All throughout the second half of our final term we have been working on a series of projects or a unit called let’s get Riel in humanities. In this unit we learned all about a guy named Louis Riel around the time of Confederation and eventually that led to a really big, super unique project where, we animated someone or somethings story or life in history. Before that we also read a book about Louis riel, his life and how he shaped today’s Canadian history. All throughout this we had to always come back to the topic of power and who had it.

To start off, let’s go all the way back to mid-may to look at how we started off this project and how it all began. Right after our WW1 comic book we launched straight into another project which was, for all I knew only about Louis Riel. At the time I was assigned a book to read called “Louis Riel A Comic Book Biography” by Chester Brown. As we read through the book which was divided into four sections, we stopped and did four section reflections (surprise!). The first three reflections were normal, explain what happened in this section type thing but tha last one was interesting. For ou last section reflection we had to create a short animation (5-30 seconds) instead of a formal report. After this we also did a final overview paragraph where I have the comic book a four out of five because I thought it was very interesting but at some points it got confusing. I also put how I thought the government was always in power over Louis even though at times it seemed like he had control.

By this point we were almost in June and the year was soon coming to a close so we really needed to get a move on. We had already been briefed on our final project, now it was time to choose a topic. I wanted to do a topic around the CPR and immigrants to Canada but I didn’t know who would fit in or around that category as a figur in history. After talking to Ms. Maxwell, I decided to go with a guy named Andrew Onderdonk. The next step was research. I researched for days, all around the web. Once I was satisfied that I could make a quality video around my research, I was ready to move on. Before we continue, I’ll tell you who this Andrew Onderdonk is. He was a very influential figure who won a contract to work on the western-most section of the CPR. To do this he brought many Asian immigrants from China and California which was very controversial at the time. Anyways, next step was to storyboard and write a story. If you don’t know what storyboarding is, that’s ok. Storyboarding is used if you’re creating a video or animation of any type and it helps you create or visualize the shots in your mind so you can more easily execute the animating or filming when its time. The storyboard was easy for me because I already knew exactly what and how I was going to do my animation. My story was easy to along the same principle as my storyboard. 

Finally, it was time to animate. For my animation I chose to use keynote magic move which was a newish, propriety feature that let you screen record animations. I used this instead of hand-drawn animation because it was more time efficient and in my opinion, looked much sharper because you could use real images. We had about a week and a half in total to make a two minute animation around our persons lives. Throughout the several check-ins I was always ahead and always ready to move onto the next step. 

Lastly, we had the viewing party. On this (technically actually two days) day we brought in snacks and such to watch every bodies video that they were proud of. I accidentally had my music too high and it was hard to hear me explaining but it was a quick one minute fix. Everyone’s videos looked really good and some of them really blew me away with their really good voiceover and animation. 

In reflection, this was an awesome project that was easily one of my favorites. I liked it because of how it had lots of creative freedom but still had strong guidelines to work within. I also felt like it really allowed use to use our video creation and editing skill along with our research and actual knowledge on the topics we were learning about. One thing that I think I did really well was time management. Because of time management I felt like I was always ahead of the game and ready for the next step and that really helped me in this project. One thing I would do differently is acquire more in depth research on all angles of my topic. I constantly found my self going back online to double check a fact or to get more info on a topic. If I had just gott n really good, high quality, in-depth research at the beginning, things could’ve been a lot easier for me in many ways. To finish off I think that this project really had everything that a project should have. It had the fun, creative aspect to it so you could customize it to your liking, but it also had the informative deep learning part of it that really makes you remember what you learned for a long time.