You know when you almost walk into somebody and you both try to avoid each other but step the same way and end up hitting each other anyways? Well that’s basically what happened to the Imo and the Mont-Blanc on the morning of December 6th, 1917. These were two ships, both inside the Halifax Harbour, which collided resulting in the largest man made explosion before the nuclear bombs.
For this assignment we had to create a news report on The Halifax Explosion with a group of no more than four. My group was made up of Marley, Maria and Nolan. Our first step was to do research on the event. We used the Canadian Encyclopedia and CBC to do this. Then using our information we wrote a script as if the event had just occurred.
Once we finished our script it was time for filming. We decided to film against a green screen and later edit the video to look like a news room. On our first day of filming we hadn’t fully planned out the format of our video so we didn’t get much done, but we did come up with a pretty good green screen set up.
*insert green screen setup pic*
We put a block under the green screen which we then sat behind to allow us to edit in a news desk later. Our next filming session was after school at Marley’s house, where we got over 30 minutes of Nolan bloopers. While these were funny they weren’t very productive, and it took Marley so long to sift through them to get our actual footage. But at least by the end of our filming session Nolan could say the word subsequent.
During our last filming session we managed to be quite productive. Marley, Maria and I all got all of our clips filmed and ready to go, so then it was time for editing. It is quite hard to collaborate when it comes to editing, so Marley ended up actually putting together the video and making it look good. She used the software final cut to actually create our video. The group helped her out by finding virtual newsrooms that we could use, and finding pictures to go along with the script. After many hours of editing, and a long group house party (which killed my battery life) the News Report was finally finished.
https://youtu.be/x-V4MHEhUOA
The Halifax Explosion devastated the city, and a memorial service is held for it each year on December 6th at 9:00am in Halifax, by the Memorial Bells at Fort Needham to commemorate the casualties of the incident. I urge you to take a minute out of your day this year on December 6th to remember those lost and injured during the tragic incident.
During World War I almost 61 000 Canadian soldiers were killed, one of them being John Douglas Armstrong. He was an engineer from Ottawa who, in May of 1916 went across to Europe to fight in the war. He never made it home.
For this blog post we had to research a Canadian soldier who fought in World War I and make a journal entry as though we were him. Ms. Willemse gave us a link to a website where we could find a soldier who fought in World War I, and another page where if we type in their name it gave us even more information on the soldier. Sounds easy enough? Maybe not. See to get an understanding of who this person was we had to find a soldier with lots of information on them. Some people found soldiers right away with lots of sources, but I personally spent an hour searching before finding a soldier with more than two documents, he had 4 but they were two different documents each on the website twice. After hours of typing in random names and sifting through the soldiers trying to find one with quite a bit of resources I realized this meathod wasn’t working. So instead I decided to search by dates. I searched for all soldiers who died between April 9th and April 12th 1917, the dates of the Battle of Vimy Ridge because I thought it could be interesting to do research on a soldier who died during the greatest Canadian battle in WWI. And that’s how I came across Lieutenant John Douglas Armstrong.
I found out information about him using newspaper articles, his forms and a few other sources that were on the website given to me by Ms Willemse. I had quite a bit of information but felt like more would be better. I searched his name on google and came across a couple great pages that gave me more information on him. Here are the main sources I used for information.
Along with those I used this website, and this one. Together I used these sources to try to determine what he may have been thinking on April 8th 1917, the day before he died. Then I wrote this journal entry.
On April 9th 1917 John Douglas Armstrong was shot in the abdomen and passed away almost instantly. His last words were cautioning his friend not to advance to quickly, even when dying caring more about his friend’s safety than his own. He died with a smile on his face. John Douglas Armstrong is now buried in Villers Station Cemetery.
Have you ever heard of the Manhattan Project? I can guarantee that you wouldn’t have known what it was in 1944, unless you were one of the few scientists selected to work there. Most of the people involved with the project didn’t even know what it was.
For the first unit this year in PLP, we studied the Manhattan Project, an American Program that played a key role in World War II. Its purpose was to create atomic weapons to be used in war. This project was top secret and only the key players in the project actually new what was being developed.
We started our unit by creating a character card about an important person involved with the Manhattan Project. I decided to do mine on Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, and while almost everyone else did theirs on people no one had heard of I chose the director of the Manhattan Project. Ms. Willemse and Mr. Hughes wanted us to choose less known people for our character cards but I also remember them saying that we needed the key players too. I was looking for someone good to do mine on when I realized that no one had chosen a single key player so I decided that I should. While it may have been a bit easier to do mine on Groves because there was so much information on him it made choosing the most important facts that much more difficult.
After the character card assignment we put our historical perspective skills to the test. We downloaded the app “Los Alamos: The Secret City of the Manhattan Project” which allowed us to walk around Los Alamos and get a sense of what life there was really like. We had to use the information from this game, along with other research and prior knowledge, to write a letter as if we were someone living in Los Alamos writing to our loved ones. When Ms. Willemse told us about this assignment our initial question was whether or not we could give detailed information and she told us we’d worry about that latter. What we didn’t know at the time was that after writing the letter we’d have to get into pairs and censor each other’s letters. This exercise made us first imagine what it would be like to live in Los Alamos, and then think about what type of information would actually be allowed to be shared with people outside of the city.
This is part of my final letter, can you guess what is blacked out? Family members got letters like this everyday and had to try to fill in the blanks, and now you can try too.
After that assignment is when our main project began. We had to create a video in the style of “History in Five” where we had to get into groups of five, choose a main topic and then come up with five subtopics that had to do with our theme. My group’s topic was the Secrecy at Hanford, and my group and their subtopics were:
Nolan: Hanford Working Conditions
Anatolia: Security Measures
Mike: Keeping it Top Secret
Me: Hanford Work Ethics
Gabi: Why Security was Necessary
I was kind of nervous for this project because it’s my first year in the PLP program so I had never done a big project like this before. I didn’t know how to edit videos or the process of putting together something like this, but I was excited to learn. Luckily the other members of my group had been in PLP since grade 9 so they were pros. They helped me along the way and were patient with my learning process.
For this project I had to do research into my subtopic, write my own script and create my own video. Of course, this being PLP we didn’t just do research on our topic but instead we actually went to Hanford, one of the secret cities that was part of the Manhattan Project. During this field school we got a chance to go to the site of the B Reactor, a museum and more. Here’s the full itinerary of what we did:
While at Hanford my group asked people who now work there questions that we came up with prior to the field study. This is how we got most of our research done, and we even filmed many of these interviews to use as clips within our video.
We didn’t start writing our scripts until after the trip because we got most of our information at the site. When we arrived back at the school it took my group too long to finish writing our scripts despite the information we now had. By the time our first draft was due all we had to hand in was our interview clips and some voice overs on black screens. In fact, it took until the day our second draft was due for everyone to have finished writing their script.
It took my group a long time to edit as well, because we decided to do it all on Anatolia’s laptop. This meant we could only edit one at a time which slowed down the editing process. We did it on her laptop because we needed it for the green screen effects we used. I decided to try and put mine together on iMovie on my iPad and sent it to Anatolia to add into the movie. Then we put the green screen effects in after having put the rest of the movie together. I’m glad I did this because I’m not sure if I ever would have gotten a chance to edit mine otherwise, I just wish that more of my group and used their iPads to edit.
Despite these road blocks though, our video progressed through each step of the process. I’m honestly not 100% sure if it’s completely finished yet, after all, there is always something to improve, but I’m still proud of what we managed to make. It took quite a while and lots of late nights, but the hard work was definitely worth it.
https://youtu.be/hZlMzmyiVjY
If (let’s be real, when) I am to do a project like this again I will definitely start writing my script before the trip. This way I will be able to film on site which will give the video that much more effect. It will also help us to know exactly what clips we need and use our time to get those specific clips. Plus having the script written and all of our video clips sooner will allow more time for editing and making sure the project is made to the best of our abilities. Also, I will try to get my group to edit our individual sections on our iPads rather than making the whole video on one laptop, because that really limits the amount of time we have to work on our individual videos.
I learned a lot from this project, in both the creation process of PLP projects, and about the Manhattan Project. It was quite interesting, and getting to go to Hanford made it seem so much more real and allowed me to connect with what I was learning. Overall our film could have been better, but I’m proud of our group and what we managed to create, along with all of the hard work we put in.
What caused World War I? That’s an easy question, right? Wrong! In fact, the cause of World War I is still highly disputed among historians. For this blog post we had to research different reasons historians had for why the war began and choose our own stance on the topic. Then, of course, we had to find a creative way to display our findings. I decided to create a few political cartoons to highlight my key ideas, two of which I drew on paper, and I edited the other on my iPad.
The cause of World War I is highly disputed among historians and while researching what the cause was, I found many different ideas. After finding multiple views on the beginning of World War I I came to the conclusion that, while there were many factors that caused WWI, the main issue was the many alliances formed between various countries.
The two main alliances were the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. The Triple Entente consisted of France, Britain and Russia, and Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy were the three counties who made up the Triple Alliance. Along with those alliances there were other, smaller, alliances, the most notable being Russia and Serbia. Russia was allied with Serbia because of their common Balkan background, and felt the need to protect the smaller, struggling country. These alliances made it impossible for a regional dispute to stay isolated, and not escalate.
When a disruption did occur it happened to be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The disruption that sparked war could have been any minor disagreement, the assassination just happened to occur at a time when it would cause much more than a small dispute.
Bosnia, a region in southern Austria-Hungary, wanted to become its own country. Serbia also wanted this freedom for the Bosnians. Bosnian nationalists saw, and took advantage of, their opportunity to strike at Austria-Hungary when Ferdinand announced his trip to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Assassins were recruited throughout Bosnia and Serbia, and were trained to kill the Archduke. These assassins were part of a terrorist group called the Black Hand. Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian-Serb, who one of these assassins. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary when he was killed.
This assassination caused a chain reaction of events that set off WWI. The Austria-Hungary government felt the assassination was a direct attack on them, from Serbia. They believed that the terrorists had been aided by the Serbian government, and put an ultimatum on Serbia. When this ultimatum was denied by Serbia, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. They began this war as a way of showing that terrorism would not be tolerated, and they also hoped it would inspire nationalism within the country. The government of Austria-Hungary just hadn’t expected on fighting against two countries.
This dispute would have only lead to a small war, if not for all the alliances. Russia had agreed to aid Serbia if you Austria-Hungary attacked, so when war was declared, Russia mobilized. The French wanted power over all of Europe and were allied with Russia, so they mobilized right away, as well. Germany, having had agreed to help Austria-Hungary in the case of war, then declared war on both Russia and France. Belgium originally hadn’t planned on joining the war until Germans invaded Belgium on their way into France. The chain reaction of European countries joining the war had began, and continued until almost all of the continent, and eventually other continents, were pulled into war due to various alliances.
World War I would never have grown to the size it became without all of the alliances. These made the war grow much more than it needed to, and the amount countries joining in, to defend their allies spiralled out of control. Without the many alliances World War I would have never occurred.
