How many Bosnians does it take to start WWI? The answer? Seven. Five to do nothing, one to have bad aim, and one to kill Franz Ferdinand.
We just finished another project in PLP, and this one was about nationalism before World War One. We started by choosing what country’s nationalism we’d be focusing on, and I chose Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before this project, I barely knew anything about Bosnia and Herzegovina. I knew that it exists, but I had no idea how big it is, where it is, or even how to pronounce Herzegovina (Hur-suh-gov-een-ah).
The final goal of this project was to create an informative YouTube video on our case studies. This was a fairly short project with not very many steps until the final video. One of the things we did before making the video was watch other YouTube videos about nationalism from creators like Heimler’s History, and Crash Course. We watched these videos not for their content, but to learn about how to format our videos and make them interesting to the viewer.
Okay, it’s time to start working our videos. I started by writing some questions that I wanted to answer about Bosnian nationalism. I knew that Bosnia and Herzegovina only became a country in 1992, so one of my questions was “What was the area of present day Bosnia called before WWI?”, and another was “How did Bosnia and Herzegovina gain independence?”. After a quick google search, I concluded that Bosnia and Herzegovina were provinces in Austria Hungary before WWI, and were a part of Yugoslavia between the end of WWI and 1992. Some of my other questions were “Where were the region borders in Austria Hungary?” and “Why were Bosnians important during WWI?”.
Now that I have my questions, I needed to answer them. It took a lot of research but I finally had the necessary understanding that I needed to make my video. I started by planning my video in a graphic organizer with a general idea of what I’ll say in each shot, and the visuals that will be on screen. It was time to write my script. This was the hard part. I went though multiple editions, but I didn’t really like any of them. Eventually, I settled on something I was happy with, and started filming. The filming process was very easy and, even though I tripped on my words enough to make an entire bloopers video (That you can watch here), I got it done quickly. The editing was also very easy, and using some new skills and techniques that I learnt in the Rise of the Frankenstuffies project, I also finished that pretty fast.
So, do you think that overall, nationalism is a good or a bad thing?