Introduction
To kick off the world building project in English, we read a few short texts such as “The Big Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas” as well as the novel “1984” by George Orwell. Through reading these texts, we discussed the types of society each story has as well as the characters, take 1984 for an example, which is a dystopian society where the truth is altered and people are kept under control.
Starting our Project
When beginning our actual project, we formed groups to draft out our general concept. I worked with Stephen, Nick and Mason, where we decided to have our story focused on mining, where people are forced into labor under a mining company and are trying to fight for freedom. Before drafting our story though, we did a research project, where each of us researched different real life aspects of our world. On my part, I researched the overall mining environment and the challenges miners face through it, such as extreme heat, mercury exposure, and tunnel collapses, which could be possibly implemented to our story.
Part of our story involved making creative and funny visuals composed through Adobe Photoshop, where I learned to use the selection and masking tool to cut out objects and paste them onto different backgrounds. I created a surreal composition that illustrates the theme of escaping towards freedom, where I made a picture that depicts me escaping underground into the sky through riding a mining cart. Creating this was really fun for me, because I feel like my writing itself can be boring sometimes, so creating a funny visual like this can really balance it out and show how much humor I can have visually.
After doing our research, we started drafting our our characters and building the overall plot of our story, stemming from our research. Our character developments underwent many changes, as my character William Rockwell, was originally a secret spy, and we revised it to one of the leaders of the evil mining company that keeps the miners under control. At the end of drafting, we gave an initial pitch presentation of our story to the entire class, before making our final revisions to make a pitch video.
Final Pitch Presentation
After getting valuable feedback from our class, we made adjustments to our characters, and recorded our voiceovers. Then I made a rough storyboard of how the video will go, and made some additional graphics and animations to add onto what we already have, to make our story come alive in our pitch.
The feedback from the live pitch helped shape our story because we aimed to have our story be different than existing dystopian stories like 1984, giving it a bigger sense of hope for a happier ending where the miners would break out of the oppression from the mining company. We made our character roles more clearer, as we finalized the character of William Rockwell, ensuring that he is the more main antagonist and head of that evil mining company, instead of a secret spy in our original planning.