Welcome humans, animals, and other life forms. Today we are talking about Revolution. I am your guide today, and my name is Benjamin. I will be leading you throughout the project that was about cause and consequence. The driving question you ask? “How do ideas drive change?” This is perfectly exemplified in the many videos we do in certain revolutions we do, but to sum it up here is the answer I think I found. Ideas are the driving point to change. You need an idea to have change. A good example of this is the French Revolution. King Louis XVI funded the American Revolution so France was in debt. The third estate which was being taxed, realized that they were 98% of the population and started a revolution. They couldn’t have done that if they didn’t have an idea of why they were revolting and what they were revolting for.

We were ultimately graded on 4 competencies. The first one is cause and consequence. I was assessed on how I could assess how actions or conditions of individuals affects events, decisions, or developments. I feel like I did very well in this because I felt like I was able to easily understand how and why the events in the different revolutions took place. An example of this would be the screenplay and the notes we took on the different revolutions. I had an active role in many of the screenplay’s and in order for them to be good I needed to know and understand why everything happened and what led up to that happening.

The second competency is based on how i can assess the justifications and reliability of competing historical sources. I feel like I also did very well on this one. An example would be the note-taking part of pretty much every revolution we learned about. Ms. Maxwell would teach us what she knew from textbooks (don’t worry they were digital) and then I would go home and watch YouTube videos about the subject from a certain channel called Oversimplified. I would then use knowledge I had gained from reading about these revolutions from library books that I had read at a young age and fact check all the events and major components of the revolution.

 

Competency number 3 was exchanging ideas and viewpoints with group members to build a shared understanding of the project and extend our thinking. I think my group did fairly well for this. Personally I feel like I could have communicated better with my group with the ideas I had and I think that our entire group could have communicated better so we were on the same page. I do think that we were good at sharing different ways to film and produce our video which was good for our group.

The last competency was about text comprehension and strategies. I do think that I did pretty good for this competency because I could understand the different ways the stories of the French Revolution were being told. Whether it was someone from the third, first, or second estate I could figure out why they thought what they did and why they did what they did simply because of how they were speaking and how they were portraying their experiences. 

Now for the videos we made. I have been talking about these videos my group made so now is the time to reflect on those videos. The first video we did was about the French Revolution. We decided to act it out. This was our first video so we were a little disorganized in the process. We could have done better for the pre-production and that ultimately led to us rushing the video and prematurely ending the video. We should have planned a bit better so we weren’t rushing an ending where almost a quarter of the revolution wasn’t represented. But then again this was our first try so we had a few more chances for improvement.

Our second video was about the American Revolution. We decided for this one to make a rap. I am very proud of the result of this video as I was very invested in the writing of the lyrics. I wrote most of them and this video turned out to be a success in eyes. Although the audio was a bit patchy and we could have done better with the filming, it was a definite step up from our last video.
https://youtu.be/yXCjzKf9Rq0

Video number 3 was about the Russian Revolution. This was a video where my group decided we would be making a video similar to Crash Course videos. Our backdrop was very good and I feel like that was the high point of this video. Our audio was not very good. Actually, our audio was terrible. The mic had decided to malfunction and in our infinite wisdom(sarcasm) my group decided not to test out the mic. So this video had a lot to improve considering we had one last video to make.  

Our last video was a combination of the things we were good at and the things we haven’t done yet. We did it on the French Revolution since our groups theme was the French Revolution. This time I was a bit more invested in the screenplay which had turned out well for the rap video. Our backdrop, which was expertly designed by Anders and Alex, was added and our video format was a Crash-Course Animation combination. We had two weeks to make this video and we were confident going into it. The screenplay was set and the backdrop built. I had made the music and we were ready to edit. I think there was a big difference between our first and last video. The quality of the video and the content skyrocketed from the first to last video. I think we did well in the last video and I am proud of what we did. 

I really did enjoy this project of videos and I thank you for attending the tour of this project. I will see you all in the next one!