So if you didn’t already know most of the PLP class went down to Florida for a field study. The main project for the trip was based on making a video explaining what draws us into the imaginary world of a specific ride. This post will be about the video part of the trip if you want to read more about the trip itself read my older blog post here.

Anyways the first thing we did prior to the top was pick our ride. I got given Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin. This was one of my favourite rides as a young kid so I wanted to get it. The next thing we did was story boarding on a basic graphic organizer. Which is a sheet of paper that has a box  of text for each of Exposition, Rising Action 1 and 2, Climax, Falling Action, and Impact. This sheet basically gets us to outline our plan for the video without having to go too in-depth. We then did a full on story board for each shot we needed. This style of story board is not the easiest for me as may style of video editing is working with what I’ve got rather than fully planning it out. Each page of story board has 6 slides i filled up almost 6 full pages.

We were then finally off to florida. The first day there was the day at the Magic Kingdom of Disney World. This was where my ride was located so I had to do all of my filming here. One of the key elements of the video was supposed be having interviews so I got 3 different interviews. Two with my friends and one with a disney cast member. Unfortunately I managed to kill my phone while on the trip so I lost all my footage.

When we got back from the trip we pretty much instantly started work on a first draft. I found it tough to get started on the video as I had lost all of my own phone footage and was waiting on the download of the few scenes that I had filmed on the GoPro. When I got this footage I realized it wasn’t great as the ride had been so crowded and I didn’t really have much to work with. So my approach to draft 1 was to write my script and then find images and video that fit into the script. This kind of worked, but the end result is too choppy and I wasn’t really very happy with it.

For the second draft I worked from the same script, but tried to find a lot more video footage that I could use. This definitely improved the flow of the overall video and made it much easier to watch. However, it still didn’t do a really good job of answering the driving question about how we are drawn into fantasy worlds.

After the second draft we received extensive feedback based on reviews of our video by both our teachers and senior PLP students. The general comments about most of our videos was that we were not answering the driving question, were missing interviews and were not telling enough of a story. In my case the specific feedback was that the intro was unclear, I wasn’t explaining enough about how the ride draws us in, and my voice-over was too fast and unclear in places. There were also some suggestions to rearrange parts of the content.

Baseed on this feedback I tried to think about why I liked this ride so much when I was a kid. The reality I felt was that the most compelling part of the ride is actually trying to get a high score. The ride itself is very hectic and so there isn’t a huge amount of time for story-telling. For my final draft I changed a large amount of the video, as I took this new perspective that the competition was the key to this ride. I linked this to the imaginary world by seeing the parallels between the ride and the Buzz v Zurg storyline in Toy Story 2. After re-writing the script I felt much happier with my video and it was far easier to find suitable footage to fit with my new storyline.

This is the final draft – I think it tells a good story about the ride and why it draws the rider into the imaginary world of Buzz and Zurg.