So here we are, end of the project and I can proudly say that me and my group have finished are metaphor machine. If you’ve read my other blog post you’ll know that in PLP 9 we have been working on a project for the past two months. Our task was to create a machine that would show the process of a chosen revolution that would have to include a circuit, the aesthetic of steampunk and we would also need to create a video of the process of building the machine, and how it works. First we had to learn about Crane Brinton and his theory of revolution, Crane brintons theory of revolution was book Crane brinton wrote talking about his theory. His theory was that a revolution would have four stages, in each stage the revolution would progressively get worse until the last stage, this is when the revolution would start getting better and go back to normal, Crane brinton described a revolution almost like a fever. Next we had to learn about steampunk and what it is. Steampunk is a sub genre of science fiction that typically features steam powered machinery rather then advanced technology, typically the people are dressed as if they where in the Victorian era. Machines in steampunk are usually made of copper or brass and havin all the “guts” showing, so if there was a 
steampunk watch it would have all the cogs and materials commonly seen on the inside showing on the outside. We also had to learn about a revolution of choice. We where put into groups and had a choice of what revolution are machine would be based on. My group consisted of Claire, Sofia, Simon, and I. The revolution we chose was the Haitian revolution. The Haitian revolution was when the people of colour revolted against the white colour due to disagreements over the freedom rights. So in our machine we included a piece of paper being ripped in half, this represents the people of colour disagreeing with the white colonists over freedom rights.
We had many other metaphors in our machine. We started off with making a timeline of our revolution, we did a lot of
Researching on our revolution so we would be able to explain each step of the revolution and each step of our machine. We then started planning out the metaphors and how we would put our machine together, we got all the metaphors and then decided how to use them and how we would build are machine. We got all the supplies we would need for our machine and started building. Building the machine took a lot of planning and time. We would always come up with cool ideas but it would be pretty hard to use on the machine. We spent a lot of time on building the start of our machine as we could never get it to work. We would have a piece of paper rip in half by a metal gear/cog pulling on one side of the paper, which would cause a metal ball fall out and roll down a track. This would represent the people of colour disagreeing with the white colonists over freedom rights, the ball represented Toussaint the main leader of the people of colour int the haitian revolution. This was hard to do on the machine because the ball was never able to stay in the paper and would always fall out on the floor. We solved this by using stronger paper and have the paper taped down for extra support. Me and Simon did a lot of building the machine and testing to make it 
work while Claire and Sofia made the video. For the video we took lots of time lapses of building, used lots of images of us building and filmed the machine working. In the our video that I have included below, it tells you about the Haitian revolution, how we built the machine, the overall project and how we planned it out, and What we learned. We planned the video out before using a video template that showed what would be included in the video and all the dialogue that would be spoken.
I’m really proud of my group because we all put lots of effort into this project and tried to do our best, this project was very interesting, fun, and it taught me a lot, I learned how to plan and use my time a lot better and because this is my first year in PLP it taught ,me what PLP group projects are like and what the expectations are for a great project. I liked how we got to choose the revolution we wanted to use because it made researching a lot more fun and interesting. Overall I really liked this project and a lot of fun building the machine.
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