Hello! One the past couple of weeks we have been studying about how Disney Parks use things like theming and storytelling to immerse its visitors into the story they try and tell in the parks. All this studying led up to us going on our first official field study to Florida.

To start off this project we made something called PKMs also known as Personal Knowledge Managers. In most of the PKM’s we completed a 4,2,1 worksheet to help us pick out the important parts of videos we watched and articles we read, these would later help us in our topics and and our video essays!

Then to really kickstart the project we were put into groups, My group members where: Colton, Makenna, Hannah, Dylan, and Cale. everyone in the group picked a specific video topic out of the broad one which was theming, For my smaller topic I picked Disney architecture so I found 5 different articles that housed fun facts or different topics about Disney architecture in just the parks but things like the hotels and the busses even. I then took that information and made five PKMs for each article on my topic. After everyone had completed there PKMs we came together to choose a precise topic for our video essay. We brainstormed a few ideas for what specific theming topic we would use then after being given helpful feedback we landed on basing our video on the architecture standpoint of theming. We then needed to decide which architecture highlights we would feature in our video which landed us with the Cinderella Castle in Magic Kingdom, the Pandora World of Avatar in Animal Kingdom, and Galaxy’s edge in Hollywood Studios as our main points on how Disney uses architecture to transport visitors, in between those points we had even more facts and video clips (b-roll) that showed the rest of Disney’s architecture, just not in the same depth.

Then we each took a bit in the documentary that we would be in-charge of in the video essay. I had two parts which werew “Once Upon a Time” (the opening shot) and “Galaxy’s Edge” once we had the video divided into parts for all of us we started working. I, just like the rest of my group, created  a script and storyboard for my parts in the video. Once they were all put together and looked over we took it too the teachers who gave us some feedback, then we revised a few of the storyboards, and we were ready to film.

Once arriving at Disney world I was started filming b-roll, which Colton reminded be about every time I put my phone down for two seconds throughout the trip so I kept filming during the week as we went to all the different parks and locations, in places where I knew I had to have a precise clip I would slow down and try and get more shots in that location. Then the trip was over and it was time to head back home where we would all start putting it together. We each did some editing over spring break and then once we were all back at school and in our groups we started to put our final video together. Once we had the whole video we put together we decided it would sound better if it was one voice over the video, and finally after working to plan and then putting it together this is how it turned out:

Overall this was actually a really fun experience and it’ll hold really good memories with it!, I’m proud of the final product and how to turned out and I hope you enjoy it too!