History can seem like a boring and useless subject at school. Many people think along the line of “If it’s in the past, then why do I need to care?”, but let me tell you, it is as important to remember and know our history as it is to plan for the future. Everything from culture, to events, to family ties play a huge role in shaping how things are today and how we can learn from our mistakes. Yet, there is nothing more important in history than the very foundations of how the place you live, learn, and love in was formed. Ever since last year in sling, our class has been learning about Canada’s history, and have gotten to explore some amazing experiences about it. Are you someone who think’s history is boring? Well if so, then I will prove to you today why the past is not something to pass. I will share with you today the answer to our driving question: How do the stories of our history shape our identity’s today?
Our Learning
Now here is the part of history class that every student dreads; those long and tiresome lectures about some old guys in suits writing stuff on paper. Most people wouldn’t say that the content of history is particularly boring, but rather the way it’s taught is rather lacklustre. Our teacher Ms Maxwell however, has found some ways to make things a little more engaging. We started off last year learning about the first white people to explore the western world, and got to do the project of creating a comic about there adventures (If you want to know more about that – click here!). We then began the transition to the next year by learning about New France, the beginning of french colonization in Canada.
The year if grade 9 started off with a bang, for not even 2 weeks in we drove off to Calgary to follow the trail of the Canadian Pacific Railway. We got to stop off at the location of where the last railway spike was nailed into the track, completing it, a ghost town, a mountain pass, a glacier, and more. We also got to go to Drumheller and a science and art festival called Beakerhead in Calgary, which was extremely awesome (see more here!). Once we got back, we worked on a few other units such as our Frankenstuffie Project and our Metaphor Machines, and took a little break from Canadian History. But then in January, our Canadian History started up again with the introduction of a Heritage Minutes.
A scene from one of my favorite heritage minutes, Nitro
In order to educate, connect, and inspire Canadians, an organization known as Heritage Canada (click here to see an opportunity they gave me!) creates short yet powerful videos which each tell a tale from our history. This can be about a person, a place, or an event, and each one takes over 6 months of great dedication to create. No detail no matter how small is left out, and telling a good story never gets in the way of the facts. This, along with the behind the scenes effort that is put into every aspect of these videos, I felt was quite inspiring and made me more interested in our heritage.
The amazing amount of detail in the scene alone
Throughout this unit, We watched a number of heritage minutes and wrote down what their story was and what made them each unique from a video making point of view. We studied deep into how Canada was formed; the struggles, the hardship, and the resolve. We did unique activities such as playing web games that took us into the struggles of a Upper and Lower Canada, read some short stories, and even reenacted our own forming of confederation. Yet, nothing in this unit quite compared to our project, which is quite fitting after our exploration of heritage minutes, for it was to create our own.
From this unit, I came to see some answers to the driving question. One of these, is how our history can act as a blueprint for solving problems today. It is very rare that a problem is encountered that hasn’t been dealt with in some manner before throughout our history, so why try to reinvent the wheel when we could find the answers in the stories of our ancestors. Another way our history affects us today relates to my last point, and is that remembering our history is the only way to move to the future. What I mean by this is in history, there are conflicts of blood, horror, and destruction, which are sometimes glossed over in teachings. If we forget about these terror, then we may repeate them, and that’s why history is so crucial.
A picture which shows a metaphorical connection between past and future
The Project
The first thing that happened to kick start this project was we were divided into groups. I was put in a group with Owen, Jessie, and Lauren, and we were assigned to the topic of the Fur Trade. After this, we decided which smaller topic we wanted to focus on; the Beaver Wars. Now before you go questioning if beavers are capable enough to operate firearms, let me explain to you what the Beaver Wars actually were.
(Click here for a shocking truth that history teachers leave out)
During the Fur Trade, the beaver was nearly hunted to extinction in Lower Canada, and was known to be the most valuable kind of pelt during the time. Because of this, the Iroquois Confederation (specifically the Mohawk Tribe) decided to move northward for more territory and hunting grounds, and began to raid and destroy any settlements in their path. This sparked a conflict which lasted for over 40 years, and eventually settled in uneasy peace which was never fully settled. We chose this event for we felt it demonstrated the purpose of how violence was not the answer to conflict, and wanted that to be the main message of our video.
Now that we had our topic, it was time to start planning our story. We started off with an idea of a man looking back to the story of his great great grandfather fighting in a war against the Iroquois and having it in a typical war setting. However after further examination, we realized that the Beaver Wars were far from organized conflict, so we changed it to a man and his family running from a raid. After coming up with our story, it was time to transfer ideas into words in the form of a script.
To do this, we used the app Celtx to make professional looking scripts with settings, dialogue, and detailed descriptions. It was interesting to see how few words could say the most when it came to the message of a story. Once our script went through some refining, we were ready to move onto making a storyboard. To do this, we split the task throughout the group, with everyone doing a section from the script. I helped coordinate the camera angles and the audio for each scene, and helped with setting. Finally, after about a week of small tweaks to the script and storyboard, we were ready to get out there and film!
Our Video’s First Draft
We set up our filming location at Jessie’s house for it had a shack resembling that of those found in the 17th century and was surrounded by thick woods. We also used her Nikon Camera for most of the shots, with my iPad catching B-roll footage. Now in a lot of unprofessional made videos, you will typically see actors who do not fit the part either age wise or character wise, and we felt that that degrades the overall quality of the film. Because of this, we cast both Jessie’s Dad Greg and our siblings as children in our movie to get that authentic angle. Once it was time to actually get filming, I took on the role of director, seeing where everyone should stand and which area would be best for the scenes. Everyone else helped with things such as filming, lines, camera angles, etc.
Our Video’s Second Draft
We also decided that adding effects in editing would not look the best, so for the scene where a house needed to be on fire, so Jessie created a small model of the shack and burnt it, which really helped us later on with an ending scene. After filming was completed, we moved on to editing. Lauren did the base editing, with putting the clips in order, trimming them, and filtering them. It was my job later on to do the fine detail editing such as music, transitions, and sound, and then we were ready to present our first draft.
Our first rendition of our movie was received rather well when being watched by the class, but we still has some improvements to make. For our second draft we added French subtitles for the French section, and fixed some sound issues where it was out of sink with the scene. Then for our final draft, we cropped some scenes even more, reshot the audio of Lauren’s character, and added the outro made by Daniel.
Our final draft
Reflection
Overall, this project ran the smoothest of any of the group projects I have done in PLP so far. We had little filming complications, everyone got there jobs done well and efficiently, and we were all proud of our work after. I think this was because our personality’s really meshed well and made our work and product stronger because of it. It was also because we were so inclusive of ideas, and I made sure to support my teammates with what they came up with. As for filming, I think we should have stacked closer to our storyboard, for I feel it would have made our final product even stronger. Overall, I had fun with this project, and connected a lot with my group.