For this blog post I will be taking about a huge project we worked on recently where we studied revolutions then made short videos that explained what happened in these revolutions. But before we could do all of that we had to learn some fundamentals when it comes to revolutions the most important of which is Crane Brintons theory. What is crane Brintons theory well it’s in my understanding at least it’s the steps a revolution takes to get to the climax and what happens after. Those steps are 1. Incubation 2. Moderate 3. Crisis and 4. Recovery.
Now that have that done it’s time to talk about the actual process we took in making these videos and that starts with getting our groups. Getting our groups isn’t that exiting they were just randomly selected
Once we got our groups mine being Angelo, Ryan, Felix, and myself it was time to actually start learning about the revolutions starting with the French Revolution. To help us learn in class we watched a video by a YouTube channel called the French Revolution by oversimplified which is basically a funny video that explained the French Revolution pretty well.
After watching that video we still had some more research to do. That research consisted of reading a few textbook pages and doing some note taking on a very handy template the teacher gave us.
Now that all of the research was done it was time to actually start making our short video and being inspired by the oversimplified video we decided to make it animated. Now that we had our video format it was time to assign roles. I was in charge of animation and editing. The first thing I had to do as animator was read over the script and write down only the things we see. After that it was as easy as animating for an hour a day and then realizing I had a ton of animation left to do and animating till 4 in the morning. If the was one thing I could have changed I would probably have spread out my animation and do three or four hours a day.
the second revolution we did was the American Revolution. The first step of the American Revolution was learning about it which was almost exactly the same as the time before reading a textbook making notes etc. After learning about the American Revolution it was time to start making our video for this video we decided do make a heritage minute which is a short live action film that shows an important part of the revolution. For this video I was editing as well as acting although I would have preferred to have just been editing. The filming went pretty well we had some fake guns and ehh costumes. Overall I think it went decently our video wasn’t the best wasn’t the worst. If air were to change one thing I probably would have spent more time on the editing.
The next revolution we did was the Russian revolution so as usual we read some textbooks made some notes etc. Now it was time to make our video and for this one we had the brilliant idea of making a parody of the song Rasputin. For making the song my entire group met at my house where we worked for quite a long time. After we had the actual song done we still had to make a music video which lets just say went very poorly. In the end we had to redo our entire video. Overall if I were to change anything I probably would have planned out our video a little better and have chosen a different song to parody.
For the final of the revolution videos we got to choose our own revolution so after some research my group chose the Easter revolution. For this revolution the research was a little different because we didn’t just have a textbook from our teacher we had to do some googling. After all of our research it was time to make the the video and we were doing the same thing as our first ever video animating. Except this time I wasn’t editing I was only editing half the video. Overall this video turned out pretty well if I were to change one thing I probably would have done all of the animation.
now that I’m done with the videos it’s time to talk about the other big part of this project the book we had to read which was called revolution and was written by Jennifer Donnelly. As we read the book we had to do role sheets which was a kinda like a check in. For the role sheets we each got a role for example discussion director and you would have to do that job so for example the discussion directors job was to come up with questions to kinda lead the conversation. After we had finished the book we had to do a creative reflection about the book if you would like to learn about what I did and how I did it I made a second post all about it. In conclusion I think I could have kept more on track with the book and worked harder when it came to the role sheets.