After another long week of constant learning and creating, we’ve finally found ourselves and the end of our latest project titled “Storm The Barricades.” I’ve already covered the first half of this project in a formative post so if you haven’t checked that out, make sure you do so before reading this. Last week I left off at the end of milestone two and what the historical significance of the Americans Revolution was, now a week later it was time to learn about the French Revolution then later on combine the two in a video explaining how they relate to Crane Brinton’s theory, plus the causes and consequences and historical significance of both. 

Metaphors In Revolutions – Part 1

Now on to the third milestone, this is where I finally got a good understanding of how a revolution works and how to write a proper paragraph. I feel like this paragraph was a large improvement from my American Revolution one because I had a better understanding of how a revolution works, and how to write a paragraph properly, also instead of the question being based around the historical significance, this time the focus was the causes and consequences which I think is an easier topic to write about. Receiving the feedback from my previous paragraph really helped me write my second one better, I was told that I had a good overview on the American Revolution but I didn’t really answer the question of “what was historically significant?” So having this in mind I made sure that I clearly mentioned the question of “what were the causes and consequences” throughout my text. Not only did we have to write a paragraph, we also had to carry on modifying our machine to fit the revolution we were in. Once again with my group of Randy, Nathan, and Indira we changed our machine to represent the French Revolution accurately and I would say it was our best one yet. It took a few of tries to work without anything failing but when it finally worked perfectly, we were jumping for joy. Although it failed many times and we got frustrated, this process helped me persevere and made me try to stay as calm as possible even though at times I wanted to punch something. This milestone probably helped me the most throughout this whole project as it gave me a good understanding of revolutions and how to manage my anger when things don’t go as planned. 

The next day came and we all knew it was time to write an essay, I can say that most people if not all were dreading this but the day didn’t go as we thought. Everyone got feedback on their French Revolution paragraph and apparently we didn’t do too well, most of us didn’t write the paragraph correctly so our teacher decided to call of the essay so we could have a second chance and hopefully make our paragraphs better.

The final milestone arrived and this was the big one, it was time to put all of our learning into one last video that explains the following five key points; Crane Brinton’s theory, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, historical significance, and cause and consequence. Our first task that needed to be done was answer the driving question of “how do revolutions transform societies?” After a long period of thinking we finally came up with a solid answer which was “revolutions transform societies by reforming the political structure, and fundamentally changing peoples lifestyles.” This answer would be the base of our final video, and everything will come back and relate to this answer. Having this in the back of our heads gave us a pretty clear idea on how we were going to show all of this in a video and tell a story at the same time; like always we began by creating an in depth storyboard which would lay out every single shot we would need. It was time to shoot and everything went to plan, we divided the tasks up and efficiently got them done. This final video was were we all showed our best collaboration and every single one of use contributed something that made the video come together. 

To be completely honest, this was one of the toughest projects I’ve done in a while, when we were first told it was about revolutions I had absolutely no idea what they were or anything to do with them; now after two weeks of hard work I finally have a solid idea of both the French and American Revolutions plus Crane Brinton’s theory. Throughout this project my leadership trait came out to play, I feel like I took control of the group but still let everyone share their ideas. I have grown a lot through this project and have kept my growth mindset no matter how hard it was.