Bertie was created by me, Brooke. He was hand crafted with needle and thread. I carefully chose some stuffies and cut off parts from them to put him together. Then I worked tirelessly at school and at home to put him together. It took a long time to make him, but it was worth it.

Once Bertie was formed I started to write his story. When making him I was starting to think of what I wanted his backstory to be but I didn’t have it fully planned. I knew how I wanted to start the story but I couldn’t get into it. I wrote down the start:

“Life is not for the weak, it’s not easy and there are no shortcuts. You can’t cheat through it, you just have to deal with it, make decisions, smart decisions, and do the work you were assigned at birth to do. There’s no way out of it, unless there is?”

After that I was stuck, I sat in front of my ipad at school with my hands hovering over the keyboard for the entire class of humanities. This happened during multiple humanities classes that were supposed to give us time to write the story. Then finally the night before it was due I sat down at my kitchen table and started writing. I finally got into the flow and just wrote and wrote for hours. After that I edited it and read it over to my mom. The next day at school we received feedback from our peers and teachers to make our stories even better. I then edited it even more and was very happy with it.

Then it was time to create the trailer to my imaginary movie about my story. To start this I planned out what I was going to do by drawing out a storyboard. I watched a lot of different movie trailers to get a sense of what I was about to make. The class analyzed these trailers to see what makes a good, or bad, trailer. After all this I felt quite prepared.

Now it was time to make the video! My plan was to search YouTube for a bunch of copy free clips then use those in most of my trailer. Over those I would add text and voiceovers. At first it was easy as I searched things like “Copy free clips of buildings” but then I needed more exact footage which was hard to find. I started searching “Copy free clips of dark smoke swirling” “Copy free clips of sunny cabin” or “Copy free clips of weird things”. It took a long time of searching and watching a lot of videos to find the right clips but eventually I got them! The next step was to get all of it together and start editing. I started recording voiceovers and then adding the finishing touches onto it!

Here is my final product of Berties trailer:

In the end I think I took away a lot from this. We did a lot of different things which I think is very helpful when learning about something. In the start of this project we read the book ‘Leviathan’ which taught us about science fiction and fantasy. Then we made something physical which taught me how to sew. After that we wrote a story about the stuffie we made which helped improve my writing skills tremendously. Finally we planned and created a trailer for our story which taught me how to plan efficiently for projects and I even learnt a few more editing techniques.

Along the way I also had tons of fun! I love writing which made the story part very fun, and I also enjoyed making the video because I’ve been editing videos for years.

Anyways see you next project! I hope you enjoyed reading my story and watching my video 🙂