Kaboom!
The Halifax Harbour a beutiful and peaceful place until Dec 6, 1917.
The largest man made explosion in the world in 1917 happened in Halifax. It was not an act of war but because of war. Two ships collided in the Halifax harbour because of navigational miscommunication one being the Mont Blanc a french shipped packed with explosives headed to the western front. The Mont Blanc would light on fire and continue to billow smoke for about twenty minutes then suddenly the ship exploded. The ship was loaded with 226 797 Kg of TNT and other explosive materials creating the largest man made explosion to date. Our assignment was to put this devastating disaster into a news report. I will get you to watch it first then explain the reasoning behind the decision’s we made during the creation process. I have also been to Halifax and heard about this explosion and received a very short story about it while I was on a tour so it was nice to learn more about it.
https://youtu.be/sxOG_EWulN0
So first of all let’s talk about how we made the video. We used Tom’s amazing filming equipment, he had a green screen, camera, lights and a large area everything you need for filming a news show. Before we had could use all of this awesome filming equipment we had to create a script so we knew what we were saying. We created the general plot line for our skit and decided on one major aspect of our video that would make it different then all the other groups. We were going to play out the scene as if the explosion happened live, instead of a disaster report. We choose to do this as all the interesting things happened before and right after the explosion. We were able to fit in bits about the firefighters, frenchmen and spectators in a more interesting way then just getting a news anchor to say it. When we had a French sailor come up and take the mic away and tell everybody to run was probably the strongest scene in our skit. It portrayed all these French men who would be running of this ship and telling the English people to run away and nobody being able to understand what they are saying. Finally Cashel and Tom did a great job editing and our video was finished. We also kept our video short making it a powerful, concise, snapshot of this disaster. This was a very successful project in a video making point of view, but I didn’t really understand the learning outcome of this project just seemed like useless information about a disaster. I didn’t receive any context that would help me conceptualize the war other then some ships had a lot explosives and the Halifax harbour was poorly managed. So all in all I learned how to be a news anchor and about a human disaster.