Yeah, my class went to Las Vegas…you may be wondering “why would a group of grade 11s go to Vegas for a project?” Well let me tell you.

So this unit was an interesting unit. Our driving question was “How is fear used as a defensive, political and cultural tool?” And we went to Tucson, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada to answer this.

This unit was mainly focused on the Cold War, along with bits of the history of Las Vegas and the mob. With these two main ideas in mind we had to come up with a much more focused question that related to fear being used as a tool. From there we were expected to figure out everything we’d need to film on the trip to answer our question in a video essay.

One part of this project that I really struggled with was actually coming up with a question. Marley and I were originally working together, with the general idea of whether feared or loved leaders are stronger. With this we were planning on focusing on the mob, and how the fear of them was used as a tool to create the thriving city of Las Vegas. This was all going great until we actually got on the trip.

Once we were on the trip Marley and I realized that our idea in fact wouldn’t work. After lots of discussion and trying to figure out what we actually were going to do we decided our projects would be best if we went separate directions. The main thing that inspired my new choice was this display at the National Atomic Testing Museum about atomic culture. I decided to focus my project on how atomic culture evolved as the fear of nuclear energy grew.

Throughout the trip I found information and got interviews to help me complete this project at all the interesting and fun places we went.

an abbreviated itinerary

Once I got back to the school I made another change to my project…Maria and I decided to work together. It made sense though because both of our topics ended up evolving into the exact same thing, and we knew we could create a much better final product by putting our information, footage and skills together.

We ended up focusing on how fear of nuclear weapons and energy in general affects people view of nuclear power. This was quite interesting because throughout our research we found that it has an unwarranted negative stigma, and we hoped to be able to change this a bit for anyone watching our video.

The first thing we were expected to do when arriving back at school was write an essay answering our question. This took a few revisions but we eventually got a solid essay that helped a lot with our final product.

I’m actually really glad that Maria and I worked together because we both have a strong work ethic, but working with her is always really fun. We often have different ideas, but this just helps us form even better ideas. We work well together because we always bounce ideas back and forth until we figure out the best way to get things done. Along with that, Maria is a really good video editor so she took more charge in that department, while I took charge when it came to actually writing the essay. Our combination of strengths tends to go well together.

Once the essay was finished we moved onto planning our video. We made a rough video outline to figure out what shots we wanted where and what our voice overs would be. One place we went wrong with our video was looking at the essay a bit too much. We kept looking at it while writing the script which ended up making our video almost seem like an essay with some visuals overtop, rather than visuals with only a few words being needed to explain it.

When it came to editing the video we used some clips from our trip, along with others that we found online.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4RRLbrje3TU

All in all I really enjoyed the project and the trip. I think our final product was pretty good and am proud of what we managed to create despite both going through so many topic changes. Las Vegas and Tucson were both so much fun, and I hope that next time I’m in Vegas I’ll be 21.