In my Humanities class we just completed a project of 4 different videos on revolutions. The driving question for this project was; How do ideas drive change?
The first Milestone was to look at and observe different forms of media. We looked at various types of books, videos, websites, and analyzed them to see if they were reliable sources.
Milestone two was creating a video in the style we wanted on the French Revolution. We decided to act out the video, using various people from our class to give an overview of the French Revolution. My group for this project was Ciara, Holly, Grace, and myself. I acted in, filmed and edited the video.
For the third Milestone we focused on the American Revolution. We had to write a song/rap that explained details of the Revolution. The video included American Revolution images from the web superimposed on top of our rap video, which explained the revolution. I represented Canada by holding a maple leaf.
Milestone four was the Russian Revolution. We found this video the hardest to do because we had to record everything at once, and another reason was that there were other people talking in the background because we were filming in the school library. Our video was a John Green style video, which could be described as a “crash course “, which is quickly explained with animations, images and videos while the host is on a set in the background.
For Milestone Five we had to do a creative reflection on the book we read, Revolution.
The majority of the the story is set in Paris, wether it be Andi’s or Alex’s point of view. In the book Alex’s role is that of a companion to the crown prince, Louis-Charles XVII (18th). After Louie-Charles is imprisioned in the temple of Paris, Alex decides to start setting off green fireworks to bring the crown prince joy during his inprisonment. Eventually she becomes known as the ‘Green Man’ because of her nightly green firework display. She eventually gets shot, and goes down to the catacombs to die, and hides her diary in the guitar case that she has with her.
Andi then ends up travelling back in time, and everyone thinks she is Alex. She then starts to do the Green Man’s job of creating firework displays. On the night of Louis-Charles’s death she asks fauvel for “the most buetaful fireworks paris has ever seen”, and receives two dozen Lucifer rockets which will rain down silver and gold.
I had an interesting experience reading Revolution, not only because I read it in 3 days at around 1 in the morning, but because it is not a type of book that I would usually read. I will probably only read this book once not because I didnt really like it, but as I said before, it is not a type of book that I commonly read.
A weird thing that happened with this video is that a YouTuber that I’ve never heard of with over 26k subscribers commented on the video. So… yeah.
Milestone six was our final video, and we were allowed to chose what style of video and what revolution we wanted. We chose the Troubles in Ireland. Unfortunately I was away when this video was being created and did not participate in the production of it.
Through this project about revolutions I leaned that when people are dissatisfied with the system, they will come up with new or “revolutionary” ideas which will often lead to change,
Overall I enjoyed this project because I was able edit and draw.
-Finn