Hello and welcome back to my blog. In grade 9 flight we’ve been learn a lot about making videos, such as making a storyboard, plot graph, script, and much more. Our most recent assignment was to create a video explaining what Canada is to us. Click here to visit their official site. The video could be about almost anything, ranging from values, sports, nature, culture, diversity, or history, we could base it off just about anything. In class and in previous assignments, we’ve done a lot of work with plots in stories and our teachers suggested that we could use that to our advantage and base our videos around a story or an experience of ours. At the beginning, I was clueless as to what I could do for my video and was a little worried because the project description was so vague. Luckily, we were able to do some note taking in class about Canada and that gave me a better understanding of what I could include in my video. Here’s a picture of the notes I took:
I watched a lot of the videos that were uploaded in their app which set the bar that I was to not only surpass, but exceed. Our teacher supplied us with the rubric that would be used to judge all the Canada video submissions. Our teachers had us make a few drafts of the video and we were out in pairs to give feedback on the first draft of each other’s videos. Click here to watch my first draft. Here’s a picture of my feedback from Robbie:
As I said before, it was very hard for me to find a story to use in my video. I knew what I’d wanted the story to be based around, I wanted an experience of when a stranger helped another out of pure kindness. Unfortunately, my mind would completely blank when I’d tried to find examples of when this happened to me. I could’ve came up with a story but my imagination is very limited and I really didn’t want to. I proceeded to go around the classroom asking people if them or someone they know ever had an experience where a stranger went out of their way to help them. I’d asked nearly the entire class until Adam told me about how his older brother helped a woman during his paddle board race. The women from the organization seemed to enjoy the story, (at least I hope they did) however because my memory is (most likely) worse than a goldfish’s, I had to read it off my cracked iPad.
I showed the first draft of my video to a few other people, including my classmate and friend named Willa. She enjoyed the video and suggested to add some background music so that the ending of my video would be smoother. For the second draft, I added some background music I got off youtube so that the video could seem more professional. As for the voice over, I redid it many times because my throat was acting up and in most clips it were as if a twelve year old boy that was going through puberty had been narrating my video. It took a lot of editing and research to get the audio just right and the timing perfect for all the clips and effects included. At last, you may watch my glorious, inspirational, and meaningful video.
In summary, I had lots of fun making this short video because I was able to bring in all my ideas and be creative with what to include to represent the story. I liked adding cool effects, such as the lightning sound effect at the beginning and the clip of the kayak flipping over. I’m very happy with how this mini-project turned out and I hope to do more like this in the future. Until the next post, goodbye!