Canada! A country that was only founded 152 years ago but already has such a rich history. In this project we had to create our own history minutes in groups of four. The time period for our videos was anything between 1800s and WW1. We were divided into 5 groups of four. Each group had a different topic that they had to focus on. My group consisted of Kiera, Taylor, and Luciano. Our topic was the Fur trade. We decided to focus on the voyageurs of Canada. Here was our end product.

Now we go though the process of getting an idea made into a video.

The Process 

Obviously the Fur Trade is a huge topic and narrowing it down can be a difficult challenge. One of the big rules for this project was that you could make your minute on a topic that had already been done. Fortunately Historica Canada (the company that makes history minutes) had not done anything about the fur trade so for us the door was open.

After a lot of research around what significant events happened during our time period after much debating we decided on the voyageurs of the fur trade. For those of you that don’t know the voyageurs were a group of elite First Nations men payed to move furs across Ontario and Quebec’s rivers.

We then plan out our video using a storyboard. After that we turned to the calendar to figure out a day that we could all film.

Then we went on the the filming stage. We ran into quite a few challenges while filming as it was very hard to make sure there were no houses or anything human built in the background. We also only had just over 2 hours to film everything as some people in our group had to go.

We then moved on to my favourite part of video making, the editing! I really enjoy editing because it’s all about precision. If one clip is a tenth of a second to long it could have drastic impact on the film and make it look very unprofessional.

Once I had put our clips together our first draft of our video was due.

As you can see the first draft was pretty solid but there was still quite a bit to change and fix for our second draft.

Here is our second draft. Some of the things we change were: we re-filmed all of Kiera and Taylor’s talking scenes as they were out of focus. We also changed transitions and extended/ cut a bunch of clips. We also add another scene.

This is our third and pretty much final video. For this draft we add music and I changed the font of the subtitles.

Here is our final video. It is the one featured at the beginning of this post. From the third draft we change the volume of the audio in different places. We also added a black screen at the beginning to add more effect. Also an outro at the end to tie it all together with the other videos.

After we made the video we then sent it to Historica Canada the company that create history minutes. We recently got feedback from Ryan Barnett and Joannne Archibald, who are important people at Historica. Here was their feedback.