I’m back, with another late blog post! But better late then never right? Okay anyways for this blog post we are going to be talking about the The Manhattan Project, and more specially the Hanford Project.
For our first field study of the year, we traveled all the way to Oregon. This field study was centred around the Manhattan Project. We were all spilt into groups of 5 and we had to chose a topic around the Manhattan Project. My group consisted of Gabi, Nolan, Chloe, and Mike. Each person in your group would take on a small piece of your entire topic. At first we were thinking of doing women in the Manhattan Project but we soon left that idea behind because there was another group doing that and also we couldn’t think of many topics around it. We finally decided on secrecy during the Manhattan Project.
Secrecy in the Manhattan Project was the number one concern behind safety. People working for the Manhattan Project and more specially the Hanford Project, had no clue what they were woking for/ towards. All they knew was that they were aiding the war effort and for many that was enough. The reason they had to keep this project so secretive was because it was a race to who would create the first atomic, and overall win the war. It was mainly the US vs. Germany, and if anyone who was woking on the project spread the word about how they were creating it or how far along they were, then who knows what would have happened.
This project was mimicking a type of video called “History in 5”, our teachers wanted us to use similar format, by each person having one fact/ piece essentially.
Here is a History In 5 video for example…
Each member of my group was assigned a small sliver of the entire topic,
Nolan- Hanford Working Conditions
Me- Security Mesures
Mike- Keeping It Top Secret
Chloe- Hanford Work Ethics
Gabi- An Alternate Outcome
Everyone in there group made there own part of the video with one person usually me or Nolan going over everyones, and making sure they flow together and everything is in the same font and we don’t reuse any of the same photos. When we first started working on this project I didn’t really have a clear vision on what the outcome was going to look like, which made me have a delayed start on it. First we had to write our scripts which also took me a while, because for some reason I couldn’t get started. Once we finished our very first rough draft we went through constructive criticism by Mr Hughes. He was actually a lot less harsh then we thought he was going to be. He basically told us to cut out the all the stuff except for the super important stuff. Our video was 15 minutes long at this point and by our final draft it was 9 minutes long.. That is 6 minutes of useless video footage…
We kept making revisions to our movie until we got to the deadline… See how I didn’t say “until we got to what we were happy with”? I did that on purpose because I am not entirely happy with our final product. I think we could have edited it a lot better and also I think the overall quality of our movie could have been better. I think that some peoples parts were a lot stronger then other, which were could have fixed if everyone put in the same amount of effort. I also think that if we could have had our scripts and everything planned out for before the trip our movie could have been a lot stronger.
If we were to ever to this type of project again, I would want to fully understand what the main goal was right from the get-go so I could start right away. I would also want to have my script done before we left for the trip, this would have allowed us to get exactly what we need and not get back and realize we missed something we easily could have gotten. Overall I enjoyed this project, but didn’t love it.