For my adaption of Ode to an Orange, I know I wanted to tell the story between family members. Marco Polos are an interesting and fun way to communicate and tell family members or people you know a story or what you are up to. It works great for time differences and simply different schedules. It can be fun to see nieces or nephews little videos and just to chat back and forth. I have only used it a little bit and honestly just learned about it this summer, but I love catching up with people with it. It's a little more personal than a text, but we don't necessarily have to go through the stress of calling or talking at the perfect moment for both of us.
Unique to Marco Polo, there's often room to goof off a little bit and just have fun. My dad automatically wanted to tell a knock knock joke and I wanted to try burning an orange because someone suggested it. There are usually many random videos and every family or relationship is different. While talking to my roommate, she explained her brother puts on a specific personality and character to entertain his family. She searched through video messages just to find one of these unique videos for me.
Through the creation of this video I was able to refresh some basic skills from elementary school and junior high using iMovie. My parents wanted to go back and forth telling a joke and I didn't realize they did separate videos for every "knock knock" and "who's there", so to make it all flow I had to cut a lot of down time in-between their lines. Through this process I also learned how to use a screen recorder for my iPhone to capture the Marco Polo's back and forth.
Creating something new and fresh was difficult to know how close I should stay to the text, yet how many possibilities I had to explore and develop what I wanted to stay. It's nice to have a specific work/script to at least pull from because you need structure to create. If we just give students a big open ended prompt or assignment there's too many options they might never choose one.
I like how you translated the feeling of family and nostalgia into a modern media like Marco Polo. I thought it was effective in creating the unique feel of your work. Your family's also just really funny. I wondered if there was a script or if it was just improv? I thought it was great. I also thought it was interesting that the only part that there was an orange in it was in the end when you were trying to burn it. Most of the other pieces had lots of oranges throughout. It was unique because it could be about an orange without super having to have oranges in it.
ReplyDeleteMelissa, I appreciate how your personal life really came out in this project. You directly connected it to your family and friends. This can be something we can encourage our students to do: to connect their work with their own lives, to let the art ground itself in reality and personal experiences. I wonder what we could change about the prompt to encourage this more.
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