Wolf + Dolphin = Frankinstuffy

Ah, the classic grade 9 project Frankinstuffy… Or frankinstuffie. Whatever one floats your boat. This unit was about based off the question “Who’s in control? Humans or the environment?” We learnt lots about Canadian geography, potato growing on mars and how to sew. Are you confused? Its ok. Ill explain.

Before we jump into the actual project of frankstuffy, I’m going to talk about the buildup and learning we did before. We read the martian, a book about a guy who gets left on mars and fights the environment of a unlivable planet to stay alive. The question we had to think about while reading this book was what I mentioned earlier “Who’s in control? Humans or the environment?” My final thoughts were I overall really liked the book, and i think the environment is in control. Something that supports this is a quote by Mark Watney “Its space, it does not cooperate.” That applies for the whole world. It does not cooperate.

During the book reading we were divided into groups, then assigned regions of Canada. My group was Kai, Melika, Keifer and we were St Laurence Lowlands. We were happy with this because of the animals there, and the St Laurence river. To get to know our area we had to make a cheesy commercial on the area. We filmed this in class and I edited it on the weekend. It ended up turning out great in our opinion and it definitely feels like a cheesy old commercial.

Now, the actual Frankinstuffy. There were so many steps to this, I’m going to have to break it down.

#1: Create story and write 6 episodes on it, getting across everything we needed

This took a while because it was not only just writing stuff down, it was creating the story too. I started from nothing and ended up with this. (By the way, my story incredibly changed from this to the final product)

#2: Turn them into episodes from the POV of the animal

This was pretty easy, just a bit time consuming.

#3: Story Board

Oh my, this was one of the hardest steps of all. It took me probably a good 6 hours to draw and create all of these being the perfectionist I am. I regret spending so much time on it, but in the long run it was really helpful for actually creating the video knowing exactly what to do. (this is only 2 out of the 15 I drew)

#4: Film and edit

And this, was the hardest step. It was all going ok, a lot of time was put into it and then the worse thing ever happened. All they clips were deleted/moved around. I had to start the editing all over. I had all the clips and music and audio but the most time consuming part was putting it all in the right place, this took a good 3 after school days to fully fix but I did it and ended up with something I’m really proud of!

But wait you ask, how did you make this wonderful video Luca? (Let’s pretend you asked.) I used superimpose to crop out the backgrounds of all the animal stuffies, pexel images and video for free usable Creative Commons. Splice for music (a app meant for go proers but has copyright free music.) Keynote for the animals moving around (I screen recorded and moved them around.) And finally, iMovie (which I am mad at for deleted and messing up all my work) to edit and put it all together.

#5: All done!

I wouldn’t call this project necessarily fun, because I had to go through the editing process twice… But I definitely did learn a lot. Not just about Canada but some cool iPad tricks and to save as you edit so you have a back up plan for if anything gets deleted! I’m really proud of myself because at one point at 12am on a Wednesday I was going to give up (which my teacher wouldn’t have let me anyways) and I didn’t, I just toughed up and spent a weekend fixing it.

 

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