Welcome back to my blog. Today, we will be going over the first maker project we have done so far this year. The final product of this project was five “trend videos”, which were five TikTok style videos that we would be filming on location during our field study to DisneyWorld. Now I’m sure you’re wondering how making TikTok’s in DisneyWorld could possibly be for school, and honestly, so am I. I am struggling to find the education in this project. Besides the obvious video work with angles and planning and other things like that, this project doesn’t seem to have many educational things going for it. Nonetheless, I will take you through this project and go over what I “learned”.
Driving Question
“How can I make effective personal design choices?” I can make effective personal design choices by preparing and planning what I am going to do thoroughly, and sticking to my plans.
The Preparation
Leading up to the trip, we did a lot of preparation throughout all of our classes. In maker, we started with creating a personal productivity system designed by Ms Willemse. This was a very interesting way to start the project. It wasn’t really a launch to a project, and I thought it was very interesting. The system itself was a coordination between, calendar, things, and craft. The only thing that I didn’t like about this system was how we didn’t get any control on the systems that we used. We had to use the system that Ms Willemse designed, and while I thought it was a good system, I felt that it wouldn’t work for everyone. I think that forcing people to use a system that works for you, but might not work for them is a little problematic.
After we created the system, we moved on to the project itself. For this project, we would be creating 5 “Trend Videos”, which were essentially TikTok’s. We would plan them out, create storyboards and prototypes, revise, and shoot on location during our DisneyWorld trip. This is the only part of the project that I could start to find some sort of education in. I guess that we learned about planning, revising, and all of those things, but I felt that since the videos were so short and so unpredictable, all of the planning and revising felt tedious and unnecessary. I felt as though making a storyboard for a 10 second video with two shots in it would be useless when you could just go to the place you need to go and film the videos you need. The only useful part of the planning that I found was planning out where you were going to go in the park during your day so that you could fit in all of the filming you needed to do, as well as getting to go to all of the places you wanted to go. This was the only part that I found actually helped me in the process. Some people use storyboards to help visualize their videos and what they’re going to look like, but when I brainstorm, I automatically get an idea of what the video is going to look like. Because of this, I found storyboarding extremely tedious.
The Trip
We were scheduled to leave the morning of Saturday, February 25, but on the morning the flight was supposed to leave, it was cancelled. This lead to the teachers scrambling to schedule flights, and reschedule all of our park days. This lead to a swapped around schedule where we we’re doing different things on different days. I am honestly amazed that the trip actually happened. After our first flight was cancelled, I expected the trip to be cancelled. In order to get everyone there and back, we had to fly there on two different flights and fly back on four different flights. The teachers also somehow managed to keep the length of the trip the same, and just change the dates. Because only three teachers were going on the trip, and we had four flights flying home, the principal had to fly out the day before we left so everyone could be accompanied. Once we got out there, we started our days. We started the trip with Magic Kingdom I thought that this was a really cool park, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Because of the last minute rescheduling, we didn’t have a clear schedule on where we were going and when besides a couple hours ahead during our park days. This lead to all of the planning that we had done at home for where we were going to be and when so that we could get all of our filming done was completely thrown off. This made it a lot harder to film everything. We also edited the schedule on the fly to accommodate everything, which made it even harder to schedule our filming.
The Product
After our trip, it came time to put together our videos. Because of my overall lack of footage, it became quite difficult to put all of my intended videos together. Because of this, I had to use the footage I did have to put together some completely new videos. Of the original videos that I had planned, only two of them got filmed and put together. You can check out my videos here.
Conclusion
I guess I learned more than I though on this project. When I was first introduced to it, it seemed ridiculous. Filming TikToks… in DisneyWorld… for school? But after the project, I realize what it taught me. It taught me the importance of developing systems to keep yourself on task and completing everything you need to be completing. It taught me the importance of planning, thinking ahead, and adaptability. Although I would consider this project to be a massive failure on the product side of things, I think that this has taught me more than I ever thought it would.
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