Over the years of being in PLP, we have done many different types of projects varying from essays, videos, explain everything’s, and for some, even puppet shows. However, we tried a new form of project to demonstrate our learning this time, the video Essay.
Video Essay definition: A video essay is a written essay read aloud and mixed with a stream of images, sound, or video. They often explore topics in a subjective or poetic manner.
Now when we first heard the news that this would be our project following our trip to the Southwest, I wasn’t too thrilled. We watched an example in class of what one of these video essays might look like and wow it was pretty amazing. After watching it sure I was inspired to do my own and do it well, but I was a little worried because of the amount of work that was put into it as well as how well it was done. I worked with Anatolia on this project and it definitely did not end up being as good as the example we saw.
To start off the project we traveled all the way down to Tucson Arizona, and Las Vegas Nevada, (which of course isn’t necessary, but was amazing nonetheless). Before leaving for the trip we had been learning about atomic energy, the mob, and everything under the concept of fear around the time of the 50’s in Las Vegas and America. And of course we created our question for our project. For ours it was. We then took the flight, very early in the morning I might add, and traveled down to the southwest to experience and learn even more about what we had been talking about in class.
During the trip we had the opportunity to get video, pictures, interviews, and find even more information for our topics and video essays. When we returned from our trip we used all of this new information, as well as our previous knowledge from class and brought it all together in an informative expository essay. Here’s a link to the essay: Southwest Essay
After getting our Essay approved by our teachers, we moved on to the video aspect of the project. We had to take our Essay and record it as audio, with a few changes to better the video content of course. Then we took that and found videos, pictures and used our own videos, pictures and interview clips from the trip to enhance our written aspect and create an image for the viewers to use to better understand our essays.
This was more challenging then expected because of course we didn’t get as many clips and pictures from Vegas as we had hoped because we ended up altering our topic when we returned from the trip. At first we were focusing on the mob so we got a lot of footage for that, but when we returned we changed our focus more to the atomic bomb and the economy of Vegas. And it is completely our fault for not recording everything, which now looking back we should have. Since we didn’t we have had to find and create our own footage and images to use for our video. This has made things a little more challenging for us.
Honestly we had a slow and rough start to this project. We didn’t collaborate well and therefor we were left with a terrible and not finished first draft. I spent hours after receiving the feedback and critique fixing, adding, and editing our video. It took a long time to get our video to an acceptable state, and I still wish I could go back and edit a few more things.
Before this unit I had never heard of a video Essay and when I first heard about them I was not excited to be creating my own. After completing this project I realized that it wasn’t that bad to do. I always have enjoyed writing essays, (well not enjoyed, but they’re probably my favourite to do over most other things), so by incorporating an essay into a project I used one aspect of a project that I liked and used another, the video, as something that I need to improve on and want to get better at. This project showed me a new form of presenting my learning and I’m glad we did it. It was something different and engaged me in the project more then doing something that we normally do would have.