I bet you’ve never heard of the Halifax Explosion of 1917… Yeah I thought so. Well that’s what we’ve taken a look into recently, and in this post, I’m going to be sharing my experience with this major disaster and an important piece of our Canadian history.
So here’s a short breakdown of the terrible event that took place on the morning of December 6th, 1917:
The Halifax Explosion was the result of two large ships colliding in the harbour of Halifax: The Imo heading out of the port, and the Mont Blanc coming in to dock. The Mont Blanc was carrying tons of ammunitions for the raging war in Europe, and when the two ships hit each other, a mass fire broke out on the ammunitions ship. After around 20 minutes of burning, and after drawing in the attention of onlookers around the harbour, the Mont Blanc exploded and created a 2 kilometre-high cloud, wiping out most of the city. The once busy and buzzing city of Halifax was virtually vaporized and reduced to nothing, leaving thousands of people dead, injured, and homeless.
The Imo shipwrecked in the Halifax Harbour
The Explosion Cloud
So, as well as completing a soldiers diary entry and a keynote presentation, we were asked (well…more like told) to create a news report summarizing the Halifax Explosion. It had to be informative, engaging, and under 3 minutes. We were able to choose our own groups, so naturally I grouped together with Anatolia, Alanah, and Brianna. We first had to read up on our topic, because to be honest I had no idea what the Halifax Explosion was. When we were familiar with this saddening piece of history, we started constructing our script, and who was being who in the video. We decided that Brianna and I were going to be two news room reporters, Anatolia was being the “on-the-scene” reporter, and Alanah was playing the eyewitness/innocent citizen affected by the explosion. At the time, our script didn’t seem too long and after it was finished, it was time for us to actually film.
My group and I decided to base our video in 1917, just days after the explosion, which meant that we had to incorporate costume, green screen, and solemn attitudes into our movie. I actually think we did well on this front. We really fell into character, and tried hard with our backgrounds, making them as lifelike as possible. After we filmed all our footage, and edited all together, we were so relieved and were ready to publish it to Youtube.
So you might be wondering where the actual movie is, and to be honest we are all wondering the same thing. We were trying to publish it from Anatolia’s laptop but it kept failing. So we rebooted her laptop and it never turned back on. So I’m just as lost as you, waiting for my movie to magically turn up on Youtube and my blog. I will be updating this post when we find out what happened to our movie.
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