At the beginning of quarantine, a few friends and I hit an absolute peak in our boredom. Stuck at home with virtually nothing to do, as school was in a limbo and everyone was bound at home. Honestly, all of life was in a limbo.
In this limbo, we did as rational teenagers do, and built our entire school in Minecraft, in painstaking detail. You can see a video detailing it on the left!
The mystical place that is William G. Enloe High School is, unfortunately, not constructed out of solid, brick cubes that are 1 meter tall. So we had to improvise! A lot!
This project took an incredibly surprising amount of design and planning work. In order to make any of the school's papers, flyers, signage, or anything of the sort, we had to remake them using a trick with in-game maps and image files. I also remade or heavily edited virtually every piece of design in the school to better fit Minecraft's aesthetic, as you can see by the blocky William G. Enloe text here.
Another wonderful example of the stylized design. Although this was a group project, I made all of the wonderful, pixelated detailing. Painstakingly.
Finding reference for this detailing was a hellish process. We went to nearly every resource on Enloe imaginable to strive for accuracy, not only in my paraphernalia, but in the entire school. Google Maps, satellite views of the school, photos from students, hallway maps. We even had one person drive by Enloe to get a better eye for it.
As visible at the end of my little tour video, we had quite the team. I went to every length possible to make sure me and my friend Matthew weren't the only people putting together this behemoth. More than anything, I wanted it to be a community project.
So we suffered, as a community! I truly do not know what Enloe's architects were on when they made the marvelous school, but they certainly didn't have the cubic videogame that came out decades later in mind. One of Enloe's most significant buildings, known to most students as the Towers, are built at a 45° angle. Minecraft does not like 45° angles. We had to reshape the entire landscape around the school, the parking lots, and the softball field to fit the proportions of this demonic brick palace. That process genuinely took at least 7 people over 5 days to complete. As I said, we suffered as a community!
The towers, however, are the most accurate part of the school. When we started the school, we were basically eye-balling it. But with the towers, I referenced the school maps for each half and made space for every single room. We didn't get to decorating each one because we value our sanity, but I'll still count it as a win.
Although a ton of people came on to help build the place, it didn't immediately get too much attention. It wasn't too hard to figure out that most teenagers have already lost their Minecraft account passwords, so I had to figure out a way to get these 2 weeks of work out and about. I went to Twitter and posted about it, and that's where the first wave of traction came.
But a lot of it wasn't even from Enloe students. In reality, the 496 people liking that tweet were mostly Enloe graduates, baffled at the lunacy of the dolts that were still at Enloe. But they found it cool! Surprisingly. While I wouldn't shrug off nearly a thousand cumulative likes, most of the clout actually came from Instagram.
I had been planning to make a video tour for a hot minute, but it took me a while to actually accomplish it. I wasn't exactly a ripened veteran in the field of Premiere Pro, and I had to grab quality footage of the entire school. My laptop did not enjoy the task.
However, after learning what a keyframe was and how to use premade text effects, I successfully made the wonderful video at the top of the page. I was proud of it already for how nice it looked considering my lack of experience with the software, but I certainly had more to be proud of the second it went on Instagram.
Being honest, I knew that Instagram was going to be where it could garner the most attention. However, I did not expect this much. Getting nearly 5 thousand views and hundreds of comments was insane.
This also led to some other interesting events. The video had the old server's address on it so people could come on and check out the school themselves, and to my surprise, students that had graduated literal decades ago were joining the server. I would sit on there idle for most of the day doing other things, ready to greet new people, and I'd be met by someone who's already filing their taxes and asking me which college I plan to go to.
The other end of the spectrum was just as interesting. We had kids from middle school joining to check out their future school, which was both adorable and terrifying. We were in charge of their first impression of the campus. I'm still taken aback by that.
Something I was not expecting was for this to end up on the news. A friend's parent sent this to WRAL, and boom, this passion project is in the eyes of even more people. Of course, none of the contributors are mentioned or credited by name, but I'll let it slide. Still incredibly proud of myself and the team for having gotten this far, and this certainly let us know that it was worth it.
All good things must come to an end, and unfortunately enough, my brief moment of Instagram fame was no exception. We had a good few weeks of people on and off of the server, thousands of views and cumulative likes, and overall, a product that we were all proud to be a part of. Word had gone from student, to teacher, to alumni from ages ago, and eventually, it faded out.
The entire experience was still one of the best I've had. It was insanely fun, and I'm baffled to this day at how everyone came together and helped with this ridiculous little scheme of ours.
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One thing I was dead-set on doing was recreating as many of the school's murals as humanly possible. If I combined the amount of time it took me to make all of them, it probably would get near the amount of time that was spent building the school itself. Some of them I simply remade in stylized manners from scratch, but for the others, I tried to use genuine photos and 360 data to put them in the game. I distorted them heavily, recolored them, removed the brick patterns, sized them to fit the scale, and boom! A huge, 21-meter long Eagle by the football field. You can see a few of them on the slideshow, but man, those were torture to make. Still worth it.
My laptop has a natural disposition against Premiere Pro. Before making the video for this, I had tried to use it to make a video for a math project. I spent easily 9 hours trying to get my laptop to cooperate, because I had edited it, saved it, closed it, and when I reopened it, it simply didn't work. Media Offline. I am still grateful that my laptop had mercy when editing the video for Enloe, because if I had lost my editing there, I would've just put the raw footage with elevator music playing.
Since this building was entirely within our hands, we took some creative liberties to... improve the school. There's always been a joke going around about there being a pool on top of the East building, constantly told to swindle the naïve freshmen. So we figured, "why not do that ourselves?" and thus, we did. Considering the earlier bit about this being the first impression of Enloe for some people, I really hope I'm not the reason some kid tries to climb that building.
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