Hello and welcome to or back to my blog! In this post I am going to be talking about my most recent project in Maker. The driving question for this project is: “What does James Cameron’s fantasy world of Avatar reveal about society today?” In this project we needed to make a documentary video on a few topics. For our end result made video which needed to have an interview relating to the theme we chose and relate it to the movie Avatar.
We started off by figuring out what different key themes were displayed in Avatar, here is an example of a worksheet we had to do:
Once we knew the different themes we were had to choose the top 3 and a back up. We told the teacher, Ms. Kadi, and we preferred and we were put into groups. I was put into the Racism group where we needed to connect it to Avatar. Then with our groups we would talk and brainstorm ideas everyday. We had to make up questions for our interviews and we needed to craft and email to send to them. For example I sent out these to emails to both of my grandparents (my interviewees), below it you will see the questions I asked.
We then were put into room groups. One was the Human Room and the other was the Na’vi Room, (I was put into the Na’vi Room). Then we needed to start brainstorming on how our rooms needed to look and corresponded with the grade 8s. We made sure people knew what to bring and how our room would look so they knew how to help on the day of the exhibition. This is what we made for our room set up:
While we were thinking of rooms we also had to make something called a “Viewing Box” and a game for each of the rooms. For now let’s talk about the Viewing Box. Here is a drawing of what they are:
In the first drawing (birds eye) the black rectangle was where you would look in and our iPad would be displaying our video. The idea was that the volume would rise and be contained in the box because it was such a loud room. Sadly I don’t have any photos of my box but I would like to talk about the “game I mentioned earlier.
All of the different rooms needed to have a interactive thing the parents could do, both the Human and Na’vi room coordinated them together. We thought that since we were supposed to show racism that we could make it so the game was easier in the Human Room then it is in the Na’vi room. We tried multiple different ideas but we settled on making these:
To make it harder in the Na’vi room we needed to stand further away from the boxes.
That was everything we needed to make for the exhibition and now I would like to talk about the exhibition itself. The exhibition went pretty well in our room, I presented to so many people and I’m glad they all came! Over all I’m pretty happy with how smooth our room went and how it turned out! The lights, the curtains, the game, all came together and everything was great! Here is a video of what our room looked like:
Credits to Kira for filming the video!
Last but not least here is my end result short documentary video:
In the end we were rewarded with going to see the second Avatar movie (The Way of The Water) the day it came out! It was such a good movie and I would definitely recommend you go see it! As 2022 ended so has this post, thank you so much for reading! Happy New Years and cya in the next post!