If you didn’t know, this week was Canada’s History Week 2017. By coincidence, we were making videos about Vancouver’s history. The project was called, Namesake video project. This was a group/partner project. I got to work with Mimi, and together we decided to do our project about the history of Robson Street. It had a lot of information behind it, and both of us shop there, so we were familiar with the street. Every group had to chose a different topic. Therefore, it was a race to get the topic you wanted.

Here are the all of the choices:

Keefer Street
Joe Fortes (restaurant / library)
Seymour Mountain
Stanley Park
Gastown
Caufield
Lions Gate Bridge
British Properties
Robson Street
Kitsilano
Lonsdale Ave / Quay
Waterfront
Cambie Street
Nootka Sound
SFU / Fraser River
Blood Alley

This was’t just some random video, we had to include historic facts. We had a list of things we had to include in our video:

Once we had our topic, we needed to decide what type of video we were going to make, Explain Everything, iMovie, etc. Mimi and I decided to make a Explain Everything/iMovie. A lot of research had to be done to make the video. We used a really useful website, that had a lot of information. I learned that many Europeans came post World War II To Robson. That is how Robson Street started to grow. More and more people came to Robson Street soon after that.

From making other previous videos/podcasts we knew the script was really important. It had to engage the reader, therefore using an intriguing hook. I have talked about hooks in my World War 1 blog, so you can go check that out. Our hook was, ‘Robson street. The place where you shop, eat, celebrate and make friends. But it wasn’t always like this. Robson street wasn’t always robson street.’ Our intention was, to make the reader wonder what Robson Street used to be like. We couldn’t make the script too long since the MAX time was 3 minuets.

As I said earlier, we used Explain Everything to make the video clips. To edit, we used iMovie. Something that inspired me was the Don’t blink video for the iPhone 7. I liked the way they used the text because it almost jumped out at you. We did something similar to the text using Explain Everything. After all of those steps we put together the first draft.

We watched all of the videos during class. We got some pretty good feedback! Our peers liked the music, and thought the video was engaging. Some constructive feedback we were given, was the text was too slow. Also every word was capitalized. I speeded up the text and got rid of the capital letters.

Here is the revised video:

I was really proud of our finished product. I thought it was interesting and creative. For example, I really like how we zoomed into Robson Street using Google Earth. I thought it gave it a personal touch. Also Mimi and I worked really well together, she wrote the script, and I edited the video. After making this video, I now how to use Explain Everything, which is a good skill to have.

On the educational side, I learned a lot about Vancouver’s history. It was really interesting to learn about Robson Street, since I go there often. Now when I go to Robson Street, I will think about what it has gone through.