Hi, welcome back to my blog. This post is about my most recent project, Storm the Barricades. This project was all about revolutions and filming. In this project we had to write two paragraphs about the French and American Revolutions. The paragraph about the American Revolution was about the historical significance of that Revolution. The French paragraph was about the causes and consequences of the French Revolution. While I am writing these paragraphs we also have to make a Rube Goldberg machine. We had to make three different mods of our machine, that correspond to the different revolutions. Along with the mods of our machine we had to make a video about our machines mods. All of these assignments contributed to our understanding of the driving question. Our driving question for this project was How do revolutions transform societies? After all of these assignments I can safely say that I have the answer to the driving question. My answer is Revolutions transform societies by causing a uprising which allows other people’s ideas to be heard. This allows for people to transform a government, allow a country to be independent or even give certain people more rights.
At the start of this project we go put into four different groups. Each group was labeled, there was North, South, east and west. I did different things in each group. North was the group I made my machine and videos in, East is where we helped each other gain more knowledge about the subjects, West was about writing skills and refining them and South was about a book we are reading call Leviathan. This set up our whole project. Our first Milestone was to make a Rube Goldberg machine that represents all the stages in Crane Brinton’s theory of revolutions. I made this machine with my North group, this machine was very bad, luckily we had two more mods to improve on. In this milestone I learned about the whole process that a revolution has to go through. There is the good the bad and the ugly. This was a key part in me understanding all the steps of a revolution.
The next step was milestone two and three. These milestones were both paragraphs. One was about the American Revolution and its historical significance and the other was about the French Revolution and its causes and consequences. These paragraphs really helped me answer the driving question because I learned about two completely different revolutions and their different causes, consequences and historical significance. While researching these revolutions I also learned how their revolutions transformed their society. While I’m writing these paragraphs, I’m modding my machine to represent the American Revolution and showing the phases of a revolution through metaphors and different symbols and actions. After we modified our machine to the American Revolution it was time for the French Revolution. Although the machine modifications were not a milestone we still had to do the best we could because it all leads up to the final product of our project.
Finally we are at the end of our project. I am preparing for our final video. However this video will be different from all others. This time we have to make our own story to go with our machine. We decide to make our video half animated in a app called puppet pals and the other half our machine. In this final milestone we show how our story’s society transforms through a revolution it goes through. By this time in the project I already know my answer to the driving question because of all the previous work on revolutions and transformation. We spend a whole day just planning for the filming. We made scripts, voiceovers, storyboard and even the story mountain. The next day we do all the filming, editing and tune up some of the voice overs. By Saturday we have our final video done and it looks pretty good if I say so myself.
Overall this project was really tough because it was a lot of work in a short amount of time but with my classmates Simon, Jordan and Julien we conquered this project. I learned a lot about revolutions and society’s in this project. I have a feeling this is just the start of whats coming at me later in life. I wont let that get in the way though because I will have all this information stored in my head ready to spring into action whenever I need it.
