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Worst Case Scenario" Project

Mr. Evenski gratefully acknowleges the source of this project: Amanda Dahlgern is an art teacher at Canyon Crest Academy in San Diego. Visit her class website to see this project in its original form.

These are her exact words:

Many of you have seen a series of books called "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks." These books describe in very serious and detailed language the processes you should follow to survive some unlikely situations, such as "How to Escape from Killer Bees," "How to Identify a Bomb," "How to Survive Adrift at Sea," "How to Escape from a Bear." Topics in the series range from the very serious to the very silly, such as "How to Retrieve a Candy Bar Stuck in the Lunchroom Vending Machine" and "How to Deal with Body Odor." According to Publishers Weekly, "The secret to Piven's and Borgenicht's [the authors] success seems to be in maintaining, at all costs, a dead-pan and practical approach to survival techniques in ever-wilder scenarios."

Your assignment is to choose a "how to" process to visually describe in a Flash movie. The process you choose can be serious or silly, but it must be school-appropriate. You can use a topic that has already been covered in one of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks," or you can make one up on your own (preferred).

Like the books this project is modeled after, even if the topic is silly, the process you describe must be accurate and have a serious, "dead-pan" tone, so do your research carefully! Unlike the books, your Flash movie will rely more on visuals and animation than on text to describe the steps in the process.

Although the information must be carefully researched, any text in your Flash movie must be written in your OWN words. Any images you use must be either created yourself (for example, images drawn in Flash, painted in Photoshop, or taken with a digital camera) or used with permission, following Copyright Law (look up the section on "Educational Fair Use").

You will demonstrate your organizational skills and technical skills in making a Flash movie that is informative and logical and free of technical errors. Your project must include simple buttons that walk the user through each step in the process and a button at the end that the user can click on to start the movie over.

You will demonstrate your art skills in creating aesthetically-pleasing layouts, legible text, and correct use of color.

You will publish your project on the world wide web and present it to the class, learning from and critiquing each other's projects.

Note: Make sure you research your topic and PLAN your project before you start the work in Flash. A storyboard with layouts for each step is VITAL and will be due ahead.

"Worst Case Scenario" Project DUE at the beginning of class on: TBA

Examples of wonderful student "Worst Case Scenario" Projects from last year.