Final Meeting- Our Documentary

Today Sian and I, began recording our voices using a webcam and then implementing them into windows movie maker. I was recorded first and my part was discussing Fungi and their medicinal purposes, and Sians part was second and included the discussion of the Bees and their medicinal purposes. However, whilst recording our voices we experienced a few issues, mainly to do with my part of discussing the Fungi. This was because I had to say a few of the Fungi names, which I found very difficult to pronounce. Whilst trying to pronounce the different Fungi names I would often make a mistake which meant recording had to start all over again, however it was successful after a couple of times. 

Also we both found the making of the picture slideshow very time consuming, because we had to make sure each picture matched with what was being said, which lead to a lot of adjustments, such as  elongating pictures and shortening pictures within the slideshow. 

However overall I did enjoy this project, I learnt a lot of new information that I would of never of known otherwise. The investigation of Fungi and Bees made me appreciate them more, and be grateful that they help so much towards medicine and the human population. 

Here is our documentary.. Enjoy!

First Meeting

Today Sian and I attempted to make a start on our podcast, we decided that we were going to make a documentary, that consisted of just our voices, then a slideshow of relevant pictures attached to show what we were discussing at the time.

Sian and I presented to each other the information we had already found on both the medicinal purposes of bees and fungi. We were both equally impressed with what we had found and began to write up a script in order for us to know exactly what we were saying when it came time to record ourselves. The script took a few hours more than we were expecting, this was because we both had strong ideas on what information we wanted to talk about and we had a few disagreements. However when the script was written we then timed it, it added up to around 8 minutes which was perfect because it was in lineament with the assignment brief.

Sian and I decided to meet up the following day to record our voices and to start gathering pictures to make our slideshow.

Individual Research on Fungi

When conducting my own research on Fungi I found that Fungi has been scientifically placed into a category of its own, much like the animal kingdom, there is a Fungi kingdom, which I found very interesting. 

One medicinal use I found that Fungi had historically achieved, is the creation of Penicillin. Penicillin is an anti-biotic that was derived from Fungi, that was among one of the first drugs to be effective against previous serious diseases, such as Syphilis. Even though Penicillin is still used today, many bacteria have found away to work against it. Nevertheless the historical uses of the Fungi in medicine is tremendous.   

Individual Research on Bees

From my research I have found out that Bees are very crucial to the quality of human life, and they help us in many different ways. When Sian and I visited the Botanical Gardens we were unable to gather much information about the bee project going on there, I decided to take a look at their website.

So here is what I discovered, at the gardens they are currently doing a project on Apothecary Bees,  according to their website http://www.gardenofwales.org.uk/science/plants-for-health/ ;

This project looks at the medicinal properties of honey and combines screening tests developed at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Surprisingly to me, Honey has long been known to have anti-bacterial properties and is already used in wound dressings. However the honey will vary in its effectiveness partly depending on the plants the bees visited to create it. In this project they will be screening wild flower honey, for activity against two of the most common hospital- acquired infections, the bacteria MRSA and Clostriduim difficile.

This information was fascinating to me and since made me realise even more how important bees are to this planet. Furthermore, from personal experience, I have found the use of locally sourced honey is helpful in lowering symptoms of the allergy Hay-fever, which is another positive medicinal use for honey.

Final Decision

After much discussion and collaboration of previous information gathered from all three trips, Sian and I decided we were going to investigate the healing properties of both bees and fungi, in relation to different medicines. 

National Museum of Cardiff

I had always liked going to this museum when I was younger, so I was excited about this trip to find out interesting information for my podcast. The museum had many diverse exhibitions to explore, such as art, natural history and geology. Even though I found the museum very interesting Sian and I did not get a lot of valid information from it. However we were interested in one of the insect displayed in the museums as we were thinking of talking about bees in our podcast.  

St Fagans National History Museum

St Fagan’s is one of Europe’s leading open-air Museums and Wales‘s most popular heritage attractions. Even though when visiting this Museum Sian and I got a lot of information about Wales and our culture, we felt like this trip to St Fagans did not have a lot to offer in relation to helping us with our podcast as The Botanical Gardens did.

Sian and I had already decided before arriving there that the place we wanted to explore and could possibly be useful to us was the Future House within the St Fagans grounds.  We thought it would be fascinating to look at how they had used recycling and the new ways in how they were preserving energy with all the different and wonderful technology’s they had. I had read about in on the St Fagans website previous to going on this trip, unfortunately, when we arrived the Future House was closed, and we did not really find anything else in St Fagans very useful in relation to our assignment. 

The National Botanical Gardens of Wales

The botanical garden of Wales is a garden dedicated to the collection, cultivation and display of a wide range of plants labelled with their botanical names.  The garden contains specialist, tropical and exotic plants from all around the world, and are kept in special green houses and shade houses. Botanical gardens are often run by universities and other scientific organisations, the origin of the garden is to maintain documented collections of living plants for the purpose of scientific research, conversation, display and educational purposes.

While Sian and I were walking around and exploring the gardens the first thing we were interesting in was a display called the Amazing World of Fungi. We walked through the display and admired all the different Fungi they had for us to read about and investigate. Also as we further explored within the garden we discovered these huge trees trucks laying on the ground, they were all different types of trees that some people had used for the purposes such as medicine and home uses such as using them for a tooth brush. Sian and I also went to visit the bee garden because we were both very interested in bees and wanted to learn more about them and how they helped the environment and people, however unfortunately because it was winter, there was not much information on the bees so that was a little disappointing. 

Official Assignment

Today our class got given our second assignment brief, which was; in a group of no more than three create a podcast to show how an out of classroom environment can develop an innovative scientific idea. The podcast can be in the form of a film, documentary or interview (or any other contemporary idea).

My group consists of Sian and I and there has been a number of trips arranged to assist us in gathering information and ideas for our podcast. These trips include:

• The National Botanical Gardens of Wales  
• St Fagans National History Museum
• The National Museum of Cardiff  

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