Todays topic is gold, which I have been studying for the last month. I have learned a lot about the people who looked for gold and its many uses, so in this post I will cover what I have learned.

My first task was to compare the uses for gold back in the day and right now in modern day, I found the differences were pretty massive. Back then people like the Incas, gold was used as an offering to their sun god, so for them it was important to their beliefs and traditions to have gold. 

Now in modern day we use gold for currency, we trade it for money. We also use it to show our wealth, for example people who have money and want others to know that will buy golden things to express their wealth, to them it has no other purpose. 

Just from this we can see that gold had a more significant purpose back then rather to now.

Next up we were placed into groups to create a small project that shows a little bit of history on the gold rush in B.C. my group (Angelo , Ryan , Kaia  , Brenton  , and Kaden ) researched all different aspects of the gold rush, who was involved, where did it take place, how did they obtain the gold. In result we had a map with all the different pieces of information on it with links to our sources and YouTube videos explaining further. This activity really boosted our understanding of what the gold rush in B.C was all about.

As we continued through the history of the gold rush, we started to learn more about the actual people involved. Some people were just store or restaurant owners but they played a huge role in supporting the miners as well. The shops were the only place for miners to purchase equipment and restaurants were the main supply of food, but who ran these shops and other jobs besides miners, thats what we were tasked to find out. Once we knew who they were we had to put them into a character card, which was basically just a card with their title and face along with facts about them in the gold rush. To make things more fun my teachers also assigned me to make one about myself and what I think I would have done if I was in the gold rush.

Personally I found this part very exciting as I was able to use what I already knew about the gold rush and my self to depict what I though I could do back then, it was tough to think about at first but when I thought about what I think would be best for me it all came together, below is my character card.

The final task before creating the video was of course to create a storyboard but we did not even have a topic for our video. As a twist for this project we would have to watch an episode of Gold Trails and Ghost Towns and create a story from one of the events in the episode. It sounds confusing but what it really was is finding part of the video which tells a story that fits into a story spine diagram and then share it in video format.

 

In the episode I choose ( Blakeburn) there was a tragic part of the video where Bill Barley explains that this town had a major coal mining industry, but on day lighting struck the entrance to the biggest mine that had the most workers inside. It blocked the exit out and caused carbon monoxide ( CO1) to spread throughout the mine, tragically killing every miner except one who was blown out from the lightning. Ever since then the town and mine has been known as an unlucky place which lead to it being abandoned.

This fits the story spine perfectly and makes a great story as well. Now all that was left was to create a story board for the video. I had to plan out all of the shots and camera angles, but the one thing was that we had to use only photos and videos which meant telling a story through the angles of the camera was much tougher an honestly it wouldn’t help communicate my point to the audience. I planned out all the shots but instead of showing camera angles I decided to was better to show which way the camera would move and what it would focus on. Then it was straight on to filming or rather finding images to put into a movie format.

The first part of putting together the movie was finding the images that tell the story of what happened in Blakburn, and surprisingly finding the images was not easy at all. There were a couple of them that came up right away but others I had to go looking for in man different archives. Eventually I was able to find some very helpful images to put into my video along with some recordings from the show Gold Trails and Ghost Towns which helped explain some difficult parts of the story. 

When I had voiced over my images and video I was ready to submit my work.

Overall I think the video turned out very well and just about passed my expectations. I put a lot of effort into making and designing the video, along with paring the audio and editing the sounds from the Gold Trails and Ghost Town video clips. It was a fun way fun way for me to express what I had learned and I could show it in a fun video format.

That’s all for now