Vancouver, British Columbia is a beautiful city. Lush forests and bountiful rivers cover the land. Different cultures from around the world express themselves here, and the government works hard to keep everyone happy. But, it wasn’t always like this. What is the story behind Canada’s beautiful Vancouver? As a short mini-project from our Vancouver, B.C. unit, we were assigned to learn, research, and then make a maximum 3-minute video about the history behind one of British Columbia’s meaningful locations. This project is called the Namesake Project, and it’s about finding the history and importance of the area and how it has changed and affected British Columbia.

This unit is filled with group projects, so each student was assigned a group that would work together throughout the whole unit. My group was Alex, Lucas and myself. At the start of the project, we were given a list of areas that we could do our project on. We chose lower Lonsdale and Lonsdale Quay. We chose Lonsdale mostly because it was the most relevant place for us. I go to Lonsdale often and I never really knew the history of it. This was a great opportunity to learn something new about Lonsdale.

Our first step for the project was research, which I was in charge of.  Alex’s job was script creation and management, and Lucas’s was video editing. The researching took longer than I thought. It was hard to gather facts and in-depth research because of most of the facts online where quite vague. The hardest piece of information to find was the namesake of Lonsdale. The name “Lonsdale” came from the major landowner and investor, Arthur Haywood-Lonsdale. I was really surprised I had never seen this name before.

Once we had all the information, Alex moved onto making the script.  In the script, we focused on talking about the history of Lonsdale Avenue, the current day Lonsdale Quay and how it affects Vancouver, and the namesake of Lonsdale.  Then Alex, Lucas and I recorded our audio and we moved onto gathering video clips for the editing. We made a plan to go down to Lonsdale to film interactive visuals, but it turns out the weather didn’t want to cooperate. It rained the whole week which forced us to use clips off the internet.

Lucas put the audio and visuals together along with our original garage band music and uploaded it to SoundCloud.

This was our first draft:

You may have noticed that at the end of the video we had a brief description of all the sites we used. In humanities, we’ve been learning how to properly cite websites using the MLA format, and we forgot to include it in our first draft. In our second draft, we fixed up the loud overpowering music and added the MLA bibliographies in the description of the video.

This was our final draft:

I am really glad we chose Lonsdale for this project. I now know so much more about Lonsdale and I know the history behind the name. 

November 20 to Nov 27, 2017, is Canada’s history week, so, Happy history week!

Pictures:

“Tourism Vancouver – official source of tourist information, things to do, restaurants for Vancouver BC Canada.” Vancouver, www.tourismvancouver.com/.

“Kids in Vancouver: 5 Places To Play On A Rainy Day.” Inside Vancouver, www.insidevancouver.ca/2016/03/24/kids-in-vancouver-5-places-to-play-on-a-rainy-day/.

“Throwback Thursday: Lonsdale, The Story Behind the Name.” Lower Lonsdale, 20 July 2015, www.lowerlonsdale.ca/throwback-thursday-lonsdale-the-story-behind-the-name/.