Last Thursday Mel from Live Wire Media came to talk to us about Marketing and Promotion.
We learnt:
- we need to think about what our buyers want- research your target market- do a survey
- we need to think carefully about what our product is and what it is called
- we need to advertise using language that everyone can understand
- decide who your target market is
- make sure your product is original/ unique/ better than your competitors.
- look at your competitors and find out what they have that is better than you.


My product is going to be Wheat Bags.



My Target market is: Grandparents who have sore backs and parents who want to buy ice packs for their kids.

Action Plan:

Step 1: Find out the materials is need.
Step 2: Ask Whaea Meg to buy wheat and collect material.
Step 3: Make a prototype
Step 4: Show my target market my prototype. Ask them; "How much would you pay for this?"Would you buy this?" Do you like the colours and size? Any other feedback.
Step 5: Make more wheat bags.
Step 6: Design my packaging. Make sure I explain what makes my product unique. It is home made, made of recycled material. Natural materials
Step 7: Make a poster advertising my wheat bags and how much they cost. Make sure I include lots of information about the product and use convincing language and adjectives.

Quality Blog posts and commenting

We have been thinking about what we have been learning. Blog posts are helpful when we are trying to explain what we have been learning. We are also thinking about how confident we are when we are learning and practising new things. We reflect on how much we enjoyed each task and also think about what we will do next time to make our final products even better. 

This slide show will remind us how to make quality blog posts and comments.

Movie making: Take 2.

Today we attempted to create another movie. We used one of the scripts that we had written ourselves. Next time we need to make sure our script is in order and makes sense and it is clear what everyone is doing. We also need the actors to be louder and give them time to practice next time we make a movie.
We learnt that holding the camera can hurt your arms, we are looking forward to getting a tripod.
We learnt about the clapper. We used it so that it can sync up the audio and sound. We recorded the sound separately so that the speaking is clearer.
We had to re take some shots because we had cut off some of the recording. We also had to retake some shots to make sure the story made sense. Next time we will make sure we record before the clapper, we also need to make sure we say "cut" well after the actors have spoken, this will mean we can edit it more easily and ensure none of the speech is cut off.

It was a pretty good first attempt at a whole movie from scratch, we think we tried a range of camera shots and angles and we also worked well as a team in each different role; director, clapper, actors, sound recording, camera person.

The Rubbish Trip

 

Yesterday we had a visit from Liam and Hannah from the "Rubbish Trip".

They talked to us about living with out a rubbish bin and how they live by the 6 Rs: REFUSE- REPLACE-REDUCE- REUSE-RECYCLE-ROT.REFUSE is the most important R. There would be no rubbish in the first place if we refuse unnecessary plastic and packaging.
They made us think about how much waste we are making and how we can reduce it. They reminded us about how plastic is ruining our sea and environment.
They asked us to think about making one small change to become more waste free. Here are our ideas:

• Ask our parents to buy us bamboo toothbrushes.
• See if we can get some metal straws. 
• We are going to refuse plastic straws in a big loud voice at cafes and shops.
• Buy our family members reusable coffee cups as gifts.
• Use fabric bags or offer to carry the groceries if our whanau forget their carry bags.
• We are keen to try and make some soap and shampoo at home or at school. We would also like to learn more about the Japanese wrapping technique Foroshiki.

www.therubbishtrip.co.nz

Check out their website for more info!

Movie Making

On Friday we started to make some short movies:
We were learning to compose different types of shots.
We were learning to follow a storyboard.
We were learning to collaborate with our group and work in different roles (editor, camera person, actor, director)

It was difficult to work in groups and stick to our separate roles. When we watched our movies back we realised that we need to work on keeping the camera still. We decided we would need to make our expressions more exaggerated so that the audience could understand our story line better. It was difficult to stick to our story board as well and not add in extra shots.

Next we are going to think about different types of films and plan to write our own scripts.

Visiting Author: Adele Broadbent.

Today we had a visit from Adele Broadbent. She is a YA author from Napier. She told us about her inspiration for her most recent book  Between. It is about a character who is fascinated with all things Supernatural. It sounded pretty interesting and we would love to read it one day.

We asked her how she stick to a story without getting bored of what she is writing. 

She gave us a great tip:

Choose a character and find something that they want. But don't give it to them straight away. Put a few challenges in front of the character and then end the story with your character getting what they want. That sounds like a great way to plan a narrative which we hope to try out.

She also has a great website where we can visit and search through a whole range of books she has reviewed

2D to 3D

We were learning to to make 3D shapes by creating our own 2D nets. We made the nets by by using wooden 3D shapes. We rolled them over the paper and traced each face. 
It was quite challenging because we had figure out if it was going to make the correct shape before we folded it up. We had to make sure we had the correct amount of faces.
when we made cylinders it was hard to figure out how long the long face needed to be.