Here’s my final video. Enjoy!
(The way I started this post will make sense later.)
As you can tell, in this project, I made a short animated video about the Manhattan Project. I said short, right? Well this project was anything but! This was one of the longest projects I have ever done in PLP, lasting almost 1 and a half months.
The first step was to research the Manhattan Project, and pick my topic. As you can see in my pre-project post, I didn’t know much about the Manhattan Project before this project.
As I researched, I became interested in the science behind the nuclear bombs. I decided to focus on the scientific advances during WWII that led to understanding nuclear fission. Because I was interested in the topic, the research was pretty easy. I learned about how nuclear science was initially used for war, but, in the years following WWII, became a clean energy source.
The next step for this project was to send an email to an expert who would give me feedback on my video later on. We did this so early in the project in hopes that we would be able to find more experts incase our original one wasn’t able to help. Unfortunately, even after I had reached out to 4 experts, I still didn’t have anyone who could give me feedback when my video was done.
Next, I had to make my video. First, I made a storyboard with rough descriptions of what I would show onscreen and what I would be saying. In the past, I have had trouble making storyboards, but, in my opinion, this one came together well. . . except for the fact that I changed my mind later on, and only ended up keeping half of my original plan, while adding a lot more elsewhere.
Finally, I was ready to make my animations. I was very excited for this part because I expected it would be quite fun, and not too hard. What I did not expect was how long it would take. I spent a full week animating, and recording voice-overs, and animating, and animating some more. . . until I thought I was done. Turns out, I was not. When I exported my animations to sync to my audio, all of the timings that I had spent so much time on changed. After another hour of retiming my clips, I was finally done, for real this time!
This is where I would normally say “Here’s my final video. Enjoy!”, but for this blog post I was supposed to put my video at the top, so instead, this is where I will say “Thanks for reading!”
Thanks for reading!