If you got the reference from the title, hats off to you. The Wild Wild West was the name of our latest unit. During that unit we studied the Cariboo Gold Rush out here in the west of Canada (hence the wild wild west name). This was the sequel to our Louis Riel Unit. We moved on from the gold rush to learn about our first project. We were making tourism videos. Now you might thinking “hold up how did we got from the Cariboo Gold Rush to tourism videos?”. Well, the ‘question’ our tourism video was supposed to answer was: How might we help visitors to Victoria connect with B.C.’s history? And yes you also read that correctly. It does say Victoria. Because, you see, my class and I traveled to Victoria on a field study to answer that question posed to us. And the solution we came up with was to make a tour video about a historical person/place.

You should watch the video here (otherwise a few of my references won’t really make sense):

Well as you can tell if you watched the video in my video I talked about Amor De Cosmos and his connection to Victoria. To do that I had to visit the Ross Bay Cemetery, Amor De Cosmos’s resting place. I also shot at the Parliament Buildings because Amor De Cosmos was the second premier of B.C.

Amor De Cosmos

Now to talk about the actual field study. Boy! That was a whirlwind of an experience, trying to film everything had to film in normally under 20 minutes was a challenge, we had to be constantly alert, thinking of what we could use as B roll, what the lighting looked liked, etc. And we had to film for our assigned film partners. My partners were Sam and Jason.

Other than the frantic experience of filming we got to see some pretty cool things! Like the parliament buildings, which we toured with our (Seymour/Deep Cove region’s) MLA, Jane Thornthwaite. We got to sit in on a question period in Parliament, they talk about the yearly budget for B-C that just been released, boy oh boy that was a…dramatic experience.

We went on a ghostly walking tour. (Très Spooky). You can see a video on that here (made by Fraser).

We went to the Royal B.-C. Museum, you can see two videos about the museum here (made by Luc and Nik). We brushed up on a lot of history while we were there. We learnt a lot about First Nations culture through the E.A.G.L.E program (click here to see the video by Lucy). That was very interesting for me because it gave me look into a lot of aspects about First Nation culture, and I am very thankful for that. The trip to the museum was quite something. The displays were stunning as well.

And we went to the scenic Chinatown in Victoria, you can watch the video on that here (made by Jason). Did you know they Victoria’s Chinatown is the oldest in Canada (second oldest in North America, San Francisco came first)? We went on a walking tour through chinatown and we learnt a lot about the founding families there, we even visited Fan Tan alley, the narrowest alley in all of Canada.

And we ate lots and lots of food. Good food. Would totally recommend going to a place called Frankie’s Dinner. Order the pancakes but only if you’re in the mood for lots and lots of eating! The woman that owns the restaurant is absolutely lovely.

Ah Fun times.

Well here’s a little tidbit of information for you. A little bit of backstory on our video making process if you will. To find out in what style we were going to make our videos in we watched departures, a Micheal Palin documentary, and yes.. The Rick Steves travel show. I should mention Rick Steves has become somewhat of a celebrity/icon in our class. We decided it would probably work out best if we made our videos in what we now refer to as the Rick Steve’s esthetic.

And we planned out our whole video as if we were Rick Steves. One thing a lot of my classmates and I forgot to do was use the rule of thirds when filming. You can see an example of that below:

We learnt about this rule after we came back and had already filmed everything. Luckily for me, one of my filming partners, Jason, had thought of that so I ended up with quite a few neat shots.

One of the most important things I learnt about was the importance of B Roll. Basically you have a small amount of time, but you need to get a ton of shots? Well you need to improvise, think creatively on how a shot of this and of that could help you out in your video.