So, we just finished school for the year. That means we all survived exam season, TPoLs, and, of course, another PLP exhibition.
This year, our exhibition centred around an interesting synthesis of two themes: concept art, and the Vietnam War.
First, we learned about concept art. We started out by looking at some examples, some of which felt more like art than others. We even took a field trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see some examples in real life.
(Above: me interacting with some concept art)
What we learned about concept art was this: the medium of the art is little more than a means of communication for the idea, or concept, which is the more important thing. The concept could be anything, as long as the artist felt strongly enough to create art around it.
As I’m sure you’ve guessed by this point, our assignment was to create concept art about concepts related to the Vietnam War. More specifically, we looked at ethical judgements related to the war– either from a historical perspective, or from a modern perspective looking back.
In order to do this, we had to do a fair amount of research on the Vietnam War. We spent a few weeks studying some key themes such as why people went to war, how the war was fought, and what things were like in America during the war. Purely coincidentally, I ended up watching The Killing Fields and the second half of Apocalypse Now in two other classes while we were studying the Vietnam War. Although The Killing Fields is more about the Cambodian Civil War, both movies do portray events that were part of the Vietnam War, and it was interesting to see how the war was portrayed in entertainment-based media in the 70s.
Once we had done some research, we each decided what concept we wanted to present in our art. This was my artist’s statement explaining the concept behind my work:
Artists’s Statement
Matchbox ‘55 (Candles and matches) – Willa Bisanz
When we started researching the Vietnam War, one of the things we looked at was
footage of Vietnam veterans talking about why they served in Vietnam. For some of them, they had no choice, or they were in a situation where it was difficult to get a job and were just taking whatever options they could. However, one thing that caught my attention was that a few of the soldiers mentioned wanting to be heroes for their country, or believing that the government would do them no wrong. This was also a concept that came up frequently in previous years when we studied the world wars– people went to war out of heroism or patriotism or trust in their government and their country.
The idea, to me, seemed naive. However, the more I learned about the Vietnam War, the
more I realized that it was only during that war that many people were able to learn just how naive it was. With the release of the Pentagon Papers revealing that the government had been lying to the public and getting themselves further entrenched in a war they didn’t believe they could win, the televised media footage of the war giving people more of an understanding of just how bad things were, and Vietnam War protesters rallying against American involvement in the war, and the patriotism and blind faith in the government began to fall apart. The concept of “American Exceptionalism”, or the belief in America’s superiority to other countries, was certainly taken down a notch– but it still lingers a little today.
The candles in the middle of my art piece represent these ideas– American
Exceptionalism, trusting the government and military blindly, wanting to be a hero for your country with little or no reference for what exactly was going to happen to you. As more and more inciting events happen, the candles burn down more, the trust and patriotism melting away under the fire of America’s mistakes. The matches around represent these events– things that happened during the Vietnam War, and examples of how today shades of American Exceptionalism are still around, and with it, the naivety of blind trust.
Essentially, my project used candles and matches to represent how different incidents within the Vietnam War led to the American public’s trust in their government and military melting away and being destroyed over time.
Speaking to people at the exhibition who actually remembered living through the events of the Vietnam War was very interesting, because they had a very good understanding of the historical side of the art, and were able to give really interesting insights into the concepts.
All in all, this was a fun project, and I enjoyed getting to light a bunch of candles in such a manner that pretty much everyone under the age of twenty who I spoke to asked if I was trying to summon a demon. However, I think concept art is effective only in the delivery of certain concepts, and that while it worked well for this project, it’s not a format I would want to use for projects regularly.
So, it’s wintertime again. Christmas and New Year’s have passed, MPOLs are fast approaching, snow is welcome to fall anytime now, and our class has completed yet another Winter Exhibition . This year, our task was significantly different from previous years. First of all, we were working all together as a class in a sort of giant group project. Second, instead of coming up with an idea or solution to a problem and pitching it, we took all our learning from the unit we just did in Humanities and transformed it into an interactive performance piece.
As you might expect, this was quite the mammoth task. The last time we all had to work together as a class devolved into Lord of the Flies-style anarchy, so our general outlook going into this project was perhaps a little bleak. However, this time we were able to overcome our past failures and work together successfully.
We started out by assessing the constraints of the project and the information we had to incorporate. The subject matter we’d been studying had three main layers– the events of the Salem Witch Trials as portrayed in The Crucible; the communist witch hunt that took place in the 1950s (which was our main focus); and how both of the above connect to today. Our job as a class was to create and perform a cohesive story that clearly showed what was going on in the 1950s, while also connecting it back to the 1600s and forward to today. It also needed to have audience interaction throughout every section.
Based on this information, we began to plan out exactly what we were going to do, and divide up responsibilities for carrying out said plan.
We divided up our exhibition plan into seven stations, and related each station back to one or more major themes of our project.
The first station would show a soldier returning from WWII, and outline the benefits of the GI Bill.
The second station would show the soldier now in a tableau of typical suburban life, possibly a family buying a new appliance, to show the conformism and consumerism dominant in 1950s suburbia.
The third station would show the soldier being drafted for the Korean War, torn away from his happy suburban existence and not understanding why he had to fight in this war.
The fourth station would show an anti-communist rally, a sign of the public really starting to be aware of and unhappy about communism in America.
The fifth station would show the effects of the communist witch hunt and blacklist on people working in Hollywood (then Hollywoodland), who were largely targeted as potential communists.
The sixth station would show an alleged communist on trial by Senator Joseph McCarthy, a prominent anti-communist figure at the time, and the Chief Counsel Joseph Welch.
More About Joseph McCarthy
McCarthyism was the practice of accusing or condemning people with insufficient evidence, usually of subversion (although the term is also used more generally). McCarthyism came about as part of the red scare, and essentially consisted of a communist witch hunt, focussed on government officials or public figures like Hollywood stars and directors. The name was derived from that of Joseph McCarthy, a US senator who rose to power in 1950, and started the practice of McCarthyism in an effort to eradicate the communist spies he believed had infiltrated the US government. Prior to, and perhaps contributing to, the rise of McCarthyism, a few communist spies had already been discovered, notably Alger Hiss. The general public was very split on whether or not they supported McCarthy– many believed in his methods, and thought he was doing great things for America, but others found him to be extremist and unfair. Those who disliked McCarthy looked to the then-president, Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, to stop him from accusing or condemning people unfairly or without evidence. However, for the majority of McCarthy’s reign Eisenhower did little to either support or stop him, and was said to outright refuse to engage with or sometimes even mention him. McCarthy’s power began to fall apart in 1954, when he started investigating and accusing people within the US army and administration, and Eisenhower was forced to address McCarthyism and attempt to bring it to an end. The US army worked to discredit Roy Cohn, a lawyer involved in McCarthy’s investigations, and Cohn’s assistant David Schine. McCarthy and Cohn ended up being accused of abuse of power, since they had worked to clear an easy path for Schine to get into the army, and be given special treatment, by use of threats and intimidation. As the final nail in McCarthy’s coffin, Eisenhower sent out a memo to the secretary of defense ordering that no department employees were to testify for McCarthy, regardless of who this would benefit, and that if McCarthy called them to testify they should ignore him. This wrecked the last of McCarthy’s credibility, and his career. He ended up turning to alcoholism, leading to his death in 1957.
The seventh station would feature an address from then-president Dwight Eisenhower, ending with the line “we can make America great” as an allusion to the political scene of today.
A lot of this was later changed or scrapped– the first two stations were melded into one and reset as a suburban family having a dinner party (with lots of jello), the Eisenhower speech was moved to the start, and the anti-communist rally was instead made a pro-communist rally. We also decided to have the Hollywoodland scene be set on a production of The Crucible, in order to allow us to directly include and comment on parts the play.
Because we were working in such a large group, we chose twoDRIs to be in charge of the project and make sure everything ran smoothly. (Both of them did a great job.)
With all our ideas and plans in place, it was time to bring our vision to life. This required two main areas of work: building the sets, and writing the script.
While everyone was involved with both of these things, I spent the majority of my time working on the script. In order to make it as authentic as possible, I researched some 1950s slang and peppered it in. I also did a fair amount of editing, and spent time memorizing my lines– most of which, interestingly enough, were actually just lines from The Crucible, because I was a part of the Hollywoodland scene.
That was also an interesting scene to make props for, because they were actually allowed to look like props. We had a Bob-Ross-esque forest backdrop that we painted ourselves, a Hollywoodland sign made from cardboard letters, and a series of trees– some real (and very heavy) potted ones, and some fake ones that we borrowed from the drama room.
We also had a bit of a stage set up to do the in-story acting on– in one unfortunate moment, part of it unexpectedly collapsed beneath me, breaking one of the fake trees, and causing me to scream a small amount of bloody murder.
This wasn’t the only technical difficulty we faced in trying to set up the exhibition– we also had to improvise a wall last minute when the mechanical walls in the gym didn’t work, leaving us to divide our stations with some choir shells and a massive amount of black curtains. However, things ended up working out okay, since having smaller “wall” pieces actually allowed us a lot more control over how we set things up.
The exhibition itself went really well– we had fourpeopleacting asguides who led the audience through every station and acted as a consistent character called Charlie Powell whose story helped tie everything together.
In the first station, the audience watched President Eisenhower deliver a speech about how America could move on from World War II into a new and better age. The speech introduced and gave an overview of many of the topics important to the later scenes. It also helped engage the audience and give them a window into the world they were about to be immersed in.
The audience then moved on to the next scene, where they, and Charlie, were guests at a house party being thrown by a suburban couple called Patrick and Susan. In this scene, the audience got to hear a little bit about the GI Bill, have a glimpse into the nuclear family, and get a taste of 1950s consumerism, as well as 1950s food. One of the audience members, chosen at random, was also handed a Polaroid picture of Patrick, Susan, and a blender. The pictures were taken on each run-through, and given to the audience immediately afterwards.
From the party, the guide and audience made their way out into the street, where a group of communistprotesters was trying to rally forces to support their cause. The protesters explained the witch hunt that was taking place in America at the time, and made the case for communism. In the end, they gave the guide a pamphlet about communism, which he then quickly handed off to an audience member.
From there, the audience continued making their way through the suburban streets, where they encountered twomilitary officers trying to recruit soldiers to fight in the Korean War. Charlie got into an argument with the military officers, and ended up getting a draft letter, but moved on quickly to the next scene and handed the draft letter off to an audience member rather than reporting for duty. This scene reflected the country’s disinterest in the Korean War, which was a proxy war and thus seen by many as not really directly an American issue.
In the interest of getting away from the military officers, Charlie and the audience quickly hurried onto the set of The Crucible, where an upset cameraman and actor were waiting for Charlie to play Abigail. They talked about how their director, Michael Gordon, can no longer work on the film because he’s been put on the Hollywood blacklist– a list of people banned from working in Hollywood because they were believed to be communists. One of the audience members was given a clapboard and asked to help direct, and another was given free tickets to see the premiere of The Crucible. Charlie and the actor playing John Proctor began to do their scene, but midway through they were interrupted by a cop who accused Charlie of being a communist, and dragged him and the audience members to a senate hearing.
At the hearing, Josephs McCarthy and Welch attempted to provide evidence to support their claim that Charlie was a communist. After mentioning a somewhat communist-related tattoo Charlie bore, they turned to the audience, who were able to use the items from the previous stations as evidence (Anton Chekhov would have been proud). Despite some actual evidence being provided, the guide was dismissed by Joseph Welch, who claimed insufficient evidence, and then asked Joseph McCarthy whether he was completely void of decency. With the hearing done, the audience was able to leave– but not without experiencing one last element of the exhibition: a video compiling every time Trump has used the term witch hunt during his presidency, set to the backtrack of I Put A Spell On You.
All in all, I think this was the best exhibition our class has ever done. We worked together well as a whole group, incorporated multiple very in-depth topics, and did enough script-writing, set-making, and acting for a theatre class. I do wish we had had a little more time to memorize our lines, especially for the guides who had to be in every scene and often had a lot of attention on them, but with some occasional improv I think everyone did a fine job even so.
I really enjoyed learning about the 1950s, especially because we got to learn about people’s everyday lives, and it was easy to draw some clear connections to today (and to the 1600s, apparently). I would happily do a similar style of project for our next exhibition.
So, we’ve been working on podcasts throughout the year. For our winter exhibiton project, we did a set of interviews: one with a grade twelve PLP student, one with a family member or close family friend, and one with someone who attended the exhibition.
We each worked on this project with a grade twelve counterpart who helped us edit our podcasts, prepare for the exhibition, and found people at the exhibition for us to Interview.
The interviews we did were based off the style of StoryCorps, an organization that does short interviews with everyday people about their everyday lives, working from the philosophy that everyone has a story. We listened to some StoryCorps interviews in order to learn a little bit about their style, and the type of questions we should be asking.
Our first job was to interview a grade 12 PLP student. I interviewed Michael Sutherland . For this interview, we had to come up with a list of questions, and as we were working with the grade 12s, we were allowed to tailor our questions specifically to whatever story they wanted to tell. In this case, Michael told the story of how he got, disliked, and came to like his job– a theme that I held up throughout the rest of my interviews.
Our second job was to interview a friend or family member. I interviewed my mum, Celia, about her time working in a courthouse. She talked about her experiences working there, and the judges that she worked with.
The third thing we did was the exhibiton interview. For this interview, we split off into pairs, and each pair of grade ten students, as well as their grade twelve counterparts, was given a room in which to interview people. We were told to make our rooms look “cozy and comfortable”, so we put lots of lamps and fairy lights, brought a couch up from the theatre, put blankets and pillows on the couch, and added a touch of holiday spirit via a mini Christmas tree with a picture of David Boreanaz on it.
Then we took it in turns to interview the people our grade twelves brought back. I interviewed three people, but I decided to use my final interview, in which I talked to Kym Bontinen about being a nurse, and teaching other people how to nurse.
While I enjoyed some parts of the interviews, I found interviewing people without a very stagnant set of questions to be difficult. I also found it difficult to get clear audio. These are things that I would like to improve on in the future.
So, we’ve just had our spring exhibition . It was a little different this year than the one last spring, and personally, I feel that my project went a lot better this time around.
So, the basic guidelines this year were:
• you must solve a problem
• your problem must apply to either tweens, toddlers, elders or pets
• you must have at least three drafts to present at the exhibition
I chose to solve the problem of math being anxiety-inducing or hard to engage with for tweens. I decided to solve this problem by creating a math-based video game, although when I decided this I had no idea what I wanted the game mechanics to be. Basically, I knew that I needed to make a game that was non-violent, non-stressful, not confusing, and still taught math.
I’ve had some experience with programming before, mostly in the language Python, but in order to present the game with a mobile device, I needed to learn a new way to program.
I eventually came up with a basic concept for a game, and programmed a few drafts of it in an app called SketchNation before deciding that I needed more freedom in order to program the game I wanted.
The idea I was working with at this point was to have a player move from one side of a screen to the other, with obstacles that represented different numbers, and a scoring system based on factors of a given number equalling positive points, multiples of the same number being neutral, and other numbers equalling negative points. This idea remained pretty close to the game I ultimately created, although I had initially hoped to have different levels, each with a different number for the points system to be based around, and for the game to be called The X Factor. I ended up not having enough time to program separate levels, and sticking with a points system based around the number 8.
In keeping with my plan to have the player move across the screen, I set up a purple box to act as the goal point, which would reset the game when a player navigated to it. I would later realize that it made more sense for the goal of the game to be collecting all the factors of eight, and to just keep the box around as a reset button. However, this didn’t occur to me until after my next draft.
During said next draft of my game, I covered almost the entire screen in numbers in the hopes of making the goal of getting to the purple box with a positive score more interesting. I also made each number disappear after it was hit, so that you couldn’t rack up points by just hitting the same number over and over again.
At this point, I asked a few of my tween neighbours to try out the game and give me feedback. I took into account both their direct feedback, and their reactions to things during the gameplay.
Besides changing the goal of the game to “collect all the twos and fours”, the main changes I made in my final draft were to decrease the amount of numbers on the screen, bring the number six into play, and add instructions to the description of the game.
My actual project aside, the exhibition took some preparation. I was in a group of 23 people who were creating solutions for problems that applied to tweens, so we had to decorate an area of the school library to look tween-themed. This was achieved mainly through the use of posters, a whiteboard, funko pops and balloons. We also had chips, pop, candy, and pizza-themed cookies available for people to eat and drink.
I quite enjoyed this year’s exhibition, although not that many people seemed to take an interest in my project (most seemed deterred by the mention of math).
Or perhaps the more appropriate gif to use would be…
Or…
Or even…
By this point, you’ve probably figured out the subject of this post, but in case you haven’t: it’s Harry Potter.
More specifically, my class recently did projects revolving around the Harry Potter franchise. In similar fashion to the Star Wars blue sky project, and the blue sky project at the end of last year, this project involved coming up with an inquiry question and building a project based on answering it, and culminated in an open-house style exhibition for our families, teachers and peers to see our projects.
I went through several inquiry questions, most of which got rejected or just didn’t have as much potential for a project as I first thought. Some of the ones I didn’t end up doing included “What is the etymology of some of the spells and potions? What might this say about their history?”, “Is there a better way to sort the students than with the existing houses? What might a better method be?” and “Can I just bake and decorate the world’s best Harry Potter themed cupcakes and have each one represent a different character and explain why?” (A question which I definitely did not think of at three AM while fretting over how to make a project suitable to the exhibitor style, and which definitely would have gotten approved had I actually pitched it. Definitely.)
Oh, and also “What exactly is the function of a rubber duck?”.
However, the question I eventually ended up with was “What would the impact of including the St. Mungo’s scene from the fifth Harry Potter book in the movie be?”.
The St. Mungo’s scene, if you don’t already know, is a scene, or rather a few scenes which I merged into one, that takes place in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in which Arthur Weasley is in the wizard hospital after getting attacked by Voldemort’s snake, a predicament he was only saved from because Harry witnessed the attack in a dream. While at St. Mungo’s, Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny stumble across Gilderoy Lockhart (a wizard who was famous for a number of feats he didn’t actually do. Rather, he erased the memories of the people who did impressive things and took the credit. However, he ended up erasing his own memory in book two, while attempting to erase the memories of Ron and Harry, who had discovered that he was a fake.), as well as Neville Longbottom (a classmate of theirs. He was at the hospital to visit his parents, who had been tortured into insanity by one of Voldemort’s followers. Only Harry knew about this, although he found out from Dumbledore’s, and not Neville.). This scene isn’t included in the movie adaptation.
For my project, I decided to storyboard what a movie version of the scene might look like, making some likely edits as I went (such as compressing a few scenes into one, and cutting Ginny from the scene, as the movies didn’t focus on her as much.). For each panel of the storyboard, I wrote a short blurb explaining its probable impact on the movie, and the series as a whole. I displayed my full storyboard, in the form of a poster, at the exhibition.
Speaking of the exhibition, I worked in a group of students with similarly themed projects to mine to turn a section of the library into Dumbledore’s office. This included covering some bookshelves with black paper and fairy lights, setting up iPads with paper “picture frames” so they looked like moving portraits, placing bowls of candy out for the exhibition attendees to eat, and also setting up “butterbeer pong”. The basic concept of butterbeer pong is throwing ping-pong balls through “quidditch hoops” (made of badminton rackets) into a triangle of red solo cups.
All in all, I thought the exhibition went well. I meandered away from my own project long enough to look at other people’s projects (which were generally excellent), check out the grade eight exhibition (which was good but had a much less exciting topic than ours) and the grade eleven exhibiton (which was pretty amazing, especially considering that they had less time than us). However, I do think my project would have been better suited to a different style of presentation, as it wasn’t as visually interesting or attention-catching as it could have been.
I mentioned that I might to a part two to this post, so if you haven’t read it, you may want to do that now, along with this one and this one.
Basically, we had to exhibit these three projects for our parents, families, and the future students of PLP, in sort of an open house style. Like we did with The Star Wars Project.
If I’m being honest, I was expecting the exhibition, at least for me, to go something like this:
Now, setting up, and getting ready, actually sort of was like that, but the exhibition itself was more like this:
Yeah, I don’t know whether I should have made my project more aesthetically pleasing, or whether the bowl of free Swedish Berries was repelling people… Somehow… Anyway, my blue sky project proved to not actually be that popular among the people looking around.
While this was a little disappointing, it was also kind of a relief, because I’m presumably not being graded on the amount of people who came to look st my project, and it gave me time to eat dinner, look at other projects, and awkwardly stand around being a greeter-type-person for the Scimatics projects. (Sorry to the people who I tried to talk to and ended up just awkwardly waving at, and the lady who “wasn’t talking to me”… I’m an awkward person. I’m working on it.).
So, yeah. The exhibition was actually pretty fun. We were told to take pictures or videos for our teacher/librarian who just got out of the hospital after having surgery on his leg, but as everyone sent him a lot of pictures and videos, I just took a blurry selfie of myself wearing a pink streamer hat/headband/whatever you want to call it.
