History in one minute?

It’s all coming to an end, the big heritage minute project. This project has taken almost 2 months, and it has been a bumpy ride. This project was about a a time period that you chose in a group, and you make s video about it. However, it’s not just any video, it’s a heritage minute. Heritage minutes are 1 minute videos explaining a big event, or person, made by the company Historica Canada. This company has been making these videos for so many years, and they get up to 100k views. For this project, we had to make our own heritage minute, and boy was it challenging.

First, we had to learn about how Canada became a country. We learned about his there was Upper and Lower Canada, and how the French and the English did not like each other very much. Then we learned about Lord Durham and how he wanted to see why the 1837-1838 rebellions were happening, and try to help them get a better government. We did a little assignment/game, learning about what Lord Durham did, where we played the role of him and investigated Upper and Lower Canada.

Afterwards, we learned about residential schools and First Nations. Residential schools were schools that the white people out the First Nations children into, and try to take away their culture, and turn them into Christians. It was a terrible and tragic thing to happen, and Canada knows now that it was wrong.

After residential schools, we went back to Upper and Lower Canada, though this time we learned about how they united to become Canada east and Canada West. This uniting lead up to confederation in 1867. To learn about confederation, we did an activity, where we had groups, and each group was a different province. In confederation, each province had to sign the paper saying that they want to join and become one country. For the activity, we each presented a proposal of what we want if we join. My groups province was Canada West. Once we did our proposal, Ms. Maxwell created one big document, say what will happen if each province joins, and then each province gets to make the decision if they will or will not benefit from joining. Canada West divided to sign the papers, and we joined confederation in the activity.

That is the farthest we went in Canadian history, and then we started the project. The first thing we did was decide what event we wanted to learn about. We got to choose our top 3 choices, and then were out into groups. My group was the Fur Trade Group. That was just the big idea, then we had to narrow our focus into a certain event or person in the Fur Trade. We decided that our main focus was going to be the Beaver Wars. The beaver wars were the fight between the Iroquois nation and the rest of Canada. The Iroquois were running out of beaver in their land, so they wanted to move along canada and hunt the other beavers. However, they couldn’t do that, because the rest of canada were other nations land, and the were invading it, so then they started a war. They kept on fighting and fighting but nothing ended up happening, so they just stopped.

The first thing we needed to do for the video was to figure out what was going to happen, and create a script. We decided that for our video, because it is only one minute, we were going to make it about a random common fighter, and show everything from his perspective. Then, we created a script and a story board for the video. The script was pretty easy to write, but the storyboard was a bit harder. We had to figure out all of the angles and background music, but it all worked out, because that storyboard really helped with the filming.

Another thing we had to do before filming was a screenplay. We had to find a heritage minute to watch, and create a full screenplay ad script for the video. Although the video is only 1 minute, the screenplay ended up being 2 and a half pages, for only one minute!

After that, it was time to start filming. It took us only 1 day if filming to complete all of it, and we got most of the shots first try! However, we did need some extra characters, so we got some backup. We used Jessies cousins and Emilys sister for the kids, and we also used Jessies dad for the old man. We tried to make it look as professional as possible, so us trying to dress up like a man would have made it look silly. Once we finished putting together all of the clips and editing it, we created our first draft.

After that, we got some feedback from our teacher and out classmates, by showing everyone our video. After that, we realized all of the things that needed to be fixed, and made changes that made the video so much better. That is how we made draft 2

Once draft 2 was completed, we showed them to the other social studies class, which had a lot of my friends in it. They all gave us some feedback, some of which was helpful, but others were not. Using the feedback from some other people, we finally finished our final draft.

This 1 minute video is very important, because we will actually be sending the video to the company Historica Canada and they will also be giving us some expert feedback, which is really cool. This project has taught me so much about Canadian history, but we are but done with it yet.