The railways were a major revolution in Britain and our society today. They helped us by providing a faster and more efficient travel choice, improved intelligence because of the materials they were able to transport, and they supplied tons of jobs!
To show how I learned about the revolution of railways, I created an Explain Everything. This project took a few drafts to complete, so to keep you in the loop (of course) I’m going to walk you through the exciting process!
First, we created a visual essay guideline. This was to keep our ideas organized, and these ideas had to be approved by our teachers before we were allowed to continue. I used this more as a guideline for my ideas rather than for a script, because I can never really follow a script without basically changing the whole thing as I speak.
Next, was the in-depth research. I had to understand what I was talking about, so this meant lots of web searching. Along with this was finding visuals, which were ALL required to be appropriate under the whole creative commons rule (blah.)
Along with editing those images in VSCO and Snapseed (because do you want to see a weirdly saturated photo in my EE? Didn’t think so…) I also drew a little. Now, I’m so not an artist, but I did bring out the old stick figure talent that I believe everyone has in them. I used Paper 53 for this, and to be honest, it kinda sucked to have to cut out their little stick bodies so they could look clean and sharp in the EE without an awkward white background. I ended up just keeping the heads and drawing on bodies in Explain Everything itself, it saved me a lot of time and tears.
Once I was totally prepared (or so I thought, I mean it’s a first draft, right?) I began to film it and tie in my animation. I already had all my ideas in the guideline, so this was quite easy. Some trains moved, and that was it. Talk about a first draft, because my oh my was it bad.
Our first draft… well it’s always kind of rough. My visuals were choppy, my audio didn’t work (of course I didn’t realize I had audio OFF. So smart.) and I wasn’t all too proud in it overall. Here’s a glimpse below of the failure I consider to be a first draft!
Of course one draft doesn’t cut it, so we moved right along to draft number deux. I was happier with this one, I changed some imagery and actually added in a cartoon! It’s a cute little guy dancing to different names of different countries, give it a look, I promise it won’t disappoint. Along with that, I added some more animation and it was just an overall better product! Audio was definitely still struggling though, and I decided to improve it in the next draft.
Draft 2
Lastly, there was our third and final draft, the big guns. I was a lot happier with the way this one turned out. I edited the audio once again so it was clear, but I didn’t change too much about the animations because I liked them all.
Draft 3
In conclusion, this assignment taught me a lot about the Railways and gave me more insight on how things I see everyday have huge impacts on society! I think you could definitely see the improvements throughout my videos, and overall I’m protium of my final draft. 🙂
Until next time,
My Pretty Blog.