Many of you may be familiar with heritage minutes. Maybe you grew up with them playing on TV, maybe you stumbled across them on YouTube or perhaps you watched them in class. If you don’t know what heritage minutes are they are this: they are one minute long (duh), and they depict some event/aspect/activity that is a part of Canada’s past/present/future. As you can tell heritage minutes are very diverse.
Here are a two of my favorites:
And my all time favorite (and the spoof video that makes it my all time favorite)
Anyhow, now that we’ve covered that, you might be starting to get an inkling about what this project was based on. Yes, heritage minutes.
Our teacher gave us a task: to create a minute long video on a subject that was an important part of Canada’s history from the 1800’s – 1912
My group was made up of Kyle, Amelia, Jordyn and myself. Our topic was First Nations. A very broad category which we had to narrow down. We chose to focus on Oral Story Telling, and to demonstrate that we chose to do a video that would focus on a story of creation, How the Raven stole the light. The big challenge with this story was a) summarizing it to fit in 60 seconds and b) there are many many versions of this story as it was told by many people, such as the Haida and the Tlingit.
Now our first draft was, well, a fail. In both meanings of the word, F.A.I.L (First Attempt In Learning) and fail as in it was not good. You know when people say you run into a bump in the road? Well this was a mountain in the road. I’ll explain about that a bit more in a second, but first, here’s the first draft:
And at last, the final draft.
Now that you’ve watched those, I’ll explain a bit more about the production. As we do for any video we first did a story telling diagram, a storyboard, a shot list and for this one we did a script.
We do that for every video we make, but normally you don’t end up changing most of the concept, which we did, so you can also see the diagram, story board, shot list and script for the second draft bellow.
The most challenging part of this project was the filming. Especially the fire scene. Have any of you tried to light a fire? Well, it’s hard, real hard. Especially when it’s windy. But we got it eventually. I think it was one of my proudest moments in filming.
While the five groups in our class filmed, edited and planned we all had to study important events in Canadian history from 1800-1917.
We studied the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada and the Act of Union and Confederation. Here is an insightful video about the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada:
And here is a website I found especially helpful that explains the time line for the Act of Union click here.
And at the end of our project we sent our videos to Historica Canada, the creators of heritage minutes. We heard back from two individuals named Ryan Barnett and Joanne Archibald, who both work on heritage minutes. They were kind enough to give us some feedback on our videos:
We wrapped up this project with a nice little bow during our final viewing party. Personally I really enjoyed the project but it was quite a challenge! Fitting a whole chunk/event of history in 60 seconds is EXTREMELY challenging but it was a very helpful challenge in filming/constructing a movie. I think next time I will keep a more detailed eye especially when filming outside because we had sooooo many issues with background noises and external factors when making our first draft.