In humanities we just finished our latest project, we created our own heritage minutes. What is a heritage minute you might ask? They are little one minute films made by historica canada to teach people about a story that is involved in Canada’s history.

First we started learning a little about heritage minutes and the stories some of them tell. We watched one heritage mutinies a day for a week and took notes on it, my favourite heritage minute we watched was the Halifax explosion. I liked the way it made you feel very intense throughout the whole video, I also liked the whole story behind it too.

Then we were split into our heritage mutinies groups, My group included Me, Luca Jacoe, Tamara, and Jamie. We started off brainstorming ideas of which story we wanted to do our video on. We wanted the story to be about something that was never really told in any videos before, we eventually settled on the story of Big Bear, who was an aboriginal man who fought against his land being taken away by the British government by not signing the treaty offered to them.

Treaty six was a treaty that was declared by the British government to take over big bears land in exchange for food and rations. big bear fought against the treaty for six years until his people were starving because they had no food. In the end big bear had to sign the treaty to save his people from starvation.

Our first step was to start working on our story. We wrote out the story onto a google doc  and shortened it to fit the one minute time limit. Then we gave each person in our group a specific role. Tamara would do the script, I would do the storyboarding, filming, and editing, Jamie would do the voiceover, and Luca would help with filming and do the editing. When it comes to the script, we made it so that we wouldn’t be portraying and indigenous peoples as we wouldn’t want to be offensive. So we wrote it were none of our heads were in the shots, mostly just our arms. Since we couldn’t portray anyone we made the story so that someone would be writing a letter to big bear writing his story to him and saying what a great role model he was.

Once we finished writing the script I got to work on the storyboard. When it comes to storyboarding, you basically just take the script and draw the scenes to match with the story. I wanted our shots to be very artsy, so lots of out of focus to in focus shots, lots of tracking shots, and to add a nice filter to the footage in post production.

After I finished drawing out the storyboard we started the filming, me and Luca went to the beach to film the beach scenes of her writing the letter. Since those were the only scenes with people in them I shot the rest of the scenes at my house (big bear turning down treaty 6, the signing of treaty 6).

After we finished filming I imported all of the footage and got to editing. I put a really cool cinematic filter on the beach shots to give it a warmer more happier look, and when treaty 6 was signed I made the shots more dark to symbolize that this moment was a dark one. I then put in the voiceover and finished the titles and then bam! Our draft was finished.

After our video was viewed by our teacher Ms. Maxwell she gave us some feedback.

Now that we had received some constructive criticism, we went to work on our final draft. We decided to take the treaty shots out entirely because they were too dark and they just confused everyone. we also added our friend Daniel’s custom heritage minute outro.

we had finally finished our video! After weeks of planning, script writing, editing, filming, and criticism we finally had our final product!