This was the animation I created for our latest project. Have you ever wanted to work on an animation? Well, we got to! (More on that later.) We just completed an enormous project centred around Louis Riel, the CPR, and Confederation. The driving question of this project was ‘How does Power Alter Relationships Between Individuals and Societies?’. We did a lot of things in this project, but this post will focus on three of them. 

One of the first things we did in this project was a Novel Study! We read the book Louis Riel, A Comic Strip Biography by Chester Brown, which is actually a graphic novel, thank goodness. The book documents Louis Riel’s struggles, starting from when he was just a translator, and then when he set up his own government, and the ensuing difficulties. To study the book, we wrote summary paragraphs about each section, and kept track of all of the characters, which was very difficult. Back in Louis Riel’s days, there were a lot of people to keep track of! 

Before Confederation, the settlement of Manitoba was filled with mostly Métis people. They had some issues- the government wanted their land, and their food sources were quickly diminishing. We did an activity in class to represent how the Métis were treated. Half of us were given a small piece of paper, and the other half was trying to get it from us. The piece of paper represented ‘scrip’, which the Métis people were given. It was worth 160 acres of land, or 160 dollars, but the Métis were starving, and they had no farming experience. Many of them had to sell their land to buy food, and so did we during this exercise. It was a really interesting experience.

The final project that we worked on for this unit was what you saw above- an animation! Since our driving question is about the relationships between people and societies, we each chose a different person who was powerful before (or during) Confederation. Then, we created animations about how they impacted the people around them. I found that Cornelius Van Horne, while a respected, wealthy man, with interests in many, many fields, was pleasant- to a point. His workers were overworked, and if he wasn’t satisfied by their quality of work, he would replace them entirely or not pay them. I decided that the story I would tell was about the workers, and how unlucky they were. I used FlipaClip to make my animation, then looped it and edited it in iMovie. After several rounds of feedback, I decided to add photos to my animation, to make the animation more mixed-media. I think this was a good decision, as it provided for the opportunity for more background animation.