Hello world, for the past five months I have felt like Ross in “Friends” when he was trying to move a couch up a set of stairs while yelling “PIVOT” over and over again. The phrase my teachers always say was running through my mind too: “Flexibility is a tortoise🐢 trait” though most of the time flexibility and pivoting in this project felt like how Sisyphus must feel pushing that rock🪨 up a hill: hard, never ending, and the feeling that it might all come crashing down and be for nothing at any second.
Welcome to my 👻 HORROR 😱project blog post filled terrifying events like when your group members decide to change the storyline after you had already spent two days making one, or when your people don’t know who the main character is TWO MONTHS into the film production, or when people decide that they can learn their lines five minutes before we need them on camera, or when your director leaves for a month and literally has no internet to do her job……fun times 💀. Anyway I guess it is time to give you context and show you what this project really was about, but before I do that I just want to warn you that this blog post is longer then normal because this project was 4 months long.
(PLP 12 casually taking four months on a project be like ⬆️)
Now you might be wondering “hey, isn’t this a humanities class? Why are they learning about horror? ” well, that is what I used to think too (not that I wanted to say it out loud in case they changed their minds…..). The reason we were studying horror is perfectly outlined in the driving question: “Why is horror such an effective way to reflect and comment on our society?” The horror genre gives people the ability to see and process our biggest fears in a controlled setting. It also enables us to see how fears have evolved over the decades. For example, during the height of the Cold War, lots of horror movies showed an evil imposter hiding among people as the villain. Today, we have lots of zombie 🧟♂️ plague movies, as well of lots of movies about being in total isolation which we can connect directly to COVID-19.
This brings us to investigation one which was all about Frankenstein!!!! The first fact you need to know is that Frankenstein is the name of the scientist not the “monster” and the second fact is that Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein is nothing like the movies. Another interesting thing to note is that when Mary Shelley’s first edition of her book came out, (when she was only 20) it did not have her name on it. It wasn’t until the second edition of her book three years later that she was identified as the author. This is because it was the early 1800s and she couldn’t put her name on it the first time because she was a women. This book actually became a cornerstone of the gothic genre that people still read centuries later. It’s the themes of isolation, guilt, grief, fear and her manipulation of nature that come together to create this awesome novel Frankenstein that follows the life of Victor Frankenstein and how he comes to create his “monster”.
Throughout reading this novel, I was surprised how different it was from today’s horror and gothic genres, because it wasn’t gory, fast paced or about a man in a mask with a knife. That’s because the ideas and themes I said above were scary in their own way especially for the time period it was created in. After a number of chapters we would take our notes, themes, and connections and discuss them in small groups. I found that I was much more comfortable and confident in these smaller group discussions and that I was able to effectively communicate my understanding. My notes themselves showed a deep and meaningful understanding of the novel and of the role fear played in the storytelling aspects. You can find my notes here if you want to learn more about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The next investigation was quite different from our normal investigations in humanities as it included us watching horror movies. We did this to better understand how fear can be used in different situations and they gave us ideas for how we can create our final product.
The first movie we watched was the original John carpenter Halloween movie made in 1978. This movie demonstrated how long pauses cause a mix of fear and suspense and how we don’t need blood or a large budget to make a good movie.
Next was 28 Days Later, which is a well known zombie movie released in 2003. This movie I enjoyed a lot more because it used more action and jump scares to incite fear while still having long suspenseful pauses. I also really liked how the director incorporated a feeling of isolation through amazing shots and views of empty streets which would cause anyone to feel uneasy. Once you add in the fact its a zombie movie… it definitely induced fear in the audience.
Lastly we watched Get Out, which was released in 2017 and unlike the others used more psychological horror to create fear. This one was very well made and the twist at the end was crazy. My favourite part was how much foreshadowing and symbolism there was down to the cereal and milk being separated in one scene.
All of these movies showed different fears in very different ways. After watching all of these films, we thought about the specific techniques used and make connections to other projects. I think my notes showed very insightful thoughts and connections which you can find here: (Halloween, 28 Days Later, Get out).
These steps led to the last investigation/ the final product/ the reason for a lot of stress, work, problem solving and pride!!! Our assignment was to create a 15-25 minute horror movie. This was by far the longest PLP project we have done (on and off September → January) with a lot of hard work, responsibility and pivoting. BUT it is — by far — my favourite (kinda, this does not include any field school projects because those automatically are just too good to count).
First we needed to be put in two groups and to do that we needed to hand in a pitch form saying what role we wanted in the creation of the movie. When I first looked at the choices for film jobs I had no idea what to pick as I don’t like writing enough to want to write the script (thanks dyslexia), I have no idea how to use editing software and my acting could use…work. That’s until I told someone (my classmate Sabrina or Ava I believe) that I am better at organizing people, and I prefer to do more than one thing and they suggested I pitch for producer (if only I knew what I was getting into).
After being put into our groups we needed to decide on what type of horror we were going to to do and what our rough story outline was. This took many days with lots of debate and new ideas, and at many times it seemed like we restarted the discussion daily. One day I was trying to think of ways to get people to collaborate more so I brought Tim bits which oddly enough was the day we decided on psychological/killer and we came up with our rough story (whether it worked or it was a coincidence I don’t know). From there we started the script where our Max R , our scriptwriter, worked with Ava, our director, and Sabrina, our production designer to create many drafts of our movie SHATTERED. This is one part of the project where I was able to help a lot as a producer. 
I worked deadlines around different people’s schedules and I made sure everyone read the script and gave feedback. Along with making sure others gave feedback, I gave lots of feedback on every draft and put the drafts in our groups craft link to keep everything organised. Unfortunately, even after many drafts of the script we realised that our ending did not make sense and against many people’s protests I decided we needed to change it. I got the director, the scriptwriters, and one of our editors together (to get different perspectives) and we discussed how to fix our problem. After several rounds of discussion we had a plan and we changed the storyline. Here is our final story idea: “Months after the events of a grad camping trip gone horribly wrong, the surviving girl is deeply affected by the trauma of this event and is trying to move on, but her nightmare is far from over when she starts seeing the killer everywhere she goes.”
The main real world connection that we were trying to show through our film was that trauma is long lasting and greatly impacts the lives of those who have experienced it. We should all make an effort to have more compassion and patience, and to not dismiss the struggles of those suffering from trauma.
Our next big struggle was the filming. If I am being honest, just thinking about it gives me a headache because we had a lot of problems we had to pivot around. (See couch photo). The first hard part is that we took a break and started a whole other project in this class because we couldn’t go to Loon Lake (the retreat where we were going as a class to film) until end of November. 
This was hard because while we were “taking a break” we still had lots of work to do so it left like doing two projects at once. The props, lines, equipment, people all had to be organized before we went. I remember carefully making my schedule and planning who would bring what so it was there on time and two days before we left it seemed like it would all be fine. Then it wasn’t. Our first problem is that we changed our camera we were using one day, at the last minute but I forgot to make sure the person bringing it would be there on time. Unfortunately by the time I realised my error, we didn’t have what we needed and we had already lost filming time, so I quickly decided to go back to our original plan so we didn’t lose more time even though it would decrease the quality of those scenes. The next problem involved teammates not showing up when they said they would which made keeping to a schedule very challenging. We also found that it took a lot 
longer to film than we originally thought, so I moved some things around. Before we left for Loon Lake, we also discovered that our group member’s drone wouldn’t work for what we wanted it too so we had to pivot and use the other group’s drone. Unfortunately, that one ended up breaking (I think it ran into a tree….) and so I had to work with the cinematographers to find a new plan. These situations really tested my leadership and organization skills. Our main problems were around group members not being prepared, which in Grade 12 is quite frustrating, and also because of Ava and I underestimating how long it would take to film a scene. So after the first day I read through our schedule and reorganized it to put everything we absolutely needed filmed at Loon Lake on the day two and pushed everything else to if we had time on day three. This worked pretty well and even with the changes in plans and problems with filming we got everything we needed and most of what we wanted.
My favourite part of filming at Loon Lake was our “school sanctioned rager” that we created for one of our scenes. This involved speakers, lights, and a red plastic cup, all to create the illusion of a party where our main character spots the killer. While the filming for this went well it was also honestly just really fun and definitely a highlight.
While Loon Lake was very productive, we still had almost a full act to film (of our three) and that required a lot of organization. About a week and a half in advance I informed my group that we would be filming on the Tuesday we had off from school. I then created a schedule, trying to give most people as much time to sleep in as possible without harming the movie. This meant that we filmed our scenes with less people first then didn’t film much until that evening. Our first problem was that we needed a set of parents for our final act and we had forgot until a few days before that we hadn’t found any yet. This meant I had to desperately ask everyone in my group if their parents were available. Unfortunately in the end we only had my Dad and then we dressed Sabrina up to look old. This filming went really well too (shout out to Ava and Sylas for the awesome mirror scenes) and we ended up getting all the shots we needed.
This brings us to the editing. Our first draft of our movie was hard to watch and made me worried, especially since my director was about to leave for a month long trip. But this fear didn’t last long because once we were back at school the editors were able to fully commit to making the film amazing. While the deadline was tough to meet, I was proud of how (once I learned about the due date) I changed people’s roles around making us have three -ish editors and I checked in with each of them daily, giving feedback and trying to help out where I could. I found the editing portion of this film making quite tough because I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO EDIT WELL. I instead found myself only able to help, give advice and just trust that the editors would be able to complete the movie well and on time. After seeing many, many, MANY drafts of each act we got Declan started on the music which made a huge difference to the overall feel of the film.
While there is a lot more I can say about this project, I feel like this is already the longest blog I’ve written in years (if not ever). So I just wanted to wrap it up and say that this project was hard and that it pushed me outside of my comfort zone, made me have to learn how to deal with different people and added a lot of stress, but it also was so cool to work on this film every step of the way and it feels amazing to have a completed film that I’m actually proud I have created. Please make sure you watch the film below because —while there are things that could still be improved—it still shows how much hard work and effort was put into it.
Despite what my grade 9-10 blog posts might say, I’ve actually begun to love talking to people about my ideas and about my work. I enjoy explaining why I made the choices I did as well as showing pride in my creations. During the exhibition, I was intentional about asking people about how well they think they balance their use of technology. For example, one question I asked was what they use their phones for? While project itself, and my conversation related that I wasn’t at all against technology, I did want to make people think about how technology like our phones can not meet our biological needs. Technology is a powerful tool we just need to make sure we know it is a tool, not our lifeline.
For this project we learned about the Holocaust and the events leading up to it through reading articles, lectures, video testimonies, a symposium and a visit by a granddaughter of a survivor. Each one of these sources added more and more horrible information that I couldn’t imagine. We started with learning about the rise of the Nazis, and then the growth of antisemitism ending with the Holocaust itself. For the first investigation, I wrote a paragraph talking about which type of format resonated most with me and why.
Investigation two was reading Maus which is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman and the only graphic novel to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. This book is about the author learning and writing about his father’s experience during the Holocaust. Reading this book was crazy because
My partner for this project was 
Personally, I
card the visitors could bring home. Everything was presented well from the crisp edges of the paper, and the interesting layout.
people in the healthcare system) and really enjoyed telling everyone one about it. While all of those things alone were great I was really impressed with how I explained the project to everyone who walked by. I really enjoyed explaining and showing everything I knew from when Irena got in a fight at school to when she was almost executed and found myself realizing how in the younger grades I wouldn’t have been able to do that so confidently.
This is the part of the project I’m especially proud of because when some people heard this they started to stress and I know I can get like that, sort of stuck, but that day I found a white board and started writing down everything I wanted to do and how to connect them.
She saw an Indigenous Staff member come and connect to Indigenous patients waiting in the ER. She heard him talk to them and assure them that he would be checking in wth them during their time in the hospital that day. In my research, I learned that in multiple hospitals in BC there are Indigenous Patient Navigators who are Indigenous people who help other Indigenous Peoples through everything in the hospital, basically being their spokes person. So I decided to do a project talking about the mistreatment, the statistics, and the systems set in place and where. So when the two projects had to combine my humanities partner Fraser and I decided to use my BCFP project idea and our humanities one and connect it through the idea of people needling to be up-standers today.
We created multiple interactive parts including a physical timeline, an online quiz with statistics, effective visuals one where some of my friends and I made orange origami roses to make into a heart, and a physical card the visitors could bring home with a link to our calls to action describing how you can be an upstander even in a small way (look below if you want to scan the QR code yourself to see what you can do). Everything was presented well from the beautiful painting of BC (I did the islands and Fraser did the mainland) to the edges of the paper on the table, and the layout was eye catching.
I notice that enthusiasm also influences how a group works together.
Lastly, my overall engagement and enthusiasm was really evident in our “fear factor.” I am so proud of this product. Like in the BCFP project I was inspired. I took my animation abilities from BCFP and decided to make an interactive keynote animation that was like a choose your own adventure to show the decisions people had to make during the Cold War. Not only did I have simple animations, I had drawing animations and I embedded YouTube videos that looked like they were playing on a tv, and I had audio of videos and interviews. It can be a bit glitchy and I needed an extension but that was because I had so much I wanted to say. I also had taken a risk to do it in a format that I love to see from others, but don’t usually choose for myself. I am not an artist!
One of the first things we did to launch 🚀 this project was read Hiroshima by John Hersey. This book follows the lives of 6 different survivors of Hiroshima, before, during, and after the atomic bomb was dropped. We did in class discussions, wrote theme analyses, and just considered the different views on the decision to drop the bomb. I found reading this book very interesting because I’ve never known much about Hiroshima and Nagasaki even though they were such an important part of our history and I’m glad I got to understand more of what happened. I also learned more about how an author can use different ways of story telling to show us a theme or message. Most information after the war about Hiroshima was about the statistics, where as this book showed people the influence the bomb had on individuals.
I found the permanent most useful. I am not going to lie but for a while there when we were learning this in class I was thinking “this is never going to be useful to me,” “whyyyyyyyyyyy” and “what the heck is going on,” but guess what? I used the links for permanent notes in my writing on the project I’m working on now. Ms. Madsen told us to write a paragraph on why stories are a good way to learn and I was like “hey I wrote a permanent note about this” so then I linked it and used the previous things I had link to as examples for this piece of writing!!! It actually works!!!!!!! I’m trying to still keep the system in place but I am finding myself falling behind on it so I might need to change how I do parts of it to find something that works better for me. Overall I liked how I could show the connections between topics instead of just having them in my head for a day then forgetting them.
Using our Zettelkasten system to record information and our thoughts, we watched different films about atomic warfare, and just the Cold War in general. During this time we also read a book called Fallout by Todd Strasser which I found really engaging. It focused more on the impacts the Cold War had on individuals and it was my inspiration to my own question for the project. Unlike most PLP projects we got to choose not only what our final product would be but we also got to create our own inquiry question to answer. Being interested on individual people’s decisions during the Cold War I decided on the question “How did fear influence people’s and society’s decisions about personal safety?”
Then our TRIP. I loved this trip, it was even better then last years (which was also amazing) and 
video that
had a cougar attack in it! The next day we woke up at 4 o’clock and saw the sunrise on the south end of the Grand Canyon (if you ever go see the sunrise there WEAR PANTS it is cold), then we hiked, partly down into the canyon, which was beautiful, we got to explore, we drove up and stopped at this town on Route 66 which had lots of cool shops, and ended the day at a delicious steakhouse. The next few days included museums, the Hoover dam, the Neon museum,
For my animation I designed it to seem like you were a mother in 1960 in Tucson, Arizona where you had to make all these decisions based off different information that I gathered on my trip and in my search. Throughout the animation, with almost every decision there was an option to “give up and move on with my life,” which I included because fear can also drive you to push away the fear, or you may also realize that you just did not believe in it and I thought that was an important perspective that I needed to add. Overall, I’m especially proud of how I included evidence in so many different forms: I had voice interviews, videos, photos, pamphlets and drawings. Creating this final product was very fun (even the drawings…sorta) but mostly I enjoyed it because I actually am very proud of what I made and felt I showed a lot of my learning in a very creative way. If you click 
Where I pushed my thinking: In the creation of the final presentation about “why young people should vote,” I pushed myself to find ways to make the presentation engaging, and also to problem solve when we ran into issues. Our judge’s panel was made up of Grade 10 and 12 students, which meant that everything in our presentation needed to capture their 
attention. My group decided that Noah should be an old man with outdated views and who kept interrupting us. This was funny and broke up the longer sections. We also made it seem like we were “FaceTiming” a person who then talked about one of the issues and we set our whole video up as a ted talk. I personally had the idea to split up the long government video into two parts so that the judges did not get bored. Overall, I pushed myself to be very aware of who my audience was and how to get them to care about the information we wanted to get across. You can read their feedback below:
Now that we were in the debating mindset, we needed to practice using persuasive writing. “The Best _____ Ever” was our prompt and I chose to do the best sport (which you all should know is volleyball!!!!!!!).
Once we chose our topic we begun researching which allowed me to show growth in my questioning competency. I chose the affirmative side of the statement and because we weren’t supposed to know our opponent’s arguments, the affirmative and negative were put on different sides of the classroom. One engaging part of this project was how my opponent/nemesis/Ava and I made the competition entertaining. For example, you can see from the title of this blog that we would find creative, and fun names for our documents. Other examples are the title of my 
Eventually with lots of feedback and edits I had a draft that I was excited to present.
This was it where all my hard work hopefully was going to come together. I watched multiple people debate (which I found helpful for my own) and saw part of the other PLP students’ work (though not as much as I would’ve liked). Then it was my turn; Ava and I both did really well. A few things I am especially proud: I didn’t speak too quickly which is a tendency of mine when I speak publicly, I used my research to make up an appropriate rebuttal in the moment, and I completely redid my conclusion while talking. What I found surprising was how Ava took a shot at my argument in the conclusion (it was a smart move to be honest) but I definitely wasn’t expecting that. She also made a lot of points that I wasn’t expecting making it challenging for me to rebut her.
For part of this project, two group members went on a field school to New Mexico, and visited the Trinity site and a museum which is where they interviewed people and took photos for our book. Back at Seycove, the rest of us split up the book into sections. As the project manager, I helped split up the tasks and research topics to start the process of creating out book. I personally set goals for each class and made sure everyone knew what their job was when they left class each day. I was in charge of finding and writing the information for the “classified file” and the opening writing about Oppenheimer becoming director of Los Alamos.
Much of this project was about communication and research skills. As a group we found it really challenging to find sources that talked about Oppenheimer’s thoughts, which caused difficulty considering it was supposed to be from his perspective. This led to deeper research and creativity. I really love how we had different ways to show our information. We had the classified file at the beginning, newspaper to show the historical significance the end, as well as interviews, a video, and photos. To make our book to feel more like a journal we called the chapters “entries,” crossed out words, and coffee stains on the pages.