So it’s safe to say that we’ve been learning a lot about Canada’s history recently. Actually, I wouldn’t even say recently, we’ve been working on Canada’s history since Grade 9!

Greatest Moments

Anyways, we’ve already covered a large chunk of history that Canada had to offer for us. We went over how it came to be a country in the first place and how its identity was shaped through many events in the past such as WWI. Since we seem to be pretty knowledgeable already on Canada itself, it seemed like the right time to start focusing in on where we specifically live in Canada… Vancouver.

Although I won’t go into too much detail about it, we’ve been working for the past few weeks on a podcast about certain aspects of Vancouver. Right now, all you need to know is that I’m in a group with Alex and Michael and that you should be expecting a post on that podcast very soon… Either way, we took a little break from the podcast to work on another project about Vancouver but more specifically, a certain location in the city we know so well today.
Here’s what we had to choose from.

My group chose the Lonsdale Quay as it’s a place we commonly go to for several different things such as restaurants and the SeaBus and we felt like we would be able to do a good job of making a video about Lonsdale’s history.

So we got started and of course like we always do, we started off with the script which we wrote on Pages. Writing the script was fairly easy as our video had to be under three minutes which meant we wouldn’t need to write too much. It was nice to write a short script for a change as I felt we could be a lot more concise about the points we were making in the video.

Once we had the script out of the way, we started recording. Our group found out that recording on Apple’s Voice Memos worked fairly well and gave us some pretty high-quality sounding audio, so we stuck with it for the majority of our recording. We then moved on to the editing portion and since the project was about making a video, I used IMovie to edit the whole thing as it feels very close to home for me considering I’ve used it since 8th grade. What I didn’t notice though was how rusty I became in terms of editing videos, but I think I made it work. Here’s what our first draft looked like!

I was pretty happy with how our first draft turned out but I noticed that the loudness and quality of the audio varied from time to time so I made sure that I would change that for the final draft. The music was also way too loud and made it really hard to hear our voices. Finally, it was missing the bibliography that was supposed to be included in the video but other than that, I felt like our video was pretty good.

Speaking of the bibliography, we were also taught how to use a more sophisticated way of citing our work called MLA citing that’s generally used in post-secondary situations but for the sake of learning, Ms. Maxwell decided like now would be a good time to start using it. The bibliography essentially had to follow a specific order of information that we had to include to site the work we were borrowing from the internet. This is what it would look like.

With that in mind, I then made sure to include the MLA style of citing our work when editing my group’s final draft. Here’s our final draft!

Overall, I felt like we did a pretty good job on the project and as a team, we managed to split the work up pretty well. I did feel like we struggled a little bit on the recording portion of the video as we probably didn’t use as much expression as we should have but otherwise, I don’t think our video is half-bad after not working on videos for a long time. As for the podcast I was eluding to earlier in this post, I guess you’ll only have to stick around and wait for it!

Happy History Week!