Skip to main content

Final Project: Nature is Neat!

Video:  https://vimeo.com/304523139

Nature is Neat: Justification
Throughout this course we were able to discover some of the natural beauty of Texas that we had not really seen before. Discovering all these little bits of nature interspersed within Fort Worth helped us see a new side of the city.  With most of us being from places that are defined by their picturistic scenery it reminded us how thankful we are to have grown up in a place where nature is so easily accessible. While reminiscing about our childhoods and easily accessible nature we also recalled the old educational videos we were shown in school that were filled with awkward pauses, questions and word art. We decided for our nature video to pull in these memories from our childhood and create an ‘informational’ video about nature in the true 90s style.
We filmed our video at the Trinity Trails Airfield Trail Head, out by the waterfall. While we were enjoying the scenery we decided to make the word ‘nature’ an acronym and come up with an object that we found on the trail for each letter in the word nature. We believe this was a crafty way to incorporate our current surrounding and to base our film in objects of nature. ‘N’ stood for nest, which we spotted up in the trees. ‘A’ stood for agua or water which we had walked along. ‘T’ stood for the trees that surrounded us. ‘U’ stood for underground because we discovered some holes in the ground off the side of the trail. ‘R’ stood for rocks which surrounded the edge of the river and waterfall. ‘E’ stood for eggs, because we found lots of spider webs and spiders lay eggs. From here we recalled a little bits of information that we had learned about our objects and shared our facts as a part of recreating the ‘informational’ films they showed in elementary and middle school.
The hardest part of creating our video then laid in reflecting on the course, but we decided to connect to objects we had chosen back to authors we read and videos we watched that stood out to us the most. We connected the nest back to the nest that Linda Hogan had discovered with the blue thread in it, and commented on the connectedness of life and how all of our homes are here on earth.  Agua or water we connected back to Bill Mckibben and Leonardo Dicaprio and their comments on climate change and how no one is doing anything about it, because fresh water will be one of the first things to disappear. For trees we connected it back to Wendell Berry and the tree he observed growing through the chimney, and how it takes a very long time for earth to undo the damage humans cause.  Underground and rocks were harder and we did not have any good connections that weren’t a stretch, so we did not directly connect those to our course work. For Eggs we connected them to Annie Dillard's work ‘Fecundity’ and how she talked about the cycle of life and how some animals lay an excessive amount of eggs. Although she argued that nature is all about death and just trying to survive, we took the more ‘kid friendly’ approach to go with the theme of our video and comment on how creating life is beautiful.
Overall, we had a lot of fun creating our video and worked hard to incorporate material from class as well as our surroundings and current knowledge regarding objects in nature.  Also a side note, Reilly sang her scat song while we volunteered at the nature center and we felt that the whole class should enjoy a last rendition of it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nature Doesn't Wait for You

Ever since Cameron Potter from the TCU Outdoors Center came to our class and spoke about what he likes about nature, I have thought about what he said. He talked about the ethics of being in nature and sharing that space with other people, animals, and other living beings. It resonated well with our larger discussion of how humanity has treated the environment since the Industrial Revolution. His words were a good reminder that even though we feel like we have no control over governments and international supply chains, we can control what we do as individuals. We have our domain in which we live, and we can control how we behave within that. If I spend time outside, it is my responsibility to leave the place as I found it. Just as we clean up after ourselves in a self-serve restaurant, or how my mom used to tell us to leave our cousins’ house exactly as we found it when we stay over, we must simply clean up after ourselves. It is good manners within society, and those manners extend ...
1 comment
Read more

Some Mesquite Misfortunes

Today marked our third class day spent at the Fort Worth Nature Center, and it continued our hands-on outdoor learning, although it was a bit more painful than our past two Nature Center outings. Our first day, we used picks and shovels to dig trenches in the mud for a big water tank, and the second day we used large clippers to clean up the bison observatory deck. Today, however, we got to go a bit more into the ‘field,’ literally. We were tasked with clearing the mesquite trees that grow in one of the bison pastures. We gathered up our tools, the clippers and mini-saws, and got to work. Each Nature Center outing has involved a new type of physical activity that exercises my body in ways it has not experienced before, and this excursion was no different. I quickly discovered that many of the mesquite trees were too thick for the clippers, so I switched to the little saws. I worked at the trees, sometimes moving quickly from one to the next, and sometimes getting hung up on a particul...
1 comment
Read more

Blog Post 1

Tuesday, September 4 For my first nature journal entry, I will share about my outdoor experience this weekend at our family farm and how our previous class period affected my observation of nature in a new way. When my Dad was little, my grandparents bought about 200 acres of land in the middle of the Ozark Mountains in northwest Arkansas. Since then, Big Piney, as the property is called after the creek that runs through it, has become a special place where my family and friends can get away from the world. This year, my Dad bought 30 more acres of adjoining land and built a second cabin, which he amusingly calls “Pineycello,” as if it were of such architectural beauty as Thomas Jefferson’s home. Due to my working in Fort Worth this summer, I was the only family member who had not yet seen the new cabin, so I joined him for a day trip to the farm. While we were there, we drove down to the creek to cool off. I had not been to Big Piney in months, and I hadn’t been during the ...
1 comment
Read more