Felix Labistour

Jan 16th 2020

Winter Exhibition

PLP

Welcome to my blog post! The PLP winter exhibition is a very big deal for us. We have people coming from all over the North Shore, along with their parents. This is my second year of doing this but this year was a little different. This year, the theme for the grade 9’s was… Star Wars * dramatic music plays in the back *. Yes, this year we had to create a short story on a Star Wars character that didn’t get a lot of screen time in the movie. Plus, as an added bonus, we had to build an important artifact from our story and present it live at the exhibition.

( ANNOUNCEMENT! I know that these milestones may seem out of order, that’s because they are. We did these milestones in a certain order not according to the number. I, however, am just reflecting on them by number. My apologies in advance.)

Humanites’ Milestones:

#1: Your Opinion

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The milestone that put a start on this project was #1: Your Opinion. We were asked to give an opinion paragraph on Star Wars as a franchise. I personally am not a big fan of Star Wars now. This, however, is not to say that I never was. When I was younger, I quite liked Star Wars. I liked things like space travel, ships, and light sabres. However, it just doesn’t connect to me like it did when I was 7 or 8. It may be the fact that I my taste in movies is different or it could be the fact that I am just out of the loop. What ever it is though, Star Wars has lost my attention.

We also had to write about who the franchise appeals to. I ended up putting the older generation down, people who would have seen the original movies when they first came out. The older generations have a bit more history and connection to the franchise than younger generations do. They were there for the original movie release, and seeing that movie for the first time could’ve sparked some traditions of going to see the new ones when they came out.

#2: Short Story Test

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The short story test was a test to see what we had learned while reading some short stories we had been assigned. These short stories included “The Veldt”, “The Old Woman”, “Penny in the Dust”, “Barney”, “The Sea Devil”, and “Television Drama”. We read theses stories in the early weeks of this project and now had to do a test on our knowledge, specifically getting tested on certain terms and words associated with stories (like ‘plot’, ‘character development’, etc.). So, the second part of the test included using and finding those terms. I thought I could do a little better then half marks but at least I passed.

#3: Hero’s Journey Outline:

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The hero’s journey is something that we focused very heavily upon in class. For those who don’t know, the hero’s journey is a writing template that a man named Joseph Campbell wrote. It goes through all these steps like “Call to Adventure” and “Crossing the Threshold”, and the Star Wars franchise follows all those steps to a tee.

This was my favourite point in the whole project. We had to take a certain character from the Star Wars franchise that didn’t get a whole lot of screen time, and make a short story about them. We had so much freedom! We also had to break the story into certain parts that follow the rules of the hero’s franchise template. The story sections that we created also had to be short stories within themselves. For example, if you read the fourth section of our story as its own story, it should make sense, but it should also be able to connect to the fifth and the third sections. This part was quite challenging for me. I found it challenging because I got the first section and so I felt as though I had a little bit of weight on my shoulders to try and make the end of my story connected to the second part, as well as being a story on its own. This took me me a lot of tries but eventually it turned out great.

#4 A Movie Review

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This milestone was by far the easiest for one reason: I picked an awesome Star Wars movie, “ Solo, a Star Wars Story”. This was a side story movie about Han Solo and his beginnings. I found that I stayed invested in the movie after watching it multiple times because it was so engrossing. The start of the movie throws you right into the action, which happens almost never in other movies in the franchise. The movie also does a great job of picking up loose stories. What I mean is, the movie is great at explaining who everyone is. For example, we never got to see where Han and Chewbacca met, same thing with Lando Calrisian, until now.

Here is a link to my review if you’d like to continue: HERE

I’m also quite proud of my review. I’ve never done one before but to me it was interesting and carefully thought out. I haven’t gotten a grade back so I don’t know what my teachers think but I am happy with it.

#5 Your Story

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Our final product! This was the final solo/connecting story that we had made for our character choice. My team had chosen a character from the ice planet, Hoth. Our character only got a little bit of screen time, but during his time he did something really important.

Writing this story brought out something that I didn’t know I had — a passion for creating stories. While writing my section of the story, I realized that I’ve never felt like I could honestly write anything I wanted. I realize though, when you have a fictional universe combined with a character that has no backstory, you can go crazy. While realizing, yes, I could go crazy, I didn’t. Instead, I tried to make it really interesting and like something that would fit right into the storyline of Star Wars, should J.J Abrams ever make another movie. In the end, I really enjoyed my story and I think it is a really good attempt for my first try.

Something that we also had to do was build a key element to our story. I will get a lot more into this on the maker side… I chose to build a probe droid that makes an appearance in my story and, as you will read, that caused me some troubles up ahead.

#6 Your Design

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Getting close to the end of our project, we had to start looking at what we were going to do for our actual exhibition. This was not the easiest milestone because we had to compromise in a big group. Our group was made up of a couple of grade nines, eights, and some grade twelves who were looking over us. We had an ice planet so we decided to go with a cold themed room. We eventually decided, after some disagreement, that we should go with snow cones, cotton candy, and hot chocolate as food, plus paper snow flakes, snow sound ambience, and white sheets as decoration. There were more elements to it but those were the key parts.

I don’t really know how to reflect on this milestone other than saying I would’ve liked to involve the grade eights a little more. I felt as though they didn’t get enough say, and maybe their ideas could’ve elevated the room to a new level.

7 Exhibition Presentation

Finally, we come to the end. This was one of the toughest days I’ve ever had in school because you have a lot on your mind and so much to do. Once we walked into school, we went to our first class. Sadly, we weren’t able to work on our room. Once we got to our next class, that was when the mayhem started. The room was busy. There was a lot to do (no breaks!) and Ciara was leading us.

I was quite happy about that. When it comes to leading a big group I find I get really uncomfortable, so I was happy to help and not lead. It took our group a little bit of time (around three hours) but finally our room was starting to come together. The snowflakes had been put up, we had some white sheets, and we had our snow ambience playing. A few hours later, we were looking good — and ready for people to tour through.

Then that’s when it happened. I had previously hung up my probe droid on some rope and taped that rope to one of the ceiling rafters. It fell… and broke. Right after it happened, I was right on it, getting tape and some more glue. I have to thank my friend Noah because he helped me out re-building my droid and, because that, I was able to hide a stick underneath the droid to make sure if the rope came undone again, it would be ok. (Lesson learned: don’t just rely on rope. And always have a backup plan.)

Finally, after that little hiccup, the night went really smoothly. People were really polite when they came in and asked some interesting questions. Some of my friends came in a bit later and they were really funny. Plus, I may have snacked on some food that we had made, I’m not perfect.

Maker Milestones:

The maker milestones all had to do with the document bellow, the LAUNCH Journal. The journal was a package that we did that helped and guided us through out creative experience. I will go over every sheet and explain what was happening and what I had to do.

(There is a voice over that will explain what’s going on and briefly tell you what the document did in relation to our project)

 

L.A.U.N.C.H Portfolio:

The L.A.U.N.C.H portfolio was the maker focused section of our exhibition. While we were working on the story, we also had to create a physical item that was a key part in our story. That’s where the L.A.U.N.C.H comes in. The L.A.U.N.C.H section is broken up into

Look, listen, and learn,

Ask a ton of questions,

Understand,

Navigate ideas,

Create,

And finally, Highlight and fix.

I’m going to focus on the A, N, and C phases as those were the most important to me and the ones where I learned the most.

Ask a ton of questions

This was the first stage that really helped me with my project. This was because, I had originally had an idea about incorporating video games into my key element. However, when I got to the A stage, I realized that my original idea wouldn’t fit into the requirements. My idea wouldn’t have been able to actually represent something within my story. So, I created a new idea. I had this idea a because I decided to read my story and really look for the key part.

 

Navigate Ideas:

This was the best phase for me. The navigate phase focused on taking all your ideas and figuring out which ones will work for the timeline and ticking off all the requirements. While working on this phase I had a LOT of ideas. This phase got ride of some and showed me which ones would work. In the end, I came up with my best idea for building and some equally good ideas of how to say within the timeline. With the ideas that I had created from this step, I was able to stay on track and then finish my project comfortably on time.

Create:

This was not a stage where I learned that much, but this was my favourite stage. This was my favourite because I was working on something physically and not digitally. I prefer typing to writing but, when it comes to creating stuff, I do really enjoy creating things in real life. So, when this stage came around, I basically was just boasting and showing off my work.