Hey guys, welcome back to another blog post! The topic for this post is… Confederation! PLP 9 recently jumped into a project my teachers like to call “Confederation Commercial.” Before there was Canada, there were 6 colonies. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, P.E.I, Canada East, and Canada West. They all joined together to become Canada, but what were the challenges being faced, what did the colonies have to agree on to become the great country Canada is now? For this project, we were to “become” one of these colonies. We would do research, figure out what our colony would, logically, want and fight for if they were to  join Confederation. We were going to do this in the form of a commercial, advertising our colonies demands. The biggest feature of this project? We were going to use a green screen for the video! So without further ado, let’s jump into it!

My group, Liam, Owen, Emily, and Ciara, were representatives of New Brunswick. A land separated from the other colonies by a thick, lush forest, our biggest demand was to improve communication and travel. This wasn’t the only demand our group came out with however, so we had a sheet that would help us organize our ideas. On one side of the sheet was what exactly we wanted, and the other side was our justification for it. This helped our group organize and learn exactly what our colony needed most from confederation by writing down our biggest concerns and ideas. 

We did research about our colony to help us narrow down what our colony needed most. By researching our colony, we were familiarizing ourselves with the enemies, allies, needs, and fears of our colony. We learned what resources we had and what we could bargain with to help us with our demands. At the time, New Brunswick was a mainly Loyalist colony, as many Loyalist fled to New Brunswick following the American Revolution. Vulnerable to invasion, New Brunswick was isolated due to its location and surrounding terrain. All this information helped us come up with demands that would benefit New Brunswick and the Maritimes. 

Once we had our demands sorted out, we made our video. When I say video, I mean video and not commercial. Our group kind of forgot we were making a video and instead made an infomercial with very little info. I feel like our demands were reasonable and historically accurate, but the way we displayed them to the other colonies was not something to be proud of. I feel like we weren’t as productive as we could have been and that led to our editors rushing to make a video with very mediocre footage. Our group was actually made up of most of the people from the same friend group, so we were very friendly, but we let that affect our work, and I feel like that was my biggest regret of the project. I’ll let you guys see the video for yourselves and you can judge it however you like. Feel free to comment anything you would like to add!

We had two competencies assessed for this project. Evidence and Create. Our group, at the start of this project, showed great initiative in researching our colony and learning what demands would be historically accurate and would be something that could have been proposed 152 years ago at the real meetings for Confederation. I do feel like our group could have used our time with the green screen more effectively and used the green screen more to enhance our commercial, which I think was the main reason why our video was, in my eyes, disappointing. Although I say this, I am proud, personally, for the work and effort I put into the pre-production milestones(screenplay, research, list of demands). This has been a goal of mine ever since the Take Your Kid To Work Day Video last year, and it felt good to achieve that goal in this project. This project had a lot of ups and downs, but all in all I see it as a learning experience to keep your impulsivity in check and to use the tools given to you efficiently. I must say though, I had fun with this group and with this project. Have a great 2020 everyone!🇨🇦