Total Disaster
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Animation , Engineering , Explanation , Physics , Primary
A badly-designed bridge is a disaster waiting to happen.
Director's Notes:
Team Glee write:
Our film is about bridges. We have two bridges made from polydron. One is a cable-stayed bridge and the other a cantilever bridge. A boat journeys up a river that it is not allowed to and it crashes into the cable-stayed bridge. Three people lose their lives and the bridge collapses. We have a news report on the accident with the message that ‘Different materials give different outcomes’. We got our idea from our class project on bridges. We have been learning about different types of bridges for a while now and about the materials they are made from. We chose animation to present our idea and we feel it went quite well because we have experience of doing animation. Using Garageband for our music and sound effects was new to us. It was tricky to begin with but soon solved that problem. If we were to redo this film we would ensure we make more use of the tripod to help keep a steady hand.
The team consisted of six students, ages ten and eleven. They had help ‘when we were really stuck with technical problems.’
SciCast Notes:
Blimey, this is bleak. There’s certainly a higher body count in this than most SciCast films. Luckily, they’re plasticene people, so I guess that’s OK.
I like the style, and the bridges are magnificent things, but I don’t quite follow what happens. It might have been more clear if we’d seen the two bridges earlier on in the film, so we were shown what was different about them; the notes the team have written help make sense of it all, but remember: if your camera doesn’t see it, your audience doesn’t know it.
But hey, nobody said making films was easy. Pulling all of this together must have been a huge effort by the team, and they should be proud of the job they’ve done just to get it finished.
Solid work.
— Jonathan.