My goal for this story is to teach the audience the importance of not abusing your power. Puppet shows are great for teaching young children life lessons, so making the backgrounds all colorful, setting the story in a fantasy setting, and giving the main character a very specific voice is what makes this show reminiscent of the ones shown to preschoolers. The purpose this serves is to make this show mean it is for teaching something.
My inspiration for the methods I used to bring the Foolish Knight to life mainly came from the puppet breathing and expression techniques I learned in class from a puppeteer from Rough House Theatre. Making my hand puppet move at all times, even if it is with very small movements such as breathing, makes a big difference compared to just putting it on my hand and keeping it still until it needs to do something, like walk.
I chose the story to take place in a medieval kingdom because it was not uncommon at the time to see knights abusing their power over the poor citizens living in nearby villages. With this in mind, I decided to take these historical occurrences and simplify the basics of how and what happens when they take place into a four-minute puppet show representing the similar problems we face in the present.
Writing the overall story was not very difficult. I knew what I wanted to happen in the show and the purpose each special moment serves. I did struggle with polishing the script. I tend to make things sound more complicated than they really are, along with including words that are not needed in a sentence. However, it turned out well in my opinion. The original plan was to read the whole script as I control some of the puppets, but found that I could only put my focus into one of those things, narrating and puppeteering, while I do both. This caused either sloppy puppeteering or narrating with lots of stutters. I resolved this by having my mom do all of the talking as I control the puppets. My mom also controlled some of the puppets herself because I needed an extra set of hands.
Finally, a show cannot be performed without a stage. I took different colored softcore foamboards and colored some scenery onto them to make the backgrounds for each scene. My mom also suggested the medieval music to play for the first half of the show to add to its theme. The setup was not the most comfortable for my arms as I tried to control the puppets from below where the camera can't see me. I also had to be careful with the backgrounds because they could be knocked over really easily. In the end, after a few previous attempts, I think we filmed a pretty good run of the show with an iPhone in the center of a ring light. This was a fun project and I am happy with its outcome. I hope you enjoyed it!
Egg Stage I wrote this piece in my house on a Sunday. It was calm and peaceful, just like all the other times I wrote a journal prompt. Then, I thought of how calm and peaceful my whole neighborhood was. It was around the time when the temperature started to drop this year, which gave me the realization of what my neighborhood had in common with itself throughout all seasons. I have always found my neighborhood to be calm and peaceful, so this is what I chose to write about. I used some descriptive language to help the reader capture the setting and what the surrounding scenery was like. Such as, "Fog is like a sheet that gets cast across all of Wilmette, covering up all sound." What you get from that sentence is that the fog is bigger than my neighborhood, and things are much quieter whenever it arrives. That is the power of descriptive language, you can tell what things are like without it being boring. The main theme of this piece is the fog. It is one thing that c...
Hello; I am SN. This is my first blog post for my Sophomore year. I am taking a class called Population. It has been incredibly fun and interesting. So far, we have learned about set theory, binomial nomenclature, taxonomy, and have read the book In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall over the summer. I am going to cover most of that in this AP (Action Project). For this Action Project, we had to choose an organism, identify its population, and highlight what makes the population unique. During our first FE (Field Experience), our STEAM teacher had us choose an organism at Lincoln Park Zoo. For this AP, I have chosen the fennec fox, a.k.a Vulpes zerda. You might ask, "What is a fennec fox? I will show you in this AP, along with everything else we studied thus far. The fennec fox is a small mammal that is from the Sahara of North Africa. It, naturally, lives in very hot and sandy climates. That would make sense because, according to the Lincoln Park Zoo website, it is said the fennec...
This term, I have been taking a class called Fuel. The topic of Fuel is to find more ways to use renewable fuels instead of non-renewable ones. Renewable fuels are energy sources that never run out, such as wind, solar, hydropower, biomass, and geothermal energy. Non-renewable fuels are fuels that we only have a limited supply of and have to find, like oil, coal, uranium, and natural gas. Non-renewable fuels are the cause of the greenhouse effect. The more we use them, the more global warming becomes an issue. During our FE (Field Experience), we learned how the Tesla company is making cars that run on electricity. In addition, Tesla is helping pave the way for alternative energy sources by manufacturing solar panels, solar powered home storage units, and electric semi-trucks. The main issue with electric cars is the ability to take them long distances and locating charging stations along the way. If we can increase the demand for electric cars, gas stations could, eventually, be re...
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