Last week I wrote up a blog post explaining the project we had been doing for the past month or so, if you missed that click here to catch up otherwise nothing I’m saying will make sense to you. Essentially in the blog post I was explaining what the metaphor machine was and what we had done so far. In the last post I created finished off by explaining what our group had accomplished. Last Thursday was when the second draft was due and I think we have came a long way from there.

To start off we had spray painted everything black because before it was covered in blue, copper and silver basically there where a jumble of colours and we didn’t like the way it looked. Once all the paint had dried we decided to spray paint the container and the tin can used for the transfer.

The critique we received for the second draft was that we needed to have more symbols on each part of our machine. We decided to stick some flags onto either side of the tin cans to represent how Europe overcame China. Then we decided to add some opium poppies to the spinning gears we had which would represent the addiction china had. The last symbol that we had created was the one on the marbles where we painted Chinese symbols of words meaning young and old because in our machine the marbles are the leaders and at some point the power of the leaders was transferred and we needed a way to symbolize that.

Once we felt that our machine looked a tad bit nicer than before we started to fix up our iMovie. At the beginning of this project we had to fill out a story board, for this we came up with an idea the idea was that we would have a shot of a whiteboard where we would be drawing sketches and mini comics to help the audience understand the revolution in a easier way. During the critique process of draft two our teacher mentioned that our video was too long and the first quarter didn’t even show our machine. We decided to add mini clips of us working at the beginning and a full view of the machine during the first few clips so that you could get an idea of our machine and you could get a little bit of a break from the regular shot.

Here’s our second draft:

And here’s the final draft:

What did you think? I thought we did a good job of explaining the revolution and what we represented for each one. The only thing I think we could have worked on more was having a few more pictures and videos of us working on it. I thought our machine turned out pretty well, although we didn’t kick off to a great start with all the complications on our machine design I thought we pulled it off pretty well. The one thing I would improve on next time is the initial design of it all and having everything properly thought out and drawn on a piece of paper, I also think it might of helped if we had made a list of everything we needed to accomplish and bring in. Besides that I’m pretty happy with the outcome!