I am so excited that I have had this opportunity to do this course. There are so many words that accurately describe this course. Boring and disappointed aren’t any of them. Which goes to say, I love this course. I have learned so much from What’s the Story. Especially from this weekend’s retreat. Examples are how to direct myself in the right direction without much help, of course, I still need some guidance occasionally. I now know how to operate a camera, and the things that you need to know when interviewing people, such as the angle, the lighting, the Rule of Thirds, etc.

I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at this retreat. I thought we were going to work with our groups about trying to contact our interviewees, and stuff like that. But it turned out so much better!

My team was originally going to focus on Lake Champlain only and talk about phosphorus and algae and everything that results from these things. But we decided to focus on the millennials and the future generation that have made innovative inventions to help improve or lessen impacts on water quality. We already have two potential interviewees, but we have yet to contact them about interviewing them. But we have to hope for the best. We are planning on finding a third for our documentary. That is most likely what the first thing we will do when we leave this retreat.

Even though we had to move backwards to move forward (I have always wanted to say that), we moved farther ahead than before. Which is really good, because we are making great progress. I came to this retreat expecting to keep on working with Lake Champlain. But I’m really happy that we changed topics because I think we can go farther with this, compared to our previous ideas.

One of the parts we had to do today was to come up with a “one-sentence elevator pitch”, and what I said was, “My team and I are making a documentary/website that highlights the future generation doing incredible things to help lessen impacts and improve water quality, and inspire the rest of the future generation to do the same.” So instead of just helping Lake Champlain, but every body of water that we can find that has been helped by extraordinary inventions.

Like I said, we are probably going to look for one more person that is young, and has created something amazing right when we leave. But also, until the next meet-up on January 14, we should have contacted the people we want to interview. Also, we probably would’ve interviewed one person (Andrew Silverman is most likely going to be first).

Now with the revised Action Plan, we have more details to go off for the next month. We will need less guidance when we start working towards our final project. And we aren’t only working on a documentary. We will be making a website with a bunch of information on it. It will have our documentary on there hopefully. That idea is, as one of my teachers likes saying, on the back burner of our minds, which means it’s still in the making or a work in progress. But we will perfect this idea as the year goes on and it will be a final result in our project.

Don’t forget that the food was amazing! And the beds were really comfortable and gave me a really good sleep. That’s always a good thing. I’m not sure what the next blog post will be, but it will be good, and it will push me and my team further towards our main goal… “to inspire the future generation to use the full capacity of their growing brains and make those creative, revolutionary, innovative, and perhaps life and environment saving inventions. The rest of the future generations will thank you for saving the world we are going to be living in. Unless somehow humans grow smart enough to learn how to thrive on Mars. I’m pretty sure there isn’t any water up there, so then you wouldn’t need to worry about water quality. Actually you would, because since there isn’t any water up there, we would have to bring water with us. And the water we bring needs to be the purest. And we can’t do that if our future generation doesn’t help clean up our water here.” See, I already came up with some lines for our documentary. And I included the inspiring importance of water. And Mars.

Until next time!! Hoped you enjoy. 🙂