Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post. This one is going to be about my most recent project in Humanities…which mainly took place at….DISNEY WORLD!!!! This was obviously a huge step up in the “school trip” category for us and we weren’t going to waste it. Here’s a recap of the steps we took make this a fun and productive trip. The end product was a video essay which answer a certain question about a topic that we got to pick. I was interested in the magic of Disney, what made the parks tick. In this post, I’ll talk about the process of making our film and how we developed an answer to the driving question: How do Disney theme parks shape and influence the cultural, economic, psychological, and social experiences of visitors?
To start this project, we learned about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). We made a template in Craft to make it easier to take notes on various texts. We used this template for all of the research we did in this project which kept us organized. As we where gathering research on the history of the Walt Disney Company, we re-looked at taking vs making notes. We want to be able to make notes so we can use and access the information better. We also did this thing called a 4-2-1 which helped us as a group figure out the most important point of a text. We insert the 4 main ideas and discuss a way to filter it down to 2 and than 1:
The first Keystone for this project was a collection of 5 PKMs. The PKMs had to be a collection of your knowledge on the topic that you had chosen. My group was The Magic of Disney Entertainment, so we where looking at articles and personal experiences to see what made Disney so Magical. I spent a good couple nights trying to find some semi legible and relatable texts describing how Disney keeps you entertained:
ChatGPT on Disney entertainment
5 facts about Disney nighttime spectaculars
After getting a good understanding of our topic, it was time to start putting together our video essay. We started by brainstorming on the whiteboards to get a general understanding of what we wanted the outline of our video to be. It took quite a while for us to agree on a storyline because we thought our topic was to broad to depict in this way. To us, It kind of relates to all of the other topics which makes it difficult to capture. Maybe the other topics are also the broad and intertwined like ours, but for some reason we couldn’t quite put it together like the other groups. We did eventually get some good ideas going and found some things we wanted to use as examples of good entertainment.
After getting a feel for how we wanted things to be played out, there was some more paperwork. This meant that we where back apart again which gave us some time to really think about what we felt was important and what we wanted in the film. We than compiled it into a pitch board
After the pitch, we needed to get our storyline in paper to get the details. We got to work on a script/storyboard and soon after, a storyboard. Storyboarding and script work are things we’ve done before so this was just time to improve and try new techniques or platforms like Craft. I like being able to do this part of the filmmaking in a group because you can bounce ideas off of the team and get a good perspective of who can lead what part of the video.
After getting the plans as good as we could, it was go time. We left for Disneyworld one morning and showed up with little to no will to live over nearly 30 hours later at midnight on the field of our hotel. After a good nights sleep and a bucket of cereal, and with a call-sheet in hand, we set out into the huge world of Disney to film.
Fun fact about the call-sheet. It was done before our flight was cancelled for 3 days, so everything is actually pretty off. We made it work using the “no plan” plan.
After a treacherous, (and I mean an absolutely savage, cruel, brutal, barbaric, torturous, agonizing, excruciating, harrowing, anguishing, tormenting, mortifying, distressing) 11 days at Disneyworld, we came out with like half the clips we wanted. To be honest, after our battle just to get to Orlando, we where just thankful to hang out and enjoy what we’d been dissecting for the past month. As a group we all just got to take in the Walt Disney experience for what it was and fully envelop in the story. This does bring the reluctance to do schoolwork, which lets us flunk the project and drop out of highschool in the 10th grade, but to be honest, I think we just wanted to absorb the environment with the unique perspective the our studies gave us. In short, we where doing fine up until the actual doing it part, but we survived the trip.
To make the best of what little footage we’d escaped with we needed to pick up the slack on the editing standpoint. Enter Sylas Koop. We scoured our camera roles and outsourced some B-roll to fill in our visuals and than recorded all the voice-overs. Sylas put it all together and we bring to you The Magic of Disney entertainment:
In the end, this project was super fun. I got to work with a great team and I’m really happy with the ideas that we came up with. It was so exciting to get to go to Disney World and get to film on-site. I learned so much about teamwork and collaboration. I also learned a lot about the importance of planning out shots when you film and how useful call sheets can be. Overall, this was a super fun project!
Thanks for sticking around, -Declan