Hi everyone,
It’s been awhile since my last blog post. So what happened was there was Christmas break, and then we did an extra long project, it was TEN milestones in a month! This project was about nationalism during the 19th century and how that affects our lives today. We used a different example every week, on the first week we learned about various examples of nationalism around the world. I focused on American Manifest Destiny. The second week was about nationalism in British North America and the Canadian Confederation. The third and final example was Indigenous oppression in Canada. This included the Indian Act and the Story the Red River Resistance. We also made six videos during these last four weeks!
We began with our driving question “How can an understanding of nationalism help us make sense of today?” My answer to this question was “An Understanding of Nationalism in North America during the 19th century can help us understand why People express their pride in their country through sports and explorations.” I chose to focus on nationalism through sports and travel because not only are those some of my greatest interests, those our the examples of nationalism my mom can relate to the best. You might be asking why do I care if my Mom can relate to the examples of nationalism? To answer that we have to go back to the beginning of the project.
Our very first Milestone for this project was a parent video interview. We had to ask our parents questions about nationalism. Then at the end of the project we had to create a reaction video of them watching our final video. You can check out both of those videos right in this post.
One of the biggest challenges I faced in this project was the high pace of work. I play lots of sports, mostly Basketball and Skiing right now. It was a challenge to balance those with homework. It required me to manage my time. I also had to chose what was an attainable amount of work in a few days. This would often involve me cutting information as I only had time to research a few topics. The time management techniques I learned during this project will help me greatly in the future.
My favourite video’s to make were the second video, an animatic about Manifest Destiny and the final video, the parent reaction. I enjoyed the animatic because I found the content fascinating. I have always found exploration, and industrialization super cool. In the final video I feel like I did a great job in the editing. I used some techniques which I didn’t use throughout the rest of this project. This included multiple angles inter-spliced, and a custom made intro in keynote. Go watch both of those videos, they are linked in this post.
The video I found the most challenging was the fourth video, an explainer video about oppression in Canada. I used the example of the Red River Resistance focusing on Louis Riel. I also found the editing this video in an engaging way was difficult. We never ended up finishing this video as our teacher cancelled this assignment after our rough draft. I used some of the lessons I learned from this video to improve my final nationalism video though. I would like to show the video but sadly the footage corrupted, however I still have my voiceover.
Videos are not just filming and editing though, they include a whole lot planning. We use a movie planner. We use the Know Your Story tab to began. This involves all the research and sources we will need to create our video, we also create a story mountain or story spine. Those our essentially rough plans of our video. Then we move onto a screenplay or script. Which one we use depends on the kind of video. We mostly use the Screenplay as it lets us plan the visuals as well as audio. After that we create a storyboard. Finally we move onto editing and shooting. Creating this movie planner taught me a lot of things, first off videos take a lot longer to create then you would think. For a 4 minute long video I usually spend 2-3 hours on the research, then I will spend 30 minutes on a story mountain. After that It takes me 2-3 hours to write my screenplay. Then a storyboard will take me 1 hours 30 minutes. I find this me most useless step as I generally have visualized my story during the screenplay. After all that the filming and recording will take another 1-2 hours. Then I generally spend 2 hours editing. But I’m not done yet, I still have to upload to Youtube, write a description and cite sources. That can take anywhere from 15-45 minutes. That adds up to 9 hours 15 minutes to 12 hours 45 minutes for a four minutes video! The amount of time a video takes to create shifts depending on the video, the more cuts and clips required the longer time it takes to create.
We were assessed on four competencies throughout this project. There was one Maker competency, two Social Studies and two English competencies. You might be thinking but that adds up to five, you said there was four competencies. We had one competency which spanned two subjects.
Empowered learner was our maker competency. The how might I statement which came along with it was “How might I use technology to construct knowledge.” This competency was present in all of our video milestones. My best example of this competency in my opinion was the final two videos. I feel like I used my editing to enhance the message and improve understanding of Nationalism in both of them. The multiple angles, well timed cuts and captions helped improve understanding.
The competency which spanned both English and Socials was Using Resources/ Use Evidence from various sources. The description of this competency was ‘Have I found diverse sources and evaluated them for their relevance, accuracy, and reliability? The place were this competency was most evident was my Know Your Story Tab of my movie planner. You can also find evidence of this competency in my youtube description. In three of our videos (animatic, tutorial, final video) we had to use cite everything in MLA 8 format. Most of my sources were articles. Why… well I learn the most from reading an article or book vs. watching a movie or video. I favourite websites were Canadian Encyclopedia, History.com and Britannica. I found they all had a wide selection of articles on historical nationalism. My biggest takeaways from this competency were how to cite sources even photos in MLA 8 and what sources I can use for future projects.
Our English competency was Designing Texts. The description was “Have I used writing and design processes to plan, develop, create, and refine engaging and meaningful texts considering purpose, audience, and message? Pretty much how can I design texts (this includes video) to create a meaningful text. My greatest examples of this were once again the last two videos. I think those were my most meaningful and engaging videos. I did this through increasing the time I spent on the planning stages, particularly Know Your Story and the screenplay.
Identify Continuity and Change was our Social Studies competency. “How are lives and conditions alike over time and how have they changed?” For this example I will point to cumulative video. Throughout that video I provided examples of nationalism and life in the past and the same in modern days. My favourite example was the example of Manifest Destiny in the past and how that resulted in the frontier era compared to Manifest Destiny now and how that leads to exploration and travel. I think my example of sports was the most meaningful to my mom though.
I hope you have learned something about nationalism. I would strongly suggest checking out all the videos and film planners linked I worked very hard on them. Now you know that sports and exploration are both parts of nationalism! There probably won’t be any posts for the next couple of months, I will be taking different courses (Science and Gym) in which I don’t use the blog. Have a good day 🙂
