Reflection to Creative Project

Rujian, Zhou

4/26/2016

Be Creative

   Be creative is very important in our lives. Without being creative, we might not have telephone, vehicle and many other things that make our lives more convenient. In this creative project for English II class, Johnny, Daniel and I decided to challenge ourselves - we chose to make a short movie about the book Pobby and Dingan. In this project, we had a lot of fun things to laugh; we also had many difficulties to overcome; more importantly, we learned many things from this project, which is creative. There is no limit to people’s minds, so they can make many excellent things if they are creative.

   Our project was to make a 5 - 10 minutes movie about Pobby and Dingan. We chose to make a movie because we are going to take Literature & Performance class next year. So for preparing the class, we thought to make a movie could be very helpful for us. Also, our English class is always relative to acting. I remember that we acted out the characters when we were reading the novel Gathering The Pearl. So making a movie can relate to our class. Moreover, making a movie is not an easy job. We needed to write the dialogues for the characters, decides the scenes, recorded and edited the videos. All of these require teamwork, so we would learn and improve skills of teamwork in this project. Besides this, because there were 3 members of our groups, we had enough people to make a big project like a movie. In total, we wanted to make an interesting project to prevent and also learn from the project at the same time, so we chose to make a movie.

   To be creative, we decide to edit the story a little bit. In our movie, it was about mother Anne and father Rex argument with each other first, then Ashmol came in and asked mother about her past story with the father. The argument between mother and father was taken and edited from chapter 1 from the book, and the Ashmol with mother’s part was taken and edited from chapter 6. We combined these two scenes together, so we can present a more fluent story in the movie. Due to this, we had to edit a lot of things in the movie, such as the dialogues and setting. By editing the story, we were not only to be creative but also showed our understanding about the book in the movie.

   The plan seemed perfect to us, but it was not easy to do. We had a lot of difficulties while we were acting. Firstly, this was our first time to make a movie. Everyone seemed nervous in front of the camera. For example, when I was acting, my mind was blind and I forget what should I say next. Even though we tried to remember our dialogue before we acted, the pressure of acting would make us have some mistakes. It was one of the biggest difficulties in the project. We were not a professional actor, so we can not act like the actors on the movie. But we still try our best to make our movie as much as we could. We even retook one scene more than 3 times just because we were not satisfied with it. Those mistakes in the movies annoyed me at first because I wanted to make a perfect movie. But I found that those scenes that we made mistakes could be used as the blooper because those NGs made us laugh many times. After seeing those funny bloopers, we did not feel as nervous as before and continued recording the movie. The two afternoon of recording movie were full of fun like this. There were many NGs of our movie, we knew that it was really different to record the movie. After recording, editing was much easier and better. We found the background music for the movie; we picked the best scenes we had into the movie, and we put many funny bloopers at the end of the movie.

   In this project, we learned many things, from the planning before the recording; from the acting; and from the editing. We know that teamwork is important for projects. More importantly, we know that to be creative is very important. We had many excellent ideas in this project because we wanted to be creative. We change the story based on our understanding, and we used those “No Good” videos as bloopers to make the movie funnier. In conclusion, to be creative can let you overcome many difficulties and have many wonderful ideas. We believe our movie will bring our classmate fun.