Posted on May 30, 2017
Shelby the Frankenstuffy
So a few months ago we where given a question to think about, who is in control, human or Environment? Along with this we where told to read the Martian, a book and now a movie. Every few chapters throughout the book we where told to decide who was in control and a few other things. While we where reading this book we where introduced a project, Frankenstuffies!
This projects end goal was a iMovie, and a frankenstuffie (a stuffy mixed with multiple others)
The whole movie had to tell the story of the Frankenstuffies evolution and environment and at the end the movie should clearly state wether the environment or humans won.
To start off the project we had to plan it all out on paper, that meant storyboarding every second of the movie. Usually when we wright a story board we have to include audio, a camera angle, and a drawing of the shot. Here’s mine!
To gain some sense of perspective in our iMovie we where told to make an episode guide, this was basically a letter that we had to wright from our characters perspective. The letter had to basically overview every section of our movie. So here they are!
Before we could do anything we had to actually create our Frankenstuffies! So we brought our animals we wanted to rip apart in class. Before all of that we had to decide what type of movie we wanted and how we wanted the Frankenstuffie to be showed. For example I chose to take pictures of my frankenstuffie at different angles behind a green screen. So before I started this I had to take all my pictures before I started to sew.
Once our creatures where ready we started to get our background pictures and scenery videos. Most people decided to export everything to iMovie and work from there, but what i did was exported everything to explain everything and edit and chop up all the raw clips. Then I looked at the storyboard and tried to time everything perfectly without resorting to the audio.
Once everything was chopped up I exported it to iMovie and sped up or slowed down some videos. Once all of the clips where finished I started on the audio and credits at the end. Here’s how the first draft turned out.
After the first draft we where put into groups so we could pier critique our videos, here’s the feedback I got back:
I took that critique and chose the main ideas I wanted to change throughout the video. I ended up cutting up a few of the awkwardly long clips and adding some more scenes to keep the audience intrigued. I also sped up some of the actions moved by hand so they didn’t look obviously moved. Here how it turned out!
Moving on to the third draft… once again we got feedback to improve it. I started by adding some more credits and apps I used at the end because i felt like they should’ve been included. Next our teacher talked to us about how everybody’s was quite boring, she recommended adding some sound effects or changing a tone of voice. So I ended up ending some sound effects like water splashing or people screaming, here’s how it turned out!
Throughout this project we learned a lot about the Canadian regions and evolutions of animals and how all that works. My answer to the final question was I thought that the humans where in control because they managed to pull together when the environment ruined something. I really liked this project overall because we got to personalize it, and also because instead of just making an iMovie we actually got to go outside and take our own footage and make our own characters.
Posted on May 22, 2017
You Are What You Eat?
So we just started health and career and where told to watch a few videos, two where about food crisis’s, and the other two where about healthy eating. I think that out of all four the one that impacted me the most was probably the world hunger one. There was a lady speaking about obesity and starvation, and how those two problems really aren’t very different. Here’s a link to the video so you can watch it yourself!
I think that the video impacted me in a good way, for one it reassured me that there are tons of people out there who are trying to come up with a solution for this problem. Also, the lady was speaking about how the UN declined there FEED idea and her friend and her decided to start the idea on there own. I thought this kinda showed how anybody can really come up with a solution if they have a good idea or a passion for the challenge. I think you and me probably know that there are lots of people in the world without food, or people who have too much bad food but the thing is i didn’t know the extent to it. That’s also why this video impacted me the most, because although I knew this was a problem I didn’t know the details and how bad it actually was.
After watching the video I thought about how I could change my eating habits so I did a little of my own research. Basically what I learned from everything is that anyone can have a healthy eating habits if they have the right nutrition and balanced diet. For example, it’s fine to have a slice of cake after dinner but just as long as you include the right nutrition into your actual dinner and get the right amount of exercise, you can have a balanced diet.
I also ended up doing a little more research into the FEED company and learned a little more about what they do, click here to go to the website and find out more!
After watching all the videos we where told to take all that information and really think about what we eat everyday and how we can tweak it. To really visualize what we eat we where assigned to create a picture of us using all the food we eat. The assignment was called “You Are What You Eat” and was inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an artist who create portraits of people out of food. Heres one piece of his work!
For my self portrait I started off with a actual picture of me and imported it to Superimpose, next I started finding foods in certain shades that I would eat in a daily basis. Then I started overlapping them and changing the opacity of the food so they would kinda blend together. For some of the pictures I used one of my favourite apps called Eraser and cleared the backgrounds. I think overall the hardest part was the eyes, because I couldn’t find anything that resembled the shape of them. I ended up using chocolate covered almonds and coffee beans (my two favourite things in the world!) then I cheated a little and added some eyelashes to the eyes because I looked really creepy without them. My favourite part is the hair, it’s made out of this really weird black pasta my mom buys all the time that’s surprisingly good! Here’s the final portrait!
Overall this project really taught my ways to stay healthy and food problems occurring all over the world! Like I said before I learned that keeping a healthy diet doesn’t necessarily mean cutting out everything that’s delicious. It just means making sure you get the right nutrition from your vegetable and fruit intake! This project also really helped me because it helped really visualize what I was eating and what It could do to my body.
Posted on May 12, 2017
A Day In Science!
Why is DNA so important? Well to answer that question, it makes us who we are. DNA is basically what connects your family and it can show certain characteristics throughout your family. DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid and it kind of looks like a twisted ladder… here’s a visual representation,
When our teacher finished explaining a little intro to DNA we did a “strawberry lab”. Our main goal was to extract the DNA. We had previously learned about cells so we knew the only way to extract the DNA was to break down the cell walls. The only way to accomplish that was to crush the strawberry’s, so we added some salt, soap and water to a little ziplock bag then we added the strawberry’s and gentle crushed everything together.
Once everything was thoroughly crushed we put it into a graduated cylinder. Once that was set aside we measured out and added ethanoyl to the graduated cylinder. This basically separated the strawberry stuff from the strands of DNA, once the strands of DNA floated to the top we took apart a paper clip and shaped it into a hook to pull the strands out. Then we took the white strands a put them underneath a microscope. Here’s a little video of the whole process,
Usually when we do a lab we have to fill out a worksheet to show that we understand everything here’s a picture,
The next day in class we learned a little more about DNA, what they look like, and how they work. Once our teacher explained everything we took that information and created our own DNA strands out of pipe cleaners, straws, beads and toothpicks. Here’s our finished project!
The past few days of science have shown us how important DNA is to us, DNA is what makes us distinct from everybody else. Overall I really liked all the labs and projects we have done so far, and I learned a lot from them!
Posted on May 6, 2017
What Makes Fantasy Real?
As you may remember from my Florida blog post, I mentioned a project that was surrounded around the trip. This project was focused on answering a question, What draws us to imaginary worlds? We then each chose a attraction at Disney World, mine was Kilimanjaro safaris. We had to take all the tactics we learned throughout the years like, the steps of heroism and the five senses (touch, smell, see, hear, taste) We then had to go through steps to figure out our “style” and “tone” once we had a general idea of what we wanted our movie to be like we started on a story board. In the story board you had to include the different shots, the audio and the timing, here’s my draft!
Once we got to sunny Orlando we went to every park in Disney World, we went to my park (Animal Kingdom) on the last day, so I had prepared everything in advanced which I guess was good. I did also have to take some picture of other parks and of Florida, because even though this project was aimed at each individual attraction we still had to answer the overall answer and i thought that some other parts of the parks could help me enhance it.
Once we got back from Orlando we got started on our projects right away. We when through three drafts of videos, along the way i used many apps like, iMovie, Explain Everything, Comic Life and Superimpose. My first draft was very ruff, but basically was what I did was used iMovie to put all my raw footage in then I basically chopped it up and sped or slowed down some parts. When I had a general idea of what clips I wanted I used animator to spark it up a little. Animator basically leads you draw over video clips and speeds them up. Once everything was perfect I added in some interviews to help with making everything more intriguing. Then I added some audio and was done! Here’s the first draft:
So my second draft I felt improved a lot! I started off with cropping some of the interviews in iMovie, i also spread them out a little so it didn’t get boring. I started noticing that throughout the video, everything was the same old boring clips of forest and trees because that was what most of my ride was. So I decided to add some clips of Walt Disney, Disney World and some extra clips that had to do with imagination. I then added some music to make everything more upbeat and to set a mood. Here’s my second draft:
Next… the third draft! My third draft didn’t change to much from the second. The teacher talked to us in class and explained that there was a pattern in all our videos, they where all way to long. She said that If the clip didn’t help answer the question it shouldn’t be in there. So I went home and just started cutting up the whole video and taking away parts that really weren’t necessary.
Here’s the third draft!
And the final draft! For this one we got some critique back from the teachers, basically what I had to change was some akward clips during the interviews that zoomed I nand out. I also had to redo some of the stuttering in the audio. But besides that I was happy with the final outcome!
This project was so much fun, because we got to personalize this to our own style of movie and we also got to go to Disney World! But overall I feel like my video turned out pretty well, and I think I definitely have some more things to work on for next time!
Posted on April 13, 2017
Provincials and Disappearing Colours
I’m sure that you have heard about DI by now, if not you can catch up here. Basically, at regionals, we got second which means that we can go to provincials. Usually, by the time provincials come around you haven’t changed much about your project, but for us, we had to scrap the whole thing because we lost two out of five teammates. And as you might know, we were the visual arts, which is the one where you need to create a story and a disappearing act. So like I was saying before we had to redo everything and even the disappearing act because last time the judges said that it was an appearing act and not a vanishing one. Anyways we had a very long revision process and a lot of things to do before provincials.
We first prioritized and redid our script. Lots of people told us to simplify everything because before our script was soooo confusing. We started off by figuring which ideas we wanted to keep and which ones we wanted to get rid of. This narrowed down the story a lot and it simplifies it. Once that was finished we narrowed the characters down and changed the storyline so that we could cut out some confusing parts. Here’s our first then the second draft of our script:
Once everything was completely simplified we had to come up with a different disappearing act, one of our teammates came up with the idea of using some type of thermal paint. We painted a piece of cardboard with the thermal paint and decided to incorporate it into a scene at the very beginning where the disappearing colour runs away, I’ll insert a clip at the bottom so that you can understand it more!
Another thing we needed to create was the fingerprint scanner which is in the interrogation scene, so they could figure out who was part of the disappearance of yellow (I know it sounds confusing right now, but if you watch the clips you’ll understand) anyway, we needed to create a representation of some sort of scanner that could reveal the true colour of our character, so once again we used the thermal paint. We painted the scanner all black then used the thermal paint just in the centre. Once the paint dried it turned kind of a greenish colour and when the thermal heat was pressed against it like a hand or finger or something, it would turn green. We made this paint with some thermal black to white powder, then we learned that if you mixed a different colour like yellow with the powder it would turn from black to whatever colour you added. After learning that we mixed yellow paint with the powder then some gloss and painted it on whatever we wanted.
There were only a few days left until provincials, so all that was left was to practice, practice, practice! These last few days were very stressful because it always felt like we were forgetting something or there was something we could be doing. I think the whole process went by very quickly, but we made the most out of the time we had.
The day of provincials we got there at around 8 am then as usually, we went to the parade where you show off your team poster. Then right after we had to head straight to our instant challenge, I would talk about the actual challenge but we aren’t actually allowed to talk about anything until the end of march, but overall I feel we did a pretty good and I felt we worked really well together as a team. Our overall score for just the instant challenge was 73/90 which is actually pretty good! Our presentation was actually at 2 so we had a while to just relax, we went down to the presentation room at around 1:30 to prepare for the challenge! Before the challenge, I was really really nervous, but I think overall we did a pretty good job compared to last time. Unfortunately, in the end, our disappearing act didn’t work because the thermal paint wasn’t exposed to the heat for long enough, but overall it was a really fun day!
Here’s the video of us presenting at provincials:
I think we learned a lot and improved from the first time, we learned that not everything has to be so complicated and that sometimes things can be as simple as possible. Provincials was a really fun experience and really different from last year. I thought that throughout the whole project there were many challenges like trying to integrate a disappearing act into the script and trying to get everybody to contribute. But I really enjoyed everything, and can’t wait for next year
Posted on April 2, 2017
Michelle Obama and Muhammad Ali
Before spring break we where doing an assignment to improve our leadership skills. We basically asked ourselves the question, does every good leader need a mentor? This led us to thinking about our mentors and role models and who we look up to, after brainstorming for a while we where introduced an assignment. The assignment was called “who’s at my table?” We basically where assigned a table to design, with five people we look up to as role models. It could be anything from you baby sister and mom to a country singer! I ended up choosing Audrey Hepburn, Bethany Hamilton, Muhammad Ali, Joan of arc and Michelle Obama.
I then took those people and wrote up a little paragraph of why I chose them and what made them different from the rest. I decided to add a little word of there strengths that I particularly looked up to. Here are the headshots of the people i chose and the words next to them:
As you can tell from the picture Michelle Obama is at the top representing the “CEO” of everybody. I look up to her as a mentor in my leader ship skill, bit just because her husband was the president of the United States but also because she is a strong leader for her kids and all the people around the world that look up to her.
As I said before for each person we had to write about why we chose them and a little bit about them, here’s what I wrote:
Finally, here is the finished project of the table (it’s not really a table, because I thought I would represent it in a different way)
I used eraser (an app) to erase the backgrounds behind him and I used comic life to put it all together. Once I finished all of that I tagged everybody using Photo2text. I had a lot of fun with this project because it was very personalized and you where able to express what you truly feel about your mentor and role models. Hope you enjoyed everything!
Posted on March 9, 2017
What Does Canada Mean to Me?
For the past few days we have been working on a thirty second video that represents what Canada means to us, we can incorporate anything from a video to a collage of pictures. Once you have completed the video you hand it in to a website called My Canada, the best one out of all of them wins the competition and a 3,000 dollar gift card! To help us out, a few people that took part of the competition helped us film our reasons of what Canada means to us. Since you could hand in three submissions my first one that I filmed with them was about how Canada kept me safe, the second one was about how Canada was how I made memories, here’s my first draft of it:
My first draft I decided to take different shots of around my house like the trees, this would be overtop of my audio. I used a microphone that the teacher gave me to make sure the audio was very clear, because thats something that they are looking for in the competition, and recorded everything in iMovie. The next day we got the chance to get pier critique from our table group, they filled out this sheet to help us out:
I completely agreed with the critique I got, she essentially said that I needed relevant videos for the points I was making, this would enhance the thesis of my video. So I decided to get some pictures of each of my points like landscapes of Canada, and the Canadian flag. I added those overtop of my audio in iMovie, and I used the ken burns effect for the last picture (Canadian flag) here’s the final draft that I’ll submit to the contest:
Overall I thought that there was a big improvement between the drafts, and I hope I win the contest!
Posted on March 5, 2017
SLC’s 2017
Every year we have this thing called SLCs or student led conferences, it is a conference between yourself, your teacher, and parents. We present our learning throughout the year using our learning portfolios (AKA our blogs) Usually we answer a few questions like what we learned, what we are proud of, our future goals and a time where we showed growth mindset.
Recently we started a project called the Frankenstuffies, you can learn more about it here. So far we have just done a portion of the work, but I am very proud of it so far. We started with creating a villain for our superhero video, we can create them out of anything from lego to jars and pop cans. Once we where finished our design we measured the length, width and height of everything and added our calculations together to find our surface area and volume. Out of all the things we have done this year this is a very minor assignment, in fact it’s only the half of the whole project. But I felt very proud of the learning I got from this assignment and how much I accomplished in a short amount of time, the project really helped me learn the concept of surface area and volume. Usually when we start a new unit it takes me a few days even a week before I understand everything, but this project helped me understand a lot and made me really proud of what I had accomplished.
Just a few weeks before we started the Frankenstuffies project we went to sunny Orlando to study imaginary Worlds and what draws us to them. Before that we did a small essay in class about Alice’s adventure in wonderland and around the subject of imaginary worlds, here’s the blog on it. I learned quite a lot from the mistakes from first to good copy as you can tell from the pictures on the post. I had many grammar errors, this is something that I feel I can improve in future. Also I feel as though I need to get my point across without adding extra unneeded sentences, this can improve my sentence and body paragraph structure and can help with my style. I think next time I can improve my time management skills because I didn’t have enough time to finish a conclusion and to edit it. I feel that I can really learn from my errors for next time!
Finally this year I feel as though I have shown growth mindset in DI (A tournament where classes, teams, and clubs come to present a challenge they have been working on, you can learn more about it here) We went through many stages of critique, and every time we got the critique we would have to turn it into a way to improve our script or challenge. After a while I showed growth mindset because each time you had to take the advise and revise, the critique got very repetitive and you couldn’t let it get to you. The day of the challenge went very well, we presented like we practiced and everything went well, the appraisers gave us some useful critique that we can now learn from and you can see it in this blog post.
Finally I have made 3 goals that I will be committed to for the rest of the year, the first one being to improve my writing skills. I will be asking my piers or teachers for critique after writing either essays or blog post, this will hopefully improve my writing overtime! My second goal is to read more, reading is definitely something that I always struggle with so I have made a goal to read one book every month. Hopefully this will improve my vocabulary and maybe even my writing skills. And finally my last goal is to update my learning portfolio (blog) more often. This will make the content and accuracy of information more clear, it will also help me reflect on my learning!
I hope you learned a little bit more about the learning I have done so far, what I can improve on, my growth mindset and goals for the future!
Posted on February 28, 2017
Monsters and Math
This year our class is going to start on a unit based around “Frankenstuffies” a stuffy made up of multiple other ones. After we sew everything together and create our frankenstuffies we create a video including a background story of our stuffies and how they where created. This year around we are adding a villian to the story, and we are doing all this in math.
We are incorporating this into the unit of surface area and volume, the villian has to be made up of shapes like spheres, cylinders and cones. Once we finish creating our villains we have to take measurements and add up what we had come up with, into a sum of the surface area and volume.
I decided to create a Dracula/monster villian, it had two ears, three eyes, and a cape. I used styrofoam balls for the shoulders and eyes, cloth for the cape and cardboard for the arms, head and torso. Here’s my finished project!
I wasn’t done yet though! I still needed to take all of the measurements and find the surface area and volume of each shape. To do this we learned formulas for each shape that we used to figure out the final sum, once we found the surface area for each shape we had to add them all together to find the final sum of the whole monster. Here’s the numbers I got for each shape using the formulas:
I think I did a pretty good job with creating the monster, and all my numbers add up to a correct sum. Overall this has helped me understand the formulas and math we are doing a lot, and now I understand how to do everything!
Posted on February 28, 2017
Rabbit Holes and Imaginary Worlds
A few months ago we started learning how to write essays, we started with the basics like the body of the essay starting with an intro, thesis, body paragraph 1,2 and 3 and conclusion. Leading up to the essay we had to start learning about fallacies which is basically a mistake in people’s writing or unreliable sources.
Usually when you wright an essay you are given 40 minutes, 10 to prepare, 20 to write and 10 to revise and edit but this time we where given a few days in advance to prepare. Although we had a few days to prepare we couldn’t write anything in advance, if we did we would get a zero on the assignment.
There where two questions that we could have answered in our essay, the first one being How does Carroll create a real imaginary world for his reader? And the second one being, How are readers/viewers drawn to imaginary worlds? I chose the first one and used three examples, one for each body paragraph, here are the notes I took to prepare:
The day of the essay we got 40 minutes to write it, i think the one thing I could improve on is managing my time wisely. In the end I got everything done but the conclusion, and i didn’t have enough time to edit anything. Here is my first draft:
Usually we don’t get to revise our essays, but this time the teacher let us. I finished the conclusion and fixed some mistakes, then added some quotes from the book Alice and Wonderland. Here’s my final copy and the teachers notes:
I think that I have a lot of improving to do in my writing, like run on sentences, and grammar mistakes, but besides that I think I can really improve with some more practice!