I bet you all thought that I forgot all about the next fantasy video draft?
Well, to be honest, I kind of did. That is until my teacher informed us that our blog post on the draft process would be due in the next week. Of course this sent me into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE!!!
If this is all new to you and you have no idea what I’m talking about, I encourage you to click the link (Splash Mountain Mania) below, or if you have just broken the clicking part of your mouse since reading this post, I will summarize what happened:
~Along time ago in a school down in the Cove, a teacher asked her students the following question: what draws people into imaginary worlds? To help them answer the question, she took them to Disney World.
Before they left, they created storyboards to map out their documentaries. One of the children (me) used Wikipedia and Youtube as well as Disney World.com to to their research. They put their storyboard below.
While in Disney World, the students were asked to create a short video documentary on what draws people into imaginary worlds. One of the boys (me) chose to focus their video on a time honoured ride known as Splash Mountain.
Having completed his first draft, he narrated a third person monolog around the story of the ride.
The First Draft
My first draft wasn’t my best work. It was a little sloppy (read: did not flow well) and the audio was pretty sketchy. Sketchy in that the music I chose (Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” a song composed by Allie Wrubel from the Disney 1946 animated movie Song of the South sung by James Baskett – which, by the way, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song the year it came out) sort of got loud then quiet and then load again and my narration went on too long. It just wasn’t very “tight” and needed some work.
The driving question I asked was “What Draws Us To Imaginary Worlds?”
THE SECOND DRAFT
The second draft I created really was very different from the first. The critique my teacher provided to me lead me to take the following actions:
- I re-recorded the audio
- I included a mention about the controversy that surrounded the ride (the ride is based on the Disney film ‘Song of the South,’ which is based on the Uncles Remus stories collected by Joel Chandler Harris. Over the years, Disney has distanced themselves from the controversial 1946 film, which placed a poor light on African Americans and the movie has never been released on home video or DVD due to concerns over political correctness and racial sensitivity. Splash Mountain is one of the few reminders left that Disney ever produced the film).
- I stopped the music from cutting out
- I spent sometime improving the interviews I included in the video
Acting on my teacher’s critique, I created my second draft:
The Final Product
The critique I received for creating my final draft was vary minimal. I think this was because I was really honing in on the best narrative for my ride. The critique I received was “[its] Almost ready, but I would suggest a couple of sentences between the controversy and the ride. Something like ‘despite the controversy, Disney went ahead with the ride, turning it into one of the most popular rides in the park“.
This was good advice and so I acted on it. The strange thing is that this minor change makes it so much better. It just releases a bit of the tension between the two points.
To sum up, who knew that a child friendly ride had so much controversy and yet could be so much fun?