Hey friends, welcome back to my blog. This is the last ever Humanities post from Grade 9! It’s so crazy to look back to my first post, and how much I’ve (hopefully) improved my blogging skills since then. Or, at least, how much better I now know how to use this site.

But that’s besides the point. For this final unit, we learned a lot about the Great War, or WW1. After gaining some general knowledge about the war, we dove into creating videos about whatever topic we chose, and with whatever video-making style we wanted, which meant that this project was pretty open for anything. I think that I really benefited from this, because I had the chance to try a style of video that I’ve never taken on before. If you’ve ever watched a Draw my Life video on Youtube, you may recognize my chosen format.

Our “expectation” for this unit was:

Tell an engaging story of an event, person, place, or thing involved in World War One. Your video should be informed by factual research and a well planned out Screenplay and Storyboard.

We also did Book-chats about our different WW1 books that we read. I read the book Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I’ll be coming back to these Book-chats later on in this post!

BUILDING KNOWLEDGE   

Before beginning our actual projects, we did a couple introductory assignments to get us used to the idea of WW1. Our Domino Effect Video is a short skit about the alliances and disputes between countries leading up to WW1, and I also created a Mind Map about several of the factors leading up to WW1.

BOOK-CHATS

During our unit in WW1, we had to bring out the English side of our class into this project. We did this by doing a novel study on our choice of three WW1 books. I chose the book Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo, which is a book about a young man named Tommo Peaceful and his life experience, from attending school to fighting in the war and everything in between. It also focuses on his brother Charlie’s story from Tommo’s own perspective. I really liked this book a lot. Many of the other options of books to read were less story-like and more informational. I chose Private Peaceful because I wanted to read a book that had characters I would grow to love, hate, relate to, or other; I just wanted to read something that told an impactful story. Not that a more informational story wouldn’t be impactful, I just think that Private Peaceful’s story of war told from the eyes of a young boy experiencing it was very heartfelt and managed to make me cry multiple times! It wasn’t just about the war either; it began developing the characters and their lives, and then continued to show how that aspect of them was impacted by the war. After finishing it, I’ve realized that I made the right choice. I did love this story a lot and I would definitely recommend Private Peaceful to anyone who wants to learn about WW1 with a personal, familial touch.

While reading our books, we had weekly book-chats, where we would check in about what section of the book we had all reached and share a reflection on that section in the forms of a summary, connections, art piece or questions. After we had completed the book, our final creative summary of these novels was assigned. For this final assignment, I created a playlist with songs that I felt related to certain sections of the books, and then wrote down the section of the book I thought each song related to, some lyrics from that song, and a little connection as to why I thought they correlated with eachother.

Here is my playlist and my creative responses. Feel free to click on the picture of the album covers to listen to my playlist, or click on the pages from my response sheet that I’ve inserted to open them in a new tab and make them big enough to read!

INITIAL RESEARCH

I decided to do my video on the changing borders of Europe during WW1. I knew nothing about this, but during class, we had done an activity to see what knowledge we may have already known about WW1, and upon looking at a map of Europe prior to WW1 I noticed some major differences compared to modern Europe. This inspired to me to choose this topic, as I’m pretty interested in Europe’s history in general as well.

I handed in some initial research about this topic, and discovered that there were four Empires that fell during the war: the German Empire, the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire. As you will see in my video, I learned that these empires were prime examples of political power during their time; they worked mostly efficiently at defending their boundaries and their citizens. However, it wasn’t all positive. There was often discrimination against national minorities within the large empires.

I also learned that events revolving around border alterations in WW1 were directly responsible for events leading up to WW2. This was especially interesting to me, just how interconnected these wars were, and how the smallest change of border can cause a domino effect on several other parts of history. I made sure that I was recording all this for my video!

STORYBOARD AND SCREENPLAY 

Initial research? Done. Now it’s time to do some storyboarding and screenplaying! For our screenplay, I formatted it like a TV show screenplay, as always. This makes it easy to see what’s happening while things are being said. After finishing the screenplay, I made a storyboard with Keynote, something I’ve never done before. It turned out pretty good, and it’s much easier to post it online. Definitely a method I’ll be using in the future!

VIDEO TIME! 

Finally! Now that everything leading up to the actual video is done, we can jump into the complicated filming of a whiteboard style video. I had to strategically prop my iPad up on a chair and put a light by the other side of the board to attempt to achieve some sort of decent lighting. The filming took me about two hours, and the editing was the easiest part. I actually really like this whiteboard method, and I hope that I can use it more in the future. I was feeling decently confident about my first draft; the only things that I knew I would need to add for the second draft would be music and a whiteboard introduction, because I ended up adding a FlipaClip intro as I forgot to film a proper one.

However, I ended up changing a fair amount after my first draft. I added music, which my dad helped me create in Cubase. I refilmed sections of the video to make it less confusing and have simpler visuals, which worked out well. Much of my feedback was instructing me to make the visuals simpler and clearer, so in the future with these kinds of videos I will take into account that often simpler is better. It was especially relevant in my video because what I’m talking about is quite confusing and troubling to follow at times. With all of this taken into account, I created a second and final draft which was to be…. drumroll….. presented to the grade 6 and 7s at Covecliff Elementary!!

When we got to Covecliff, we had the chance to go around and show our videos to the Grade 6 and 7 students. It was actually pretty fun, and they were interested in learning about how we made the videos. I also made a little quiz for the students. Most of them were successful at filling it out, and overall it was nice to see that they were paying attention to my video and (hopefully) learning a little something. Feel free to try and answer the questions yourself while watching my video!

IN CONCLUSION…

Just to remind you of our expectation for this project:

Tell an engaging story of an event, person, place, or thing involved in World War One. Your video should be informed by factual research and a well planned out Screenplay and Storyboard.

I believe that I successfully did this! I researched a topic that I knew nothing about, developed it into an engaging and factual story, and told it in a creative way. Again, this was my first ever whiteboard-style video, and I really really liked it! I think this style of video making should be used more often. I’m glad that this unit offered me the opportunity to try something new, which was a risk, but in the end it turned out pretty good. I feel confident about using this method in the future and I hope that an opportunity to do so will be presented to me sometime. If I were going to change or improve on my video even more, I think that I would fix the lighting in some of my shots, because I realize that I was trying too hard to use a lamp on one side and the sunlight on the other. It would be so much easier just to use direct sunlight to provide consistent light, which I found out while refilming some clips. Overall, I’m proud of the outcome if this unit, and glad we learned about so many interesting things and did a ton of different little assignments and projects that were all enjoyable and engaging while still being educational.