Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog! I have some very unfortunate news at the end but thats not what we’re worrying right now. Today, we will talking about the Great War. So let’s jump straight into the post.

First, let’s start with the Great War. The Great War is also known as WWI. The War was fought between 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Our project, is about WWI but from a Canadian’s point of view. Like every project this year, we are filming a video! The only plot twist to this project is this is a individual project. This project is like a reflection and a final video skills assessment(Hopefully this makes sense to you). Anyways, let me explain what I created.

Novel Study

First, we did a novel study. The book I read is called War Horse. War Horse is also a movie. A good one too. The book tells us a Horse’s point of view in the great war(WWI). I do recommend you to read it if you are a animal lover or someone interested in studying the animals in WWI. At the end, we had to do a creative reflection of the book, here’s mine.

For my reflection, I decided to show the different traits and aspects that Joey(the main character and horse) showed in the book. The images are symbols that I felt connected to these traits.

Project

For our project, we had a lot of topics to choose from. The one I was most interested in was Flanders Field. The reason I chose this is because I wanted to know more about the background of the poem, the poet, and the battlefield itself. Since Remembrance Day happens each year, I thought it would be good for me to know some history about it. Before we chose our video forms, we watched some videos about the Great War. Especially ones from Indiana Neidell. After choosing our topics, we had to choose our video format. There were a couple of options but  I decided to choose the Stop Motion one.

During the process of filming, I decided to come up with a genius idea of marking where I was putting my iPad. Since Stop Motion is a format where you take pictures and it turns into a animation, a shaky background wouldn’t be the greatest. The filming wasn’t the most difficult but the presentation part is. Our audience was the grade 6 and 7s. Yep, elementary kids. 

At the school, it was actually a lot better since I remember most of them from when I was in grade 7. The kids were really good listeners and I thank them for being respectful. We did about 3 turns each so I got to present to 3 groups. Overall it was fun. Anyways, here’s my final video that I showed to them. It wasn’t the only draft, but it was the final draft. More drafts awaits as you read my revisions for each draft!

Draft 1

In draft 1, I didn’t have voiceovers or music. The only thing that was good were the clips. I just needed to add more clips so it was longer.

Draft 2

In draft 2, I still needed music throughout the video. I only had music for the beginning and end. Overall, it was better when I added the new clips in.

Final Draft

The draft you saw above was my final draft. To be honest, I was pretty happy of how it turned out.

Conclusion 

In the end, I learned a lot about Flanders Fields. I also learned about John McCrae, who was a medical officer during WWI and he wrote the famous poem “In Flanders Fields.” I learned that the second battle of Ypres was fought on Flanders Field. I learned that Flanders Field is located in Belgium and many other things. For the video, I learned that it’s quite difficult to make a stop motion that is 3 minutes since I didn’t have that much stuff to say. So make sure you have lots of detail when creating a stop motion. It is important to make sure there is a stable background so the animation looks smooth. Overall, I was happy of my end product. It wasn’t perfect, but I liked it.

Now here comes a sad part. Unfortunately, this might be my last ever humanities blog post. I have another one coming soon but not for humanities. The reason for this is because I am no longer part of PLP. Anyways, I guess we’re gonna leave it at that but don’t worry cause I have two more posts coming up. For now, peace.