Recently, the PLP 9s went on a field study to Alberta. But that’s not really what this blog post is about. If you want to know more about that, check it out here! So what is this post for then? Well, on this trip, we had to make 3 videos and one more after we got back. So lets start with the first one.
Silent video
Before we left, we made a plan for the storyline in our groups. We would be filming at the ghost town at the Three Valley Gap hotel (It’s a great place that people alway drive by, but almost never stop at.). Our plan was to film in the saloon, but upon arrival, we realized that most of the saloon was blocked off by ‘jail cell bars’. We wandered around the ghost town for other places with a similar setup, but didn’t find anything…
UNTIL, we went into the roundhouse, and noticed some fancy trains that we could go inside. With some clever editing by Caelum (See his blog here), we made it look like we were in the saloon, even if we were only in a fancy train car.
Watch it for yourself here!
(Here is the link to Ryan’s blog. I can’t add links in drop-downs 🤦♂️)
Tik Tok style video
For this video, I used a Tik Tok trend to make a short video. I had a plan to do a cool transitions video showing all the places we went to, but I quickly realized it wasn’t going to work and I needed to adapt. After looking at pictures of the places we’d visit, I was exited to go to the Athabasca Glacier at the Columbia Icefield. But when we got there, there was a ton of snow and clouds, and I could barely see my hand in front of my face. So I made a Tik Tok vs. Reality video about my experience comparing the beauty in the videos and the fog that I saw. Here it is!
Investigative video
This video was made to answer the driving question in humanities, “How has the geography of the west shaped who we are?”, and you can see more about that here! In this video, I interviewed people that I met on the trip, to confirm my thesis: “The grand beauty of the Rocky Mountains improves peoples mental and physical well-being”. Check it out here!
At Home video (What inspires me video)
This is the video I made after getting back from the trip, and it’s the one I’m most proud of by far. For this video, I really wanted to show ‘Me’. I really like music, and I had done two other song parody’s for school assignments/applications in the past, so this idea was perfect. The first step was to decide which song to use. I was trying to find some alternative lyrics that went very well with the original lyrics of some of my favourite songs. I came up with lots of ideas, and eventually decided on “Wake me up” by Avicii (RIP). Then, I had to make lyrics for the rest of the song. The next step was to actually record the audio. The singing was pretty quick and easy, but getting the background music was the real challenge. I couldn’t just use the original song because having two sets of lyrics fighting to be heard wouldn’t sound good. I found an instrumental version of the song on a website called X-minus (Link to it here). Then I gathered some video clips, and used Keynote to animate a few of them. After putting it all together in IMovie, here’s the final result:
Thanks for reading!