Hello!

Today I will be writing about my latest project in my Humanities and Maker classes. This is the final project of this quarter of the year. Lets go over the project. In this project we would make a new kind of video each week. This project was also my first ever project in PLP with 10 Milestones, each with the common goal of improving video skills, and learning about history and nationalism, The difference between the videos were the styles of them. Nationalism and history was the Humanities portion of the project, in this part we learned about history, mainly Canadian history, and the effect nationalism and history have on today. The Maker portion was all about expanding our video skills. Here was the driving question that we have been working on answering throughout the project: How can a understanding of Nationalism help us understand today?

we started out with an interview. Our task was to interview one of our parents to see what they know about Nationalism. My dad was a History minor in university so he knew a lot about this topic. Here is the video of me interviewing my dad about nationalism:

There were a few more video styles that we had worked on, there was a few common things throughout all of the videos. The first one being that all of the videos past the interview all had to do with continuity and change, nationalism, and historical events. I think I did a pretty good job with these things being incorporated into the videos I made, I think that I was pretty good at identifying the different historical events through the videos. A good example of this was in the Louis Riel documentary style video, where I think I did a good job with explaining all the different things that happened throughout his life. I think I did a good job with identifying nationalism in the video about British North America and the final video that we made which brought all the different videos that we made together, I think that an example of this was explaining the part that nationalism took within British North America. 

The videos were all explainer type videos but with a few variations. One of which being a animatic video, which was our second video that we made. I didn’t completely finish the video, but that is ok because now I know how much time I will need to give myself the next time. On the other hand I think that I did a good job with getting information about the Crimean War for my video. I think that it was really effective to start by reading sources from museums and historians. Then look into the specific events with articles that focus on a certain aspect. Here is the video I made:

The next section of learning in this project was about British North America. In this section we had to make another video. This time the video was a tutorial style video, but not a regular tutorial video, in this tutorial video we had to teach 2 different things. For this, we had to take something that we were already able to teach, and use metaphors from it to explain how the British North America Act happened. For this I chose to teach how to backflip since I have thought multiple people in the past how to do it. I think that in this video I did a really good job at improving on editing. I think it was challenging to only have videos from the past for demonstrations of the backflip. Despite the challenge it helped with knowing how to take any clip and cut it down to show just what you want it to show. something that I really improved on was showing things that stayed the same and changed. I think I improved by telling a story and then pointing out what changed and what stayed the same. I also think I improved on camera work. It really helped me to have a layout of all the different angles I wanted and try all of them out with different scenes to see what worked best. Here is the video that I made:

The next big video that we made was a video about the freedom fighter and founder of Manitoba Louis Riel. For this video we had to make a documentary of his life. I think that this part of the project was the most up and down part. Sometimes it was really hard, and others it was very easy. A good example of this is the research part. It was pretty easy to find reliable sources of information, one of the more challenging parts was understanding some of the information, some of the information was easy to understand and some of it was a little confusing. Something that was hard to do was putting all your information into a screenplay. It was hard to come up with all of the information that you needed to tell the story of his life. But after doing the screenplay it was easy to talk about his life. I think that I improved my vocal parts of the film, it was really helpful to actually follow the screenplay and not just look at it a few times and then simplify it when your in front of the camera. I think another way I showed improvement was with storytelling. I really think I showed a lot of information in a short period of time. The video wasn’t finished because of the change of mind of how we were just going to hand in our rough draft. Here is the video:

Now it is time to move onto the last video that we made. This video was a video that would tell all the stories of the other videos. We had a few options for how we would do the video. The first choice we had to make was wether we were doing this project as an individual or a partnership. I decided to go with the partner option because it motivates me more to finish my parts when I have someone relying on me. The partner that I was with was my friend Dries. The second choice was what kind of video we were going to make, as a team we decided to make an explainer video. I think that this video was overall a pretty easy video. It was really useful to have prior knowledge of everything that you had to incorporate. And the execution of the video was not too bad. I think that it really showed all the video skills that I had learned over this quarter. I think that I improved on few different things. The first one being the way that I wrote a script. Before I would just write cues of what to say, this made it hard to speak in an engaging way and it made it hard to say everything that I wanted in one take. then when I started to write out exactly what to say and enlarge the key words, it made the process take less time. I think another thing that I showed improvement on was the editing. I think that I showed this by making the cuts as clean as possible with as little set movement and body movement. I think that I also did a good job with filming on different days and making them look as similar as possible. Here is the video:

Now I will talk about the final part of the project. For this part we were tasked with showing our last video to the person that we interviewed in the beginning, which was my dad. Overall the video was pretty easy. No need to make any script or anything. It was just setting up a camera and showing them the video that you already made and tell them to show reaction to it. I think the hardest part about the video was doing the editing. It was hard to show all there reactions in the editing, especially because there reactions don’t make any sense without context so I had to keep in some extra parts before his reaction. Here is the video:

Now lets answer the driving question which is: How can a understanding of Nationalism Help us understand today? Here is my answer to this: I believe that a understanding of nationalism can help us build an understanding of today because the past tends to repeat itself and when we see the way it effected us in the past then we can identify Nationalism and understand what effects it has on today.