Have you ever heard of the Manhattan Project? I can guarantee that you wouldn’t have known what it was in 1944, unless you were one of the few scientists selected to work there. Most of the people involved with the project didn’t even know what it was.

For the first unit this year in PLP, we studied the Manhattan Project, an American Program that played a key role in World War II. Its purpose was to create atomic weapons to be used in war. This project was top secret and only the key players in the project actually new what was being developed.

We started our unit by creating a character card about an important person involved with the Manhattan Project. I decided to do mine on Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, and while almost everyone else did theirs on people no one had heard of I chose the director of the Manhattan Project. Ms. Willemse and Mr. Hughes wanted us to choose less known people for our character cards but I also remember them saying that we needed the key players too. I was looking for someone good to do mine on when I realized that no one had chosen a single key player so I decided that I should. While it may have been a bit easier to do mine on Groves because there was so much information on him it made choosing the most important facts that much more difficult.

After the character card assignment we put our historical perspective skills to the test. We downloaded the app “Los Alamos: The Secret City of the Manhattan Project” which allowed us to walk around Los Alamos and get a sense of what life there was really like. We had to use the information from this game, along with other research and prior knowledge, to write a letter as if we were someone living in Los Alamos writing to our loved ones. When Ms. Willemse told us about this assignment our initial question was whether or not we could give detailed information and she told us we’d worry about that latter. What we didn’t know at the time was that after writing the letter we’d have to get into pairs and censor each other’s letters. This exercise made us first imagine what it would be like to live in Los Alamos, and then think about what type of information would actually be allowed to be shared with people outside of the city.

This is part of my final letter, can you guess what is blacked out? Family members got letters like this everyday and had to try to fill in the blanks, and now you can try too.

After that assignment is when our main project began. We had to create a video in the style of “History in Five” where we had to get into groups of five, choose a main topic and then come up with five subtopics that had to do with our theme. My group’s topic was the Secrecy at Hanford, and my group and their subtopics were:

Nolan: Hanford Working Conditions
Anatolia: Security Measures
Mike: Keeping it Top Secret
Me: Hanford Work Ethics
Gabi: Why Security was Necessary

I was kind of nervous for this project because it’s my first year in the PLP program so I had never done a big project like this before. I didn’t know how to edit videos or the process of putting together something like this, but I was excited to learn. Luckily the other members of my group had been in PLP since grade 9 so they were pros. They helped me along the way and were patient with my learning process.

For this project I had to do research into my subtopic, write my own script and create my own video. Of course, this being PLP we didn’t just do research on our topic but instead we actually went to Hanford, one of the secret cities that was part of the Manhattan Project. During this field school we got a chance to go to the site of the B Reactor, a museum and more. Here’s the full itinerary of what we did:

While at Hanford my group asked people who now work there questions that we came up with prior to the field study. This is how we got most of our research done, and we even filmed many of these interviews to use as clips within our video.

We didn’t start writing our scripts until after the trip because we got most of our information at the site. When we arrived back at the school it took my group too long to finish writing our scripts despite the information we now had. By the time our first draft was due all we had to hand in was our interview clips and some voice overs on black screens. In fact, it took until the day our second draft was due for everyone to have finished writing their script.

It took my group a long time to edit as well, because we decided to do it all on Anatolia’s laptop. This meant we could only edit one at a time which slowed down the editing process. We did it on her laptop because we needed it for the green screen effects we used. I decided to try and put mine together on iMovie on my iPad and sent it to Anatolia to add into the movie. Then we put the green screen effects in after having put the rest of the movie together. I’m glad I did this because I’m not sure if I ever would have gotten a chance to edit mine otherwise, I just wish that more of my group and used their iPads to edit.

Despite these road blocks though, our video progressed through each step of the process. I’m honestly not 100% sure if it’s completely finished yet, after all, there is always something to improve, but I’m still proud of what we managed to make. It took quite a while and lots of late nights, but the hard work was definitely worth it.

https://youtu.be/hZlMzmyiVjY

If (let’s be real, when) I am to do a project like this again I will definitely start writing my script before the trip. This way I will be able to film on site which will give the video that much more effect. It will also help us to know exactly what clips we need and use our time to get those specific clips. Plus having the script written and all of our video clips sooner will allow more time for editing and making sure the project is made to the best of our abilities. Also, I will try to get my group to edit our individual sections on our iPads rather than making the whole video on one laptop, because that really limits the amount of time we have to work on our individual videos.

I learned a lot from this project, in both the creation process of PLP projects, and about the Manhattan Project. It was quite interesting, and getting to go to Hanford made it seem so much more real and allowed me to connect with what I was learning. Overall our film could have been better, but I’m proud of our group and what we managed to create, along with all of the hard work we put in.