For the past month or so, our class has been working on a project called Rise of the Frankenstuffies. We have started out by learning all about the background to the Industrial Revolution, and then we started our final assignment for the project.

Our iMovie was the final assignment to show our learning progress throughout the project. 

Driving Question

How can we, as writers, weave historical details into our creative storytelling to convey a clear and impactful message?

I think a big part of historical storytelling is making sure the information is accurate, detailed and informative. Connecting the audience to the storytelling and how the story is told is important. When the readers are interested and engaged in the story it makes more of an impact because they care about the problems in the world, and how they can help to fix them. And example is the Covid 19 pandemic. In the past there had been multiple pandemics such as the Plague, the Spanish flu, Smallpox and many more. Covid taught me a lot about how much impact people can have in the world. First responders worked day and night to make sure communities were the safest possible. Every night at 7 everyone in my neighbourhood banged pots and pans together, played instruments and even the bagpipes making noise to show our appreciation to our first responders. Even though we couldn’t come within 6ft of each other, we stuck together and got through the pandemic. Weaving details into storytelling can make an impact on the world to connect people and to bond over things we feel passionately about. 

What is the Industrial Revolution?

The Industrial Revolution happened from 1760-1840. A revolution is ‘a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favour of a new system.’ As I learned about revolutions, and Haiti before winter break we had a good start on what a revolution is. Check out my post here.

Within the Industrial Revolution many things happened, such as women starting to work in factories, coal mining and railroad being built. So many things impacted the Industrial Revolution and this project was one to summarize it.

To first get into the swing of things we watched a BBC video and were told to create doodle notes on provided templates. I had a ton of fun creating these notes, as doodling and visually learning help me remember information well.

Urbanization Game

This assignment was designed for us to get a feel for how packed the towns were when new inventions and people were starting to get added. We started out by having few houses and a comfortable town. As the game moved along more things were added. Things escalated quickly as soon as more people arrived. More people means more food, more housing, more roads, more more more. When everything adds up, you can see how crowded places can get, and fast.

Puzzle 

In this puzzle we learned about a specific part of the Industrial Revolution, then filled in the other parts from other classmates who learned about other things. I learned about Transportation, and I found it interesting to compare to today’s transportation. 

Now that we had learned all about the importance of the Industrial Revolution we could start with what it had all lead up to, our Frankenstuffies! We started by cutting up our old stuffies and sewing them together! I had a lot of fun creating mine, I found it oddly relaxing to take them apart and put them back together. With our stuffies complete we had a few more things to do before filming and editing could begin; our hero’s journey and storyboarding. 

Hero’s Journey

This was the part that took the most time because we had to basically write out our entire story, but separated into categories. The categories signified how the story moves on from the beginning to end. Each category represents a part of the story with lots of detail describing the events going on. 

Storyboarding

Storyboarding was so much easier as soon as the Hero’s journey was done. All I had to do was take the information from my Hero’s journey and put it in the storyboard and accompany it with some drawings.

Filming and Editing

I struggled with filming because it was tough to get the stuffy to be straight, not wiggle and cooperate with me. Since I had decided to weave my story through with Madeline’s, we needed to film our stuffies together and have them be in most scenes with each other. It was a complicated process to get filming done, and we needed multiple people to help with holding the stuffies on the green screen someone to film, etc.. Editing was a completely different story. I struggled a bit with iMovie working, because my images were zoomed in too far, and I had to figure out how to zoom out and have the image the correct size. My green screen on top of the image, then was floating, so those images needed to be zoomed in, but not to much or else it would be blurry. Lots and lots of tweaking and changing my movie later, I started to drift closer to my final draft. We all handed in 3 different drafts. Draft one was just to show we had something done.

Draft two, my feedback was this:

And eventually, our final draft was handed in! It was done! 

Conclusion

I enjoyed this project because it was a challenge for me. My strengths do not include storytelling / writing, and creating videos. The more of these things I do, the better I become at them, despite how I feel about them. It’s ok to not enjoy something, because you’ll get better the more you work at it. 

I found learning about the Industrial Revolution very interesting to learn about, as it’s something I’ve never learned or heard about it before much. I learned so much about how the world has evolved. The more information I take in about the past, the more puzzle pieces I can stitch together to look at the big picture. 

Thanks for reading, another post coming later this week!