Hello and welcome to my second post about “Storm the Barricades” if you haven’t read my first post you can read it here. Now that you’ve read that one let me tell you about week 2 of our first big PLP project this year. Let’s start where we left off…

Milestone 2 was about the historical significance of the American Revolution. We were asked to write a paragraph. This is harder than it sounds because it was hard to fit all that information into a paragraph. This was a struggle for me because I wanted to talk about everything but the point was to talk bout what was important to history. When thinking about the historical significance we considered these questions,
Was the event recognized as being important as it was happening?
How widespread and lasting were the consequences after the event?
Has the event become symbolic or representative of historical issues or trends?
In my paragraph the first time I wrote it I forgot to add thoses key questions. This made my ideas not make as much sense and I didn’t answer the question properly. So I revised and added the questions. Adding the questions helped me answer the question clearly in a single paragraph because it narrowed down what made an event significant.
Then we did our 3rd milestone. This was a paragraph about the cause and consequences of the French Revolution. This one was easier for me. I could tell more of a story about the French Revolution. I also found the French Revolution much more interesting. Being in French emersion for 8 years I had a couple of teachers from France would try and tell us the history of France but I’ve never really understood it until now. I had watched “Les Miserables” and loved watching it after learning about history because I understood what was going on better. At first, it was hard for me to include the cause and consequences. But when I went back and reviewed I mostly just added keywords to make my ideas clearer. My biggest problem when writing informative paragraphs is that I remember so much information which makes it hard to figure out what’s worth writing about.
Then since we were slower learners, the teachers decided to skip a few milestones. Then we did milestone 6 which was our final video and answer to the driving question. To start this my group started with a story mountain this helped us figure out which parts of our work were important for our question.
Then we made a storyboard. Even though our group isn’t the most artistic we made an understandable storyboard with a script. this took the longest because we didn’t know how we wanted to do present it, and to be honest I still don’t know how we presented it. We decided to have the actors present a friendly historian and a French soldier. Then came filming day. The number of things that went wrong…. let’s just say if I were to write them all we would be here all day so let me tell you the significant parts of how we failed and what the causes were. Our first problem was that one of Quinn’s strengths is NOT acting. This was significant because it made the rest of our videos hard to watch and understand, it’s also not very interesting. This caused a lot of stuff that we wrong later that day. It was like the first domino. Since we had to work on Quinn’s acting we were behind schedule. This led to the rest of the filming being rushed and not getting a chance to edit. This was a significant problem because it meant that the whole class got to see our crappy filming/acting. It was significant. It made an impression on the teachers because it was so bad. This knocked my confidence in our whole project. This caused me to be quiet, and I guess my group was feeling the same kinda way because we were getting kind of short with each other. No one was as keen or optimistic. Then we finally finished filming. We had so many bad clips that it took a long time to pick out the good and bad ones. This caused us to get no editing done in class so we sent it home with the only person who hadn’t edited a video yet. They were confident in their editing skills though. So we went home for the weekend feeling ok about how this video was gonna turn out. Then Sunday night is when they realize that they don’t have all the videos. So finally we get the video back and it’s a disaster. So heres our “first draft”
I hope you are amused by our video ( it helps if you pretend its a joke)

Then we edited some more, its hardly better but here is our final video.

The teachers are always telling us that the best learning comes with failure so I guess we got lucky. Let me tell you what I learned and what I would have done differently

  1. TIME MANAGEMENT, this is so important because it sets up how your entire project will go. If my group had been more efficient and had used all the time we were given properly maybe we could have got our video to an accomplished level. Some things that could’ve helped is if had made a schedule and if we had thought out our plan a little more clearly.
  2. PLANNING, our groups storyboard was fine and we had a good idea of what we wanted to do but we should’ve planned things like background and costumes. If we had a chance to do it again I would have spent more time on the costumes and backdrop. I’m pretty good at drawing so I could’ve drawn us some houses or a castle. I would’ve also made Quinn costume better by getting old rags or something to make him more interesting and convincing.
  3. MAKING IT ENGAGING, our video was boring. I tried to save it with music but it was boring. If I had got more time I would’ve added a animated title with properly picked and timed music. I think we could’ve used our animations to make it more engaging as well.
  4. THE MACHINE, the machine could’ve helped us so much. When he video was edited the first time there were no machine shots and at that point it was too late to fix it.

I’m really glad were getting more chances to prove our video making skills because I know I can do better. See you next project!