Hello to my fellow fans that take time out of their days just to read my blog posts. I know you all have been waiting for your weekly post, so here we go with another one just for the fans of course. This week my main girl, Ms Willemse, assigned the class to create a news report about the Halifax Explosion. This very tragic event was asked to be summarized and presented in a video style format, which also required us to be put into groups of no more than 4 in order to produce this report. Luckily, the class was given the opportunity to choose who we wanted to work with. I ended up collaborating with 3 lovely ladies: Gabi, Anatolia, and Brianna for this project.

My team in particular started by planning out our roles for this video. For example, we decided that Gabi and Brianna would be the news reporters, Anatolia would be our on field reporter, and I was a key witness. From then on each of us were able to use the websites Ms Willemse kindly offered us to gather information on our own topics, and due to the abundance of information on each website this plan made it easier for each of us to narrow them down in finding the key facts we needed for our own character roles. After each of us had a general understanding about this major even that happened in Halifax, we were able to use our knowledge to begin writing scripts for the video.

For myself I really needed to fall into a different character, as I was required to become someone who actually witnessed the explosion and still lives in this demolished city. It took some further research on other news articles created, and reading stories about actual witnesses during his time to feel inspired enough to peruse this change in character on my part. At the time I had also been working on another blog post where in fact I had to fall under the character of a solider who took part in the Canadian army during World War One, and that also helped when attempting to change character. In the end, my further understanding about how people felt after the explosion grew immensely, and I was soon able to complete my script with ease.

Once we all successfully completed our scripts it was time to start filming. My group planned out what equipment we would need, and what times during class as well as outside of class we could use to film. For example, Gabi created another document within the group planning out the days we had left to film, and each of us filled in which days we were available. I also then asked our substitute teacher for permission to use the green screen outside of school to finish up our filming. My group intended on making our video as realistic as possible, incorporating costumes, and props. Anatolia, our amazing makeup artist, even made my face look beat up as if I was actually injured. (Yes there was makeup on my face I don’t look that terrible on camera.) Different backdrops were used to make it look as if Gabi and Brianna were in a news room, and Anatolia and myself were in Halifax. Over all, I think we were able to produce a well put together news report in the time being.

In the end I was able to learn a lot about the Halifax Explosion, and was able to benefit a lot from this project. I wouldn’t mind ever doing a project similar to this again, but for next time I think the outcome and quality of our video especially could have succeeded more if we were provided with more class time:)

Sources:

http://www.cbc.ca/halifaxexplosion/

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/halifax-explosion