What do strippers, money, and nuclear war all have in common… Sin City aka Las Vegas. Our class had a chance to go there. No, I’m not going to talk about strippers, and money isn’t the reason why I’m here. I’m here to talk about nuclear war.

This year in PLP are end of the year project was about fear and the assignment was a video essay. So to start, we found out what we wanted to talk about. In my case, it was something to do with the cold war. After, I figured out that I needed to make an essay before my video essay. So in most cases the first step of an essay is your thesis. My thesis was ” what is the point of having nuclear weapons although they have only ever been used once in WWII”. Coming up with this thesis was the hardest part, most of the class struggles with it. It was because of this that not just myself but the entire class fell behind on due dates and sticking to Hughes and Willemse tight schedule. So after I got my thesis, it became a lot easier, and so did the first few drafts of my essay.

After my essay was complete, I had to turn that into a video essay which I found easier than writing the essay itself. I went through my essay, and wrote as well highlighted things and key points that would work well as visuals.

Then I went into the movie making stage. I made the visual essay on iMovie. I went back into the document with the highlighted points and inputed all the visuals into iMovie. After that I used my essay as a script to talk over the visuals. But as you could imagine it sounded very boring. So what I ended up doing was use the information from my essay drafts and made it sound more interesting.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=35&v=3LoszHan_oY

You can take lessons and skills away from everything in life, this project was no different. I learnt that making a video essay is a lot different, because my previous thinking process befor this project was that I could just make an essay and turn it into a video. But in reality, just talking over visuals while quoting your essay is quite boring, so you have to frazzle dazzle it up.