Ok people. Don’t panic. This is our last unit from humanities this year and so that means this is our last blog post. We made it to the end. I wrote quite a few blog posts and this is going to be my last humanities one, so here we go.
This post is going to be all about World War 1 and our recent unit about it. We were given a topic and had to do a bunch of research to eventually make a video about it. I’ll be walking you through the process I went through in order to make the final product.
In the last couple months we have been given this project to do. It was really wide open in terms of what form of video we could make and I really liked that. You could get your information across in any way, as long as you actually do the work. An added note is that we had to create our own music using garage band to add into our videos. And, to top it off, we had to present our finalized videos to the big boss of critiquing. The grade 6 and 7’s at Cove Cliff Elementary.
All jokes aside, this was actually a pretty fun unit because of how open it was. There was a long list of items we could choose from and we decided who got which topic thanks to the spinning wheel of death, which in hindsight became somewhat of a tradition in the PLP classroom.
I had a few topics in mind, but I ended up choosing the battle of Vimy Ridge. To be honest, I didn’t actually know too much about the battle and I’m not really sure why I chose it. It seemed like a cool topic to research.
But first, we had to get some actual knowledge about world war 1. More specifically, how it started. We had an assignment where we had to make a creative way to show how world war 1 started. A lot of kids in my class decided to do videos, but I settled on making a keynote showing my understanding of how it all started. I made my keynote into a GIF so you can see it.
To summarize, an Austrian Archduke was assassinated by a Serbian guy. Then, Austria declared war with Serbia. But, Germany had an alliance with Austria and a big messy war broke out. Then, it all went downhill and the war kept on for 4 years. Not a fun time.
Back to the video. Before we started our screenplay of what was going to happen in our video, we had to commit to the type of video we wanted to make. We were watching different styles of videos in class to see which one we preferred. In the end, I chose to style my video after Indie Neidell’s style of videos. If you haven’t seen one of his videos before, check them out! Here’s an example.
I thought that this style of video would be best to express the facts that I wanted to tell.
However, looking back at it, this video style is quite boring to watch. It gets the facts across, but not in an exciting way. They are great educational videos, but it really doesn’t appeal to a bunch of grade 6 and 7’s.
I then started with the screenplay. At first, my screenplay was kinda rough. All I did was put facts down and it wasn’t in the proper screenplay form. It didn’t really resemble a story.
But, as time went on, and critique was given, I revised it. I thought that in the end the screenplay was close to perfect and when filming my video I only made micro-changes to the script. Here’s a snippet of what my screenplay looked like.
I decided that for my video I wanted to have lots of old photos and some voiceovers to enhance the video. Just me talking for 3 minutes would be quite boring and not fun to make. We moved on.
Next was creating a storyboard. I found this to be partly unnecessary, especially because my video style didn’t really change locations or anything. There was just no need to draw out all the different angles and stuff.
However, I am partially biased because I properly suck at drawing just about anything.
After the storyboard was making drafts. I produced 3 drafts.
My first draft was, well, a bit questionable. My audio was shaky, there were background noises and the camera wasn’t steady, making it hard to concentrate on myself talking. Luckily, it was just a first draft and in PLP, you can make lots of drafts. I’ll link the first draft just so y’all can see the difference between my first and last draft. *viewer discretion advised*
Apparently my video got roasted in class when I was at golf provincials, so that made me want to redo everything so that’s pretty much what I did. I fixed the set, redid all of my talking lines and edited the voiceovers to make the flow with the whole video a bit more naturally.
There really wasn’t much of a difference between my 2nd draft and my 3rd and final draft except that I change some audio to be a bit louder.
Then, after the tedious procedure, we had to present to an audience. We traveled down to cove cliff elementary in order to present our videos. It was, well, interesting to be going to the school that had consumed 8 years of my life for the first time since I “graduated” but oh well.
It was interesting because we had to make our videos relevant for them and so we had to change our presentation plan to which audience we had. It was awkward for the first group with me, but it got easier as it went in
As a class we had to have some questions to go along with the video. This was really smart because it kept the younger viewers engaged because they had to listen to answer the questions.
Oh yeah I almost forgot. In this unit we read a book which took part in ww1. I chose to read the book “War Horse”. There is also a movie about it. It was about a horse named Joey and it follows his crazy adventure during World War 1 as he is sold off, changes sides in the war and watches his friends die, which seemed to be a reoccurring theme in WW1. It was a really cool book. Every week, we had to come up with a reflection on the quarter of a book we read. Here’s my final reflection where I chose to write poems about the book
This is it, I suppose. I learned a lot this unit, from how ww1 started to the intricacies of the battle of Vimy Ridge. It was truly a fun year and I really enjoyed a lot of what we did in humanities classes. I’d also like to thank Ms. Maxwell for teaching us this year.
This blog has been a staple in my life for the last 2 years, but unfortunately I’ll be exiting the PLP program. I’ll have one more post to do, but it’s been a ride, man.
Signing off,
nik
