Welcome back! Today I will be talking about a 6 week long project that I have been working on. In school, we were studying revolutions and in groups, we made 4 videos of our choice. We were doing this project in order to answer the driving question: How do ideas drive change? In the end, I decided that this was due to a persons personal experience. The first 3 videos were about the French, American, and Russian revolutions. We chose what kind of video we wanted to make with our group. I got to work with an amazing group consisting of Asha, Ally, Liam, and I. We got a week to make these videos. The 4th and final video was completely free choice. We got to chose the revolution and the kind of video that we wanted to make. In the end we decided to do the Meiji revolution with a John Green (crash course) style video that included animations.

The 4th video:

So why were learning about revolutions through video making? Well first of all, it’s really fun! Although there were times where, just like in most group projects, there were disagreements, we were able to make the most of it and have fun along the way. From this project I really took away the fact that in all of the revolutions that we were researching, the rich were always belittling the poor. It makes me think about how money can corrupt people with greed. This got me thinking about how these peoples actions can be put to blame for a lot of the events. The main person held responsible is always the one in charge, usually the king. However, you can also debate the fact that, that’s just what they were taught. In the end though, revolutions don’t happen unless there is someone who decides to do something.

The 1st video:

https://youtu.be/5eH-0WCYYds

The first video that we did was kind of like a tester video. We were trying to figure out what we needed to know and express in our video. This means that we were trying to figure out the information that we needed and convey it in a way that all types of audiences could enjoy. Then once we started to figure out what information we needed, we then needed to know what the visuals would be. That was our main goal in our second video. We didn’t get the audio to match with what was on the screen so it looked really weird and didn’t make a lot of since.

The 2nd video:

By the time we started to understand the process of making the actual videos we were able to get a fairly good understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We understood that there were people who were really good at editing, others who were comfortable on screen, and so on. Once we understood this we were able to play to each other’s strengths in order to create our video. This made the 3rd video that we created, my favourite video to create. I was in charge of helping with animations, and I worked on the call sheet and helped with the storyboard. Because these were all things that I liked to do it was a really fun experience. We were able to add comedy and over all I think that the video itself was pretty good. Not to say that it didn’t require improvement, but it defiantly on of our better works.

The 3rd video:

https://youtu.be/_fIAvm0tbs0

While we were working on these videos, we were also reading a book called “revolution” by Jennifer Donally. It’s a story about a teenage girl named Andi who is having a lot of internal conflicts due to the fact that her brother passed away, and she blames herself. To make matters worse, she is failing school and has a senior thesis that she needs to work on. Her father, a famous scientist, is fed up with Andi’s grades and takes her to Paris in order for her to finish her Thesis. She ends up finding a diary belonging to a girl during the French Revolution. From reading the book she is able to resolve some of her internal conflicts and meets a lot of interesting people along the way. I would recommend this book to people who like history, fantasy, drama or all of the above. I personally have very mixed feelings on the book. There were some really interesting points and perspectives in the book and I thought that the way that the author wrote the book made it relatable yet kept the reader intrigued and engaged. However, there were also some parts in the book that served as red flags for me. There were a lot of unanswered questions that I had upon finishing the book, which is something that I don’t enjoy. While we were reading this book, we were also tasked with book chat assignments. These were small tasks that helped us stay on top of reading and helped deepen our understanding of the book.

In the end from this project I learned that I am really good at using animations and in some cases taking an active role in leading. I can work on the quality of our videos, and I think that I could have stepped up more for the editing. Finally I think that ideas drive change because of a persons circumstance. This can be shown in the revolutions that we were researching. People decided to change because there was something that they didn’t like. They can me up with an idea to make that change happen, and then they took action. Now, the idea itself will be different with each problem and the extremity of the action also depends on perspective. However, you can see that this pattern is shown throughout many examples in history, things in your personal life, things other people (like inspirational speakers) say, and especially in revolutions.