Right at the end of our Comic Book project we jumped straight into the story of Louis Riel and the Métis in the red river settlement. You may have heard this story before but just in case you don’t I will give the link to an overview of it here. For this unit, we started by doing a book report of the graphic novel titled “Louis Riel”. This story gave an entertaining twist on the story of Louis Riel and the Red River Settlement. For each chapter of the book we would answer a few questions to make sure we were on track with our reading. For the last book report we were tasked with creating an animation that gave a brief summary of a major event that happened in the book. I decided to make my animation a sort of metaphor, In the book Louis Riel goes on trial, I related my animation to this by animating a judge hitting his hammer which then would cut to a jail cell door being closed, all with the title “your actions have consequences”. below you can watch my animation for that.

After we finished the book we worked on learning more about the Métis people. For a few days we did guided notes where our teacher, Ms. Maxwell, would give a lesson on the Métis culture and we would answer questions about it to make sure we understood the topic. After a week of guided notes we were assigned our last project for humanities this year. From many, many topics, we would choose one of them, gather as much information as possible, and create a 2-3 minute animation of a story related to our topic. Since I was late to the ball on choosing my topic I chose “Asian presence in the workforce”.

Now that I had my topic I needed to decide what my story was going to be about. I settled on the history of the Asian presence in British Columbia in general since a significant amount of the topics relating to Asian’s in Canada were taken. After a few days of research we had our fist check in for the project. For this check in we needed to create a document with links and pictures of our sources that we used to research our topic on. After that check in we started working on the actual story that would be translated into our animation. After a few days of editing I had finished my story and was ready for the next check in. After this check in we started to work on our storyboard.

The reason storyboarding is so good when you are creating an animation is because you can base the main frames in your animation off the ones you drew in your storyboard. Once everyone in the class was finished their storyboards we began work on our final stage, the animation! I wanted to have a clean, crisp, simple, and smooth style to my animation so I used Keynote magic moves to create the visual part.

After I had finished animating all of my scenes I started work on the voiceover, title’s, and background music. For editing I used iMovie, mostly because it is the editing software I am most familiar with on mobile devices. After weeks of planning, writing, storyboarding, and audio mixing I had finally completed my animation!

I loved this unit because I was able to learn about a topic included in our countries history that is never brought up very often, learning about pemmican, buffalo, Louis Riel, the Métis. And the Métis culture was a unique experience. I hope in grade 10 we do more of this!