When we first started this project I had no idea what crazy things Jeremy Murphy was going to get into.
This semester we built a “frankenstuffie”. A frankenstuffie is created by sewing together multiple stuffed animals to make a hideous creature. For example, mine started as a meerkat, a dog, and a dragon. For short, he is a Drameerdog, pronounced “Dur-meer-dog”, but I call him Jeremy Murphy. In addition to making the stuffy, we had to create a story and a video representing the life of our frankenstuffie. The life of Jeremy is very complicated. To make a long story short, he was made in a Norwegian lab, then sent to America because he stole from a store. In America he stole the world’s biggest diamond. When he didn’t get caught he decided to spy on Norway for designing him as such an oddball, and he ended up bombing their headquarters so no more frankenstuffies could be made.
I also learned how to sew during this project, which is a good life skill I didn’t have. We used basic sewing techniques to sew the different body parts of the animals together to make our frankenstuffie.
During the design of the story we learned story structure. I found this helpful because I didn’t know what story structure was before. To help understand what story structure is, we watched some Pixar Shorts and had to name both the structure of the story as well as the theme.
MY FULL VIDEO:
There are four steps to creating a successful frankenstuffie and story. Number one, create your character, for me I saw a meerkat body. When I was looking for different attachments for it, I found a dog’s head that fit it perfectly, so I decided to use that. And since you need three different animals, I decided to add a dragon’s tail. The next step in creating a successful frankenstuffie is building your plot. This includes thinking about how he was made, who his family is, what he likes and so on. For mine, he was built in a Norwegian lab, and didn’t have any family and he liked being a thief. Then he set out on a mission, and so on. You also need to design a theme. Guess mine at the end!
However before I actually started to write my story, we had to make a hero’s journey, and select one of the journeys to make a full story. There are 7 parts of a hero’s journey. I chose “Tests allies’ Enemies Part 2”. I chose this because he had to either meet a bad guy or have something bad happen to him. Something bad happened to Jeremy when he forgot the diamond.
Once we finished our entire story it was time to start our video. I made my video using Keynote, so it was all animations and no real world stuff. I started my video off with Jeremy Murphy leaving the lab where he was fabricated. My first slide wasn’t very good because I didn’t know how to use Keynote, however when I played around with it and learned how to use it better. When I ended he blew up the place where he was made, and my skills in this were a lot better. I have learned so many Keynote techniques, and I feel much more confident with it.
Overall, I think this project was fun and full of good learning. If I was to do this again, I would skip the writing learning and go straight to the writing so I could improve my first draft. I feel like I do better when I try first and then learn from what I do wrong.
Here is a link to my padlet, you can comment what you think my theme is! https://padlet.com/sebastianh22/jeremy-murphy-ymxy9mqt0nbxt2yu