Happy new year! 2016 was an interesting year, so of course the last project of the year had to be just as interesting! The project was filled with learning (of course), stress (as always) and a lot of last minute planning (well duh…) but the final product was worth all of the hard work we put in to it.

This year for the exhibition my class was tasked with the challenge of creating an immersive experience of Canada’s emerging identity from pre WWI to the depression. My group got assigned post war, 1920s. It was a time of excitement, women finally got the chance to vote, there were new innovations, lots of partying and in general people wanted to enjoy life after the rough times of war. My group was made up of me and four of my classmates: Luciano Boniface, Maria Melhado, Michael Sutherland and Kirby Harris. This was a pretty strong group, as we’re all hard workers, but there was only one non newbie in the group, so most of us were quite inexperienced with exhibitions. We didn’t let that get in our way though, we were all up for the challenge!

Our project began with doing a lot of research. We learned about the time period, the key players and a general timeline of important events. We found out what the 20s were famous for and what people in general don’t know about the time. Then we had to come up with our setting. We first thought of 3 potential settings and then came up with a list of pros and cons for each and developed our ideas from there.

After quite a bit of planning and brainstorming we decided we’d do a voting booth, where people could learn a bit about women’s new rights, and a strike. Then it was time to figure out our characters. We decided that I should be a rich woman who was voting, Maria should be a First Nations soldier, Kirby lead a strike, Michael was a strike breaker and Luciano was a homeless beggar. From there we developed our scripts, here’s a part of the script:

Then it was time to make our props. Here’s a list of what we needed for our setting:
Protest signs
Tables for the polling station
A ballot box
Polling booths
Backgrounds
Display boards and clothing racks (for walls)

On the day of the exhibition right at three we started setting up. Once we set up our group felt awkward because we had so much empty space. So 10 minutes to go we took the art display boards from the hall way and the clothing racks from the lost and found (which we covered with paper) to create walls and make it look like we had less empty space.

When we began to present it took a couple tries to get into it, but once we got started it went fairly smoothly. All in all, I’m very proud of what my group managed to accomplish. If I were to do this again I would definitely do a few things differently. I would figure out how to use the space better because ours looked kind of empty. Along with that, I’d try to get a more interesting character because my part in the exhibition felt really dull compared to my groups’ characters.

In general though, I think we did a great job, especially considering our limited time, he fact that we weren’t able to set it up until 2 hours before hand, and not getting to rehearse with actual people going through.

This project taught me both a lot about the 1920s and how to create an immersive experience. We had to make a performance and a set that people could walk through and experience. This project added a new technique to my long list of interesting ways to present information!’

You know when you almost walk into somebody and you both try to avoid each other but step the same way and end up hitting each other anyways? Well that’s basically what happened to the Imo and the Mont-Blanc on the morning of December 6th, 1917. These were two ships, both inside the Halifax Harbour, which collided resulting in the largest man made explosion before the nuclear bombs.

For this assignment we had to create a news report on The Halifax Explosion with a group of no more than four. My group was made up of Marley, Maria and Nolan. Our first step was to do research on the event. We used the Canadian Encyclopedia and CBC to do this. Then using our information we wrote a script as if the event had just occurred.

Once we finished our script it was time for filming. We decided to film against a green screen and later edit the video to look like a news room. On our first day of filming we hadn’t fully planned out the format of our video so we didn’t get much done, but we did come up with a pretty good green screen set up.

*insert green screen setup pic*

We put a block under the green screen which we then sat behind to allow us to edit in a news desk later. Our next filming session was after school at Marley’s house, where we got over 30 minutes of Nolan bloopers. While these were funny they weren’t very productive, and it took Marley so long to sift through them to get our actual footage. But at least by the end of our filming session Nolan could say the word subsequent.

During our last filming session we managed to be quite productive. Marley, Maria and I all got all of our clips filmed and ready to go, so then it was time for editing. It is quite hard to collaborate when it comes to editing, so Marley ended up actually putting together the video and making it look good. She used the software final cut to actually create our video. The group helped her out by finding virtual newsrooms that we could use, and finding pictures to go along with the script. After many hours of editing, and a long group house party (which killed my battery life) the News Report was finally finished.

https://youtu.be/x-V4MHEhUOA

The Halifax Explosion devastated the city, and a memorial service is held for it each year on December 6th at 9:00am in Halifax, by the Memorial Bells at Fort Needham to commemorate the casualties of the incident. I urge you to take a minute out of your day this year on December 6th to remember those lost and injured during the tragic incident.

During World War I almost 61 000 Canadian soldiers were killed, one of them being John Douglas Armstrong. He was an engineer from Ottawa who, in May of 1916 went across to Europe to fight in the war. He never made it home.

For this blog post we had to research a Canadian soldier who fought in World War I and make a journal entry as though we were him. Ms. Willemse gave us a link to a website where we could find a soldier who fought in World War I, and another page where if we type in their name it gave us even more information on the soldier. Sounds easy enough? Maybe not. See to get an understanding of who this person was we had to find a soldier with lots of information on them. Some people found soldiers right away with lots of sources, but I personally spent an hour searching before finding a soldier with more than two documents, he had 4 but they were two different documents each on the website twice. After hours of typing in random names and sifting through the soldiers trying to find one with quite a bit of resources I realized this meathod wasn’t working. So instead I decided to search by dates. I searched for all soldiers who died between April 9th and April 12th 1917, the dates of the Battle of Vimy Ridge because I thought it could be interesting to do research on a soldier who died during the greatest Canadian battle in WWI. And that’s how I came across Lieutenant John Douglas Armstrong.

I found out information about him using newspaper articles, his forms and a few other sources that were on the website given to me by Ms Willemse. I had quite a bit of information but felt like more would be better. I searched his name on google and came across a couple great pages that gave me more information on him. Here are the main sources I used for information.

Along with those I used this website, and this one. Together I used these sources to try to determine what he may have been thinking on April 8th 1917, the day before he died. Then I wrote this journal entry.

On April 9th 1917 John Douglas Armstrong was shot in the abdomen and passed away almost instantly. His last words were cautioning his friend not to advance to quickly, even when dying caring more about his friend’s safety than his own. He died with a smile on his face. John Douglas Armstrong is now buried in Villers Station Cemetery.

What caused World War I? That’s an easy question, right? Wrong! In fact, the cause of World War I is still highly disputed among historians. For this blog post we had to research different reasons historians had for why the war began and choose our own stance on the topic. Then, of course, we had to find a creative way to display our findings. I decided to create a few political cartoons to highlight my key ideas, two of which I drew on paper, and I edited the other on my iPad.

The cause of World War I is highly disputed among historians and while researching what the cause was, I found many different ideas. After finding multiple views on the beginning of World War I I came to the conclusion that, while there were many factors that caused WWI, the main issue was the many alliances formed between various countries.

The two main alliances were the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. The Triple Entente consisted of France, Britain and Russia, and Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy were the three counties who made up the Triple Alliance. Along with those alliances there were other, smaller, alliances, the most notable being Russia and Serbia. Russia was allied with Serbia because of their common Balkan background, and felt the need to protect the smaller, struggling country. These alliances made it impossible for a regional dispute to stay isolated, and not escalate.

When a disruption did occur it happened to be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The disruption that sparked war could have been any minor disagreement, the assassination just happened to occur at a time when it would cause much more than a small dispute.

Bosnia, a region in southern Austria-Hungary, wanted to become its own country. Serbia also wanted this freedom for the Bosnians. Bosnian nationalists saw, and took advantage of, their opportunity to strike at Austria-Hungary when Ferdinand announced his trip to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Assassins were recruited throughout Bosnia and Serbia, and were trained to kill the Archduke. These assassins were part of a terrorist group called the Black Hand. Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian-Serb, who one of these assassins. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary when he was killed.

This assassination caused a chain reaction of events that set off WWI. The Austria-Hungary government felt the assassination was a direct attack on them, from Serbia. They believed that the terrorists had been aided by the Serbian government, and put an ultimatum on Serbia. When this ultimatum was denied by Serbia, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. They began this war as a way of showing that terrorism would not be tolerated, and they also hoped it would inspire nationalism within the country. The government of Austria-Hungary just hadn’t expected on fighting against two countries.

This dispute would have only lead to a small war, if not for all the alliances. Russia had agreed to aid Serbia if you Austria-Hungary attacked, so when war was declared, Russia mobilized. The French wanted power over all of Europe and were allied with Russia, so they mobilized right away, as well. Germany, having had agreed to help Austria-Hungary in the case of war, then declared war on both Russia and France. Belgium originally hadn’t planned on joining the war until Germans invaded Belgium on their way into France. The chain reaction of European countries joining the war had began, and continued until almost all of the continent, and eventually other continents, were pulled into war due to various alliances.

World War I would never have grown to the size it became without all of the alliances. These made the war grow much more than it needed to, and the amount countries joining in, to defend their allies spiralled out of control. Without the many alliances World War I would have never occurred.