Over the past month or so our humanities class has been focusing on some of the historical events that occurred in this nation from the 1800’s up to WWI. We found stories within the time period and created a Heritage Minute film about them. 

My group was given the topic of fur trade, so from there we found the story of the French Canadian voyagers. We researched, wrote, planned, filmed, and edited our film about the voyagers. I played the brief role of a French Canadian Woman along side my daughter during the land scenes. Filming was my second job during our project, Kiera and I filmed the water scenes of Emerson and Luciano (as French Canadian Voyagers) in their canoe paddling. 

Our driving question for the unit was “How do the stories of our history shape our identities today?” We followed this driving question throughout our unit and creation of our films. 

My group members Kiera, Emerson and Luciano started by planning our our film and creating a storyboard. We gots lots of feedback from each other, our peers and our teacher. From there we moved onto filming and editing our video. 

The acting aspect of this project was quite difficult; for me anyway. I couldn’t help but smile when the camera was pointing at me and the parts of the film where I spoke French, took awhile to get right. Although it took many retakes to get my speaking and acting parts done, we had lots of fun filming our video. However I improved my acting skills throughout the unit and we finished the project with a fantastic Heritage Minute film.

We want to thank Ryan Barnett and Joanne Archibald from Historical Canada. They are some of the creators of the Heritage Minutes productions. We emailed them our videos to get some feedback and this is the feedback they sent us on our videos: