Rise of the Frankenstuffies
WITH THE BRAINS OF A DRAGON, THE STRENGTH OF A UNICORN THE FLIGHT OF A LADY BIRD AND THE TAIL OF A BEAR, Miraghan was a hot mess.
That’s my fault but let’s back up. This project was called Rise of the Frankenstuffies and it was our most English-focused project so far (I’m not complaining). The driving question was:
How do we as writers make our message clear and engaging to an audience?
I was very excited to read this because I love writing and I have a lot of ideas but I find it hard at times to clearly communicate what’s in my head (even harder when it’s a video but I’ll get to that later). Before we could even begin to our stories we needed characters, which brings me to the most hands-on part of this project.
Our first investigation was about character and to this we ripped apart stuffed animals and sewed them into morphed animals, Frankenstuffies. This was important because we would be using these characters for the rest of the project, we needed to keep in mind how we would communicate with them.
Then we started developing our hero’s journeys. This is a plot outline that shows up in pretty much every epic hero story. You can the video we were shown in class here.
Here’s my outline. After creating this We all had to pick one section to right. We were told to write about a page. Of course, I went and wrote double that (sorry Ms Willemse). I ended up changing my story a bit but I think it made the character’s arc much clearer and less confusing out of context from the rest of the outline. You can read it here. (Tap it for drop down)
Then we adapted them to film. This was tough I’ve never really clicked with working with film. It was hard to adapt my story to film because it was a very internal story. It’s mostly his thoughts. I also had to cut it quite a bit because it was too long when in film. I’m disappointed because of this because I think it took away from the meaning of my story.
You can watch my film here
After all of this, I had an answer to the driving question, if you don’t remember it is this :
How do we as writers make our message clear and engaging to an audience?
I think that to make our message clear we have to come up with an engaging idea first. Only after that can we communicate it. Engaging ideas make people think of themselves and link to their lives ( I did this by adding some tension with family vs duty in this story). If things are engaging and people are interested then they will pay more attention to it. It’s easier to understand then. Making things clear is easy and hard at the same time. I have so many ideas I want to share but I have to share them in a way that makes sense to others. To ensure this you can use peer critique to get others interpretations.
Finally after watching please comment on this padlet.
https://padlet.com/nekoh/frankenstuffie-story-video-feedback-iyjgixz5b77zz4ef