Gold, Gold, Gold!

Gold, the world’s most sought-after mineral, prized for its value and unique qualities. And where did that all begin? From the gold rushes of course! This was the theme of our new project. It’s driving question was: How did gold shape a province and it’s people? In our final product, we each made a short video that tells a story that helps the viewer better understand an aspect of the Gold Rush in BC, and how these events played a historically significant role in the development of BC as a province of Canada. In this blog post, I will be telling you how I got there and the milestones I went through to get to my final product. 

For our first milestone, we got to make visuals that basically showed why gold was so important and valued in our society today and in the past. In my photo, I had drawn symbols representing different things gold was used for such as statues, Olympic medals, jewellery, dentistry and motherboards found in computers. I also had something showing how much easier it was to form gold into all sorts of shapes and sizes. My background also even had some symbolization to it; gold is a symbol of wealth, and even when you search up wealth, there is always the same two colours, black and gold. 

Communicate: How do I share my own ideas?

I think that I did a good job at showing my ideas, even with no words. I think that my symbols for each example of how gold is used today is pretty well done: the drawings aren’t too complex, just simple. Which is how I wanted them to turn out. 

For our second milestone, we worked in groups (Ciara, Meg, Holly and Gabe) and used Google Earth to create an interactive map that tells the story of the events, people and places that were historically significant to BC’s history. We had to have at least 25 placemarks where each would contain a photo or video and a text describing it’s importance to BC. Click here too see it!

Establish Historical Significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?

I think we did a good job doing what we were supposed to do. We all split our tasks evenly, everyone in our group would choose 5 places and wrote a small paragraph of text for each place. Although, we did have quite a few problems doing the actual Google Earth document, since no ones computers would work, we eventually figured it out and it still turned out the way we wanted it. I think that all of our descriptions for each place were just detailed enough to get say the role that that certain place had in BC’s early history. There were places such as Fraser River, where the first gold rush was, or Williams Creek, which was the birthplace of some of BC’s biggest gold towns such as Barkerville, Cameronton and Richfield. 

In our next milestone, we created character cards. In our character cards, we would complete a card with a photo of someone that we chose, two related artifacts and text that explains the role our character played during BC’s gold rush. We had to choose one real person and make up another one. Here were mine:

Establish historical significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?

Communicate: How do I share my own ideas?

I chose someone named Peter Dunlevey (a real person) who I think is worth remembering because he practically started the Cariboo gold rush after discovering big lumps of gold with some friends. Next for my made up character, I took a picture of myself and edited it a little to make me look older and to make it look like I could’ve actually been in the gold rush. I had searched up the most common first and last names around that time and this was what I found. Obviously, there weren’t many women participating in the gold rush at this time, but I actually did a bit of research and found out that they actually would bring up some women to balance out the men and women a little better. And I surprisingly managed to make a quite a detailed story to explain her life. 

For the first part of this milestone, we found all of these old videos from an old tv show called Ghost Trails and Ghost Towns where these two people would sit down and talk about all sorts of stories about how BC formed, during the time of the gold rushes. Our task was to create a story spine. The video I chose was about Dawson Creek, the birth place of the Klondike. It was a bit of a challenge to form the notes I took from the video since my video was more fact based and less story based, but I managed to form it pretty well in the end.

The next part of our milestone was our storyboard script, where we would write down what we would say in our videos and what we would show on the screen. I’m not too sure why, but I wrote mine on paper, which made it not look as nice.

Communicate: How do I share my own ideas?

Establish historical significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?

I think that I did a pretty good job forming my video into a story, talking about how Dawson Creek came to be. I also think that I did a good job in narrowing down my ideas and keeping the things that I thought were more important which also helped make it much shorter than the video I was given. 

Our final milestone, was our actual video and final product. Here it is! 

Establish historical significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?

Communicate: How do I share my own ideas?

Just as I said in my previous milestone, I think that I did a pretty good job narrowing down all of the facts and mini stories I was given in the Gold Trails and Ghost Towns video and summed up how Dawson Creek came to be very well. Plus, making it much more interesting to look at without getting too bored since it was a whole lot shorter and had me speaking a little faster in my own video. On the other hand, I definitely went too crazy in cutting each scene so fast, it was too distracting, my audio also seemed to change a lot during the course of the video. I also felt that I left out some really good parts that I could’ve mentioned in my video but didn’t. 

To conclude, it was very interesting to learn about another thing that shaped British Columbia’s history and how is today. It was also interesting to learn how valuable gold was during the gold rushes and that it’s value has only grown since then. 

See in my next blog post!

Alex