To begin this school year, our teachers organized a one night getaway for us PLP 10 students, to get us working hard as a team right away in the year. We went to a small camp only a 20 minute drive away called Camp Capilano, and it was a small building with a dining room, common area with couches, and two large rooms with bunks, one for the guys and one for the girls. And there was a pool, which was very important. We worked on a three projects while we were there.

Our first project wasn’t filmed at Camp Capilano, we stopped at an outdoor park by a dam near the camp to work. It was an outdoor area with multiple viable locations to film. This project was inspired by Master Chef, Amazing Race or Big Brother and their intros that introduce all the contestants. We watched those intros and looked to see the different personalities of the different people earlier that day. Then we made our own intro that had to introduce different people, but we weren’t allowed to use dialogue. We were in groups though, and we had to act out 10 different characters that had distinct personalities. We only had one hour to make the entire video, so once the starting gun fired, my group of five got right down to work.

We first thought of the different personalities we wanted to portray, and then planned how we would show that in a short clip without talking. It was difficult because we really needed to think on how the viewer will be able to compare each character to the next, and see how they’re different. Anyways, our theme would be a wilderness survival show, and we titled it “The Wilderness Games.” Our characters would be participating in this event. Anyways, what we came up with is this:

After watching it, with only 10 minutes left in our allotted time, we realized we should’ve:
• Made our clips a bit longer for each person
• Really broken down what we wanted to portray and focus on that one small thing better
• Transitioned between characters better

But, we were happy with what we got, and it was a good start.

That afternoon, after a great lunch, we then were assigned another project. This one was assigned when we had arrived at Camp Capilano. The main idea: the same thing we just did with the TV show intros except only audio. No visuals. Only us recording our voice. We got into our same groups and got planning.

Since there we couldn’t film and show personalities physically, we needed to think very carefully about what we put in the script. We got to work planning out the 10 different characters which were mostly the same as before, but we changed a few people that were easier to portray through voice. Our main idea for this task was still the Wilderness Games, but now you were hearing a reporter ask all the contestants what they think their biggest strength will be in the Games. First we wrote a script, and as we went through it, we made the necessary changes. Then we were ready to record. We went through and each did two different people, and then once we recorded all of it in iMovie, we did a little bit of editing like cutting the clips, or reorganizing the order of them. Then we got our final product:

That one was fun to make, yet required careful planning and thinking to pull it off right. Then we had free time. We swam in the pool for an hour or so, and it was lots of fun. It wasn’t super deep and it didn’t have a diving board, but we had chicken fights and breath holding contests and stuff like that which made it fun.

Then there was dinner, and then we watched the projects we already did. They were really fun to watch/listen to. Everyone tackled the assignment differently, and it gave everyone ideas on how they could’ve done it a little differently, or ideas for next time.
Then the final project was given to us. We had to find different groups, and so I ended up with Simon and Spencer. We then had to make a 4:00 podcast (audio only story) that was on the topic of identity. We needed a story that talked about our identity and how it affected or portrayed our identity. Oh boy.
By the way, this project was introduced to us at around 7:00 pm that night, and it was due at 10:00am the next morning…
So we had to get cracking

Spencer Simon and I thought for a while and were having trouble coming up with something. Our only idea was this one time we were maintaining an area of Dirt Jumps for mountain bikes, and one time when we did a lot of work in particular, I ended up crashing face first into a log on the ground really hard. Then the next time we went there, we noticed that there were other bikers there, and we were happy.

We thought this story was a good idea because it shows that we like mountain biking, and we will build trails in our community to help it, just for fun and we keep going even when we crash. We pitched this idea to our three teachers, Mr. Hughes, Miss Willemse and Miss Maxwell. They thought our story was great, but to leave out the part where I crashed, or at least don’t make it the main part of our story. This is because the smaller of the event we chose to talk about the better, because we could really break it down. We agreed and got to work. This was between 8:30-9:00. We began our script writing, which was hard when your brain is fried and it’s getting late…

But then we began second guessing our decision on our story, which really, really, slowed us down to the point where we stopped and asked the teachers which idea to go through with because at that point we’d thought of two more. They listened to our new ones and told us to fully commit to our first one, which they thought was the best. And so we did. This was definitely past 10:00, probably later.
We wanted to just skip the script writing process, but we didn’t know what we were saying it so it wasn’t as strong as if we did have a script. So then we began slowly began wiring bit by bit on the script. This almost drove us insane. It was probably 11:45 or later, and we’d barely got anything done. All three of us were cranky and tired, and kept getting off track. This went on till about 1:00-1:30am when the teachers told us we all need to stop and go to sleep. Relieved, we dragged ourselves off the couches and went to sleep. We’d managed to get most of the script done, so when we woke up at 7:00 the next morning, we finished our recordings, ran through it, and were happy. Then the fun part. Listening to everyone else’s. I liked hearing all the different stories and sometimes funny, sometimes serious interviews in each podcast. One podcast was actually all about Kyle’s hair…

Anyways, here it is:

This project is really fun, and taught us a lot without us even realizing it. We learned about personalities, how to analyze them, portray them through visuals and audio, telling a good and interesting story, and lots more I haven’t thought of. Overall it was an awesome trip where we all got to know one another better, and had lots of fun.

Thanks,
See you