This summer was probably the best summer I’ve had so far, I saw my friends nearly everyday, I went to so many concerts, I made new friends and stayed up late every night. Had many many “sleepovers” and mainly walked around all night with my friends listening to music on our speakers until the sun came up and then went to sleep all day and did the same the next night. So obviously going back to school wouldn’t make me happy and I can garuntee that almost everybody hates the idea. The first week of school went unexpectedly great as we had a trip planned with in the first few days, we had a retreat planned to camp capilano but until the day of we had almost no idea as of what we were going to be doing.

We left for camp capilano mid day and we had a quick little stop at the Capilano dam before walking over to the camp site. When we arrived at the dam we were assigned our first of three assignments on the trip. The assignment was to create a video intro for a reality tv show but there could be no actual audio, the  only audio that there could be was music. We had to introduce 10 characters in groups of 5 and each charecter had to have and show a different personality, look different from one another, and each introduction for the character was around 3-6 seconds so it was a little tricky to do this. Last year in grade 9 we focused more on filmmaking and how to tell stories so we all knew and have used some of these skills from last year, but this year in grade 10 were focusing more on podcasts and only using audio to create a well thought out story.

We were put into groups by the choice of candy we chose, so if you chose a Kit-Kat you would all be in one group, but when everyone decided there candy we didn’t know this. I guess me and my friends are more similar than we think as I was in a group with Kyle, Simon, Lucas, and Aiden. We only had an hour to film, edit, and review the video that we had created, we quickly got to work to create 10 characters and figure out what sort of  show our characters would be in. In the end we created the video and decided that our tv show would be a little like big brother and the real house wives in one, at the end we kinda lost track of time and when an hour was up we still had to name all thee characters and Aiden wa style one naming them. Later when we got to the cabin we all had to watch what each group had produced. Below is my groups video the name of the show is, The capilano trailer park boys.

Later on when we arrived at camp and had viewed each other’s videos we were given a second assignment, our task for this assignment was to get in the same group and retell that same video assignment story but this time only using audio. Each of the 10 characters has to have a hobby or something that makes them unique and identifiable. My group decided to keep the same theme but entirely change the characters, our story line changed as well, we decided to record like it was a previous episode of the show. It began with “last time on house of ten”, we recorded it so that there was a charecter walking through the house of guys and introducing them all. It wa Avery funny to record as we all had great ideas and it wa s just very entertaining to make. I also found this assignment much easier to make them the first as we did t need to worry about visuals and mainly had to focus on the characters and making it entertaining.

The third and final assignment was definitely the most challenging to make, we had to create a 4 min podcast with the whole centre topic being about identity. We could tell any story but it had to be real and obviously believable, and the story had to be approved by the teachers. We could also choose our own groups, we all grouped up and I ended up being with Robbie and Kyle which was great as we all work really well together. We quickly got to work as the assignment wa added the following morning at 10, it was actually pretty easy for us to come up with ideas as we are all very creative expesially Robbie. We decided using the story of Kyle’s daily hair routine as within our large friend group or the whole PLP class everyone finds kyles hair to be “funny” as he uses a lot of gel. The podcast would also be very original and funny, it didn’t take us long at all to write the script and we quickly got to recording. We recorded pretty fast and got into editing the whole podcast, this would be our first fully edited podcast we would have ever made and I don’t think it’s actually that bad, we had included interviews with many people and the audio quality is actually pretty good. Camp Capilano was a great learning experience for me, I learned how to podcast and tell an interesting gripping small story with just audio and it was lots of fun. It was a very short and quick trip but we achieved so much over such a short amount of time and I had so much fun, I’m actually very excited to create more podcasts and see what different stories I will be podcasting in the future. I’m also very excited for the other field study’s and hope that we will have more fun assignments like this as looking back it was so much fun.