish to be more patient and understanding and well as using my time to benefit others mode and relieve the stress of DI.
Overall for this project/ presentation we had to make a working pinball machine and a story that included it in some way.
Our group collaborated our on main idea which won us 2nd place in regionals. Our presentation was great, our acting was emotional and our costumes worked well, the one part we left out of were the acutal rules of the pinball. We unfortunately didn’t even make one round so we got zero points for rounds. For next time we’d like to improve on actually getting credits for the pinball rounds and how to rework if we fail.
My contribution was I was a designer. Our group worked collaboratively but we also had jobs, some focused on building and others did designing.
Overall I think I learned a lot of new things, as well as things I’ll use in the future. For example, I’ve learned new skills on how to use building tools properly especially the drill; and also somewhat skills like time management. This became crucial at the very end before regionals where we were in a big time crunch. But we did accomplish a lot in those 24 hours before presenting.
These are our “donuts” that we made as a team choice element. Lesson learned donuts are really hard to make. Thankfully I went through this struggle with some of my team members.
As you can see at the bottom right is our pinball machine. You may be able to tell, or not but our choice was to make it Star Wars themed. We decorated it and made it not look too heinous. In the end we were very proud of our finished product and how it came together. Obviously there’s room for improvement which we will present at provincials.
As I tore apart multiple stuffies, their arms legs and torso and resewed them together. I had created a monster, a monster named Todd.
1. Making our Frankie stuffie
My frankiestuffie is named Todd. I created him from octopus, flamingo and bear. But I wasn’t always sure of his design. I had a vision and an ambition to make something weird and different. As I grabbed random stuffies of the shelves of superstore I got already see him being born.
Throughout this part of the project I learned how to sew and use my creativity. I’ve given Todd personality, characteristics and so much more. He’s a humourous guy but later faces challenges when it comes to making a story.
2. Making a story
We started with gathering information about how to portray our story. With our driving question “how do we as writers make our message clear and engaging to an audience.” Through our story we can use verbal communication, animated actions, clear plot, hints and so much more to interact with our audiences understanding.
3. Creating a film
Now we implement our story into film. In these past few weeks we learned how to use different apps that have been provided to us to create our film. I decided to use keynote and iMovie to deliver my story. I animated within keynote using their tools, including animation, media, voice recordings and more. A big part of these process was creating a storyboard.
This is my story board:
My teachers told the class that every animated movie has to start with a storyboard, it helps with the animated process. Giving slides, frames and details to fortell the final product.
4. Final product
This is my final film. It is based in the White House and it’s a mystery film surrounding the idea for unfair government and economy. The rest is for you to find out:
Overall this entire project has taught me skills within apps that I will later use in the future when needed. There were multiple successes and also failures, like when I couldn’t import might movie properly so it was just a random project in keynote and I thought I had nothing left for me. Another failure was editing, this killed me. The timing to link everything together took many tires and plenty of time. The success though was the finished project and the stuffy. I loved how both turned out together. As well as it showed me ways on how to communicate efficiently to my audience whether it’s in animated or art form. I enjoyed this project especially creating the stuffy and then making an entire story for my character.
