For this post I will be going over the events in our latest project which is based around hope and identifying how influential and inspiring stories of hope can be. This post will not be about every step taken to make the project as I was away for the first bit of the project, so everything I will go over is from the second half, and I believe that’s where most of the learning actually happened for me. 

The project started out with the book Into The Abyss. It was about the story of how the four survivors of a plane crash managed to stay alive while they waited for rescue to arrive. The story is pieced together by one of the survivors daughters and tells the story through the perspective of all the survivors. This part in my opinion was both effective and ineffective in terms of story telling. What I think made it so effective was the detail that was put into each perspective when recounting the event, and I think this happens only because the writer has such a strong connection to the events and the people involved. It was very inspirational in that sense and definitely gave me inspiration for when I had to tell my own story of hope. What I believe made it not as effective was that same in depth recounting. For some chapters the author kept going down rabbit holes which did not really contribute to the main event besides explaining specific aspects of people involved. For example a going into the backstory of the pilot took quite a long time and in the end I feel it only really gave you an idea as to what was going on inside the pilots head. I felt as though I was rereading parts because the same topics came up. I can see how it connects to the main topic which is the story of survival after the crash, but personally I felt as though it droned on for a little to long to make any impact.

Then it was up to me to find my own story of hope and express it in a convincing and inspirational video. This is where I was stuck for a while. The main reason for this was because think of an event which I could connect to personally. I knew I wanted to incorporate something to do with medicine or science because personally when I thought of what makes me hopeful, the first thing I think about is how science has always been evolving to keep us safe from disease. My next thought it why else would I be grateful for something like science, that’s when my personally connect hit me, and what annoys me most is that it was quite an obvious connection which was right in front of me.

My personal connect to science and medicine was my brother. It’s not something my family or I usually talk about or share for that matter, so I’ll just summarize the significance. A while ago my youngest brother got very ill with an unknown disease. He was hospitalized for months while they tried to figure out what was wrong. Eventually through many procedures and physiotherapy he was able to recover, but the cause of his illness is still unknown. This is my greatest connection to hope and science so I decided that the events in my video would be built around his story.

If I was going to use the common trend of science and medicine providing hope, then I was going to have to find a real world example of that happening. The first community of people who came to mind were those who had benefited from things like vaccines, but my concern was that not only was it hard to pick a specific point in history where people were most hopeful about vaccines, but also I realized that not everyone believes in vaccines, and I wanted to create a story of hope which impact everyone. 

The second community which came to mind was that of people who were in need of prosthetics limbs. After some research I realized how fast this area of research was increasing and how many different advancements were happening. I thought that if my topic was on how  science and medicine were advancing and we should find hope in that, then the advancement of prosthetics might work as an example. Looking back at this now I realize that vaccines could have worked just as well as prosthetics as both don’t really have a specific time period or event which people derive hope from. I think I was just trying to include something I hadn’t done in any project before, but I think it worked in the final project, but next time I should take more time to consider options before diving into the one I like the most.

What I think I was excited about choosing prosthetics was that I knew who I wanted to interview already. One of the people my family camped with was Aaron Rideout who’s job was managing a regional office for the company insulet. I remember him talking to me years earlier about how through bio chemical engineering people were able to create realistic prosthetics. This was really interesting to me at the time and I wanted to ask him about what he thought about the current situation with prosthetics. 

The interview went really well and he helped me understand what the market and development on this tech is looking like right now. What was more interesting which I took away from the interview was that he talked about the tiering system when it comes to medicine. Something I had not considered is that not all people have access to the top quality, or even high quality models because the tier systems allows for those with higher income to gain easy access to these things. Universal health care means everyone will get some sort of equipment to help them, but that does not mean it will be the greatest quality. My question to him was that if the technology in prosthetics continues to advance, will the minimum standard continue to get better to the point where even the most basic is now a high quality prosthetics allowing for better living? Based on his answer it seemed like this would happen but the steps involved to advancing the base model or minimum standard would be complicated and involve cooperation between government programs and individual companies. Although it seems complicated its not impossible, which is already encouraging.

Next up is the video planning. This part did not go great. It was about this point when I had arrived back to school and by this time I was behind and everyone had already created theirs, so it was my job to catch up with them. I had a very rough story board done, and most of my ideas, interviews, scripts, and notes where all complied in one craft doc. Overall the planning process was rushed and honestly for me it was quite poor, and I think I let down my project here a bit. If I had spent more time here I think overall my project would have benefited, and realizing that my project was already very conceptual up to this point, it would have majorly improved with some solid plans on how it was actually going to come together. 

The final part was assembling the video and creating original clips. There is really not much to add to this part besides noting that creating original clips was not easy. In the end I put clips of myself talking about prosthetics and the impact of science and medicine throughout the video, which honestly made it more boring than I intended. 

In the end it all came together and shared the message of hope which I wanted it to. There were some extra details which I wanted to add in but to meet the length requirement I could not. This included the mention of the Invictus games which are sort of like the Olympic Games but for people who have served their country and come back with physical or mental injuries. I thought they were an amazing example of how people can overcome or partially overcome injuries with the help of medicine and I found hope reading about it even though I don’t have any serious injuries like theirs. What’s really cool about these games is that they are going to be hosted by Canada in 2025 which is a nice connection because its not something in some far off place, but something happening in our own backyard.

Overall I felt like near the end I was getting a better understanding of how I was supposed to communicate hope and how we can find hope in other people’s stories, but for the beginning I just remember feeling very lost. Looking back at the project there is a lot more that could have been changed and I know I will be focusing on planning for the next, and final, project of this year.

That’s all for now.