On Wednesdays during Nitzan over the last month, students worked on and created their own personal projects. These projects gave students the opportunity to show the skills they have developed over their schooling and through Nitzan. Many amazing projects were created, including animation, unique art, painting, quilling (see the image above), baking, piping techniques, designing and making bookshelves, desks, a new and improved bedroom and an outdoor dining area.

For my personal project, I chose to make creative videos. Since the first lockdown back in 2020, making videos kept me both busy and entertained. I had a quick brainstorm and came across the perfect idea: Types of Students in Online School. This was a video idea that I thought would be very relatable and funny to all audiences since we have just recently concluded what is promised to be our final lockdown. This video would have acted as a parody and final goodbye to online learning.

I formed a cast of 12 actors, wrote a script with a friend whom I would like to sincerely thank for his contribution and amazing ideas. Next, I got the entire cast together for a script reading session and finally a recording session which was overall very successful and enjoyable. The recording was done by Jacob Pinto and I cannot thank him enough for all his help, dedication and contribution.

Once the recording was completed, I began editing. After working for hours and completing about 85% of the editing work, something terrible occurred. At 11.19pm, right as I was about to save the project and go to bed, all of my work suddenly disappeared. The project had wiped itself clean! All my editing work was gone, the day before my project was due…

Thankfully, the next day was Cup Day public holiday. I still had all of my unedited footage, so I spent the entire day making my project again from scratch. It was a long process, but since I had done it once before, it did not take me as long as the first time, so by 9pm that evening my video was finally complete.

When I got to school the next day, I presented my video to all of the Year 9s. After 3 long weeks filled with hours of work, effort and determination, my fantastic cast and I had made an amazing video. It was very well received by our peers too. I was very proud of my project and I really enjoyed the process of creating it. In addition, I have learnt new important skills, particularly resilience and belief in myself.

If you are interested, please click here to view my Nitzan Personal Project. I hope you enjoy it and have a good laugh. 

– Dylan Umansky, Year 9 student