Exhibition Night...

The date is now April 18, 2008. It is the day after exhibition night for High Tech High. We just got back from cleaning the classrooms and we are now reflecting on all the memories and experiences that we went through last night. As usual, it is impossible to get a word in edge wise when you have a whole class conversations so I kept most of my thoughts to myself. It is still hard to grasp the thought that exhibition nights 2008 has already passed with blazing speeds. It all seemed like a blur to me. Looking back now I can not pick out one certain point in time where I remember anything so clear that I could recite it with clear details. But I do know that we did really well. From everything that I put together. Pretty much the only thing that we did bad and that we could improve on for next exhibition night was that we talked a lot and explained everything in great detail. But luckily we didn’t have to many visitors, with thanks to Allie’s mom. She was standing with us the whole time helping us with our drawings. I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. Its good because we got a lot of help with working with facial expressions, but nobody would come up to us and ask us questions because I think they didn’t wasn’t to interrupt her. We got “grilled” the hardest by our fellow classmates, and we tried to keep it as professional as possible but as you may have guessed, it got a little unprofessional at times. Overall this was a great learning experience for me, and it greatly prepared me for the exhibitions to come.

Character Updates

This was a very unique and helpful way to assume the mind of our character in order to see how they would act under many different scenarios. This really helped me and partner realize that we need to change some things about our characters to make them more “human.” There were many lessons that we learned from doing this activity. One of the main ones was we learned that our characters are “3D” not “2D.” I am using metaphors to describe what we learned but basically, people weren’t giving enough personality to the characters that they were making up, so by putting them into everyday scenarios, we can see how they would react, and therefore help us get a better understanding of our characters.
I’m not going to go into huge detail into the original story that we are changing. But mainly we added more personality to the mom, we made her more fed up with Robbie’s attitude towards life. See there wasn’t much that we needed to change. When we talked to our teacher she said that we surprisingly already had complex characters compared to most people in our class. There were also some parts in our story that we found that didn’t seem natural. It seemed sort of awkward, and unnatural. That’s pretty much all that we had to change after this exercise. I hope you look forward to reading our graphic novel.