Welcome to this all new and amazing post. This post will be about a project we have been undergoing for a while now. It involves science, math, and humanities. I’m excited to present you with (drum role please) The Metaphor Machine Project! In this project we had to incorporate many things. I will get to the science and math part of it in another post, but for this post we are talking about the humanities side. The big question for this unit was ‘how do ideas drive change?’. Since there were so many aspects of this project I’m going to split it up into a few main ones. Throughout this project we learnt lots about our revolution, but rather than writing about it all you can just watch our video on it.

Steampunk

One of the aspects of our project was steampunk. We had to make our machines with the steampunk genre. I already wrote a whole post about this which you can access HERE. I decided to talk about this first because we were reading a book based on the steampunk genre throughout this whole project. The book was called The Leviathan. I found it rather entertaining and the steampunk genre was interesting within it. If you are still wondering “what is steampunk though?” then just click this LINK.

The project 

We got into groups of 4 for our main project. I got in a group with Gabby, Anika, and Luciano. I thought we worked really well together and split the work quite evenly. We got given the French Revolution to create our project on. What is the project as whole? It’s quite complex and simple at the same time. We got given a piece of plywood and had to create a Rube Goldberg machine (above) that was made up of a series of metaphors for the revolution. In the end we had to create a short film about the French Revolution explaining all the metaphors. We cut the revolution into the 4 stages according to Crane Brintons theory of a revolution. Incubation, Moderate, Crisis, and Recovery. We explain all of this in the video, but below is a good visual of what Crane Brintons theory was.

The film draft 1

This was one of the biggest things I had to do. I was in charge of editing the video together. I started by getting numerous shots of our group creating the machine. I used this to creat an engaging intro. We then made scripts for what the voiceovers were going to say. I haven’t talked too much in this post about the revolution itself because it’s all explained in our video. Below is a first draft of our video. It turned out pretty good, but we had some big things to fix. You can watch both videos, but if your only going to watch one you should watch our final video.

The film draft 2

We fixed a lot for this second draft. I used lots of Mrs Maxwells feedback (above) and peer feedback to ensure our group created a better video. We added some music in the background during the voiceovers so it didn’t get boring. We also made all the title cards the same. We redid Jackson’s part because he made some weird farces in the first one. We then changed some of the photos so that they all were the same style and none were copyright. I tried fiddling with the audio so no noises were in the background and that helped a lot. This was our final draft and our group is very proud of it. I hope you enjoy and learn a little bit about the French Revolution.

Anyways I sure learnt many new things in this project and I think the video really shows. I thought our group worked really well together and collaborated nicely. From the novel study to the video, I thought I did really well. I hope you took the time to watch the final video. Thanks so much for reading!

Until next time… Aedan Loughran