Hello everyone,
It’s been awhile since my last post. No I’m not done with the blog, I have just been taking other classes. The last month has been filled with lots of learning and work. We have been studying WWI and an artifact and telling the story of these with the personal story of a soldier.
Making the final video involved a lot of time, hard work and revisions. We began with being introduced to the project and our artifacts. My artifact was the Canadian War Photos. The creation of any video has to begin with information and ideas. How do you obtain these? Through research, we used the Canadian war archives to find soldiers to add to our videos. We also took deeper dives into are artifacts. One particular activity which helped me was a video call with a curator from the Canadian War Museum named Jocelyn. After researching you must gather media such as photos, videos and audio. All photos and videos of WWI are copyright free so that was very helpful. After this we have to began creating our first draft. For me this was inputting some general photo and video clips over my first draft of my script. Finally we move into revisions. I found these very helpful as it gave me time to see what I could improve in my videos. Through both peer and teacher feedback.
If you’ve watched my videos you already know about my artifact. Some key facts are that it was sent to seycove by the Canadian War Museum. It was one of 8,000 taken by professional photographers during the War. The most useful resource for learning about these was our call with Jocelyn the War Museum curator. I learned more about how the photos were acquired, as well as how they were used during the war.
If you haven’t watched my video by this point in the post I would strongly recommend it. The video provides a lot of key information needed to understand this post.
After watching my video you may be wondering why I chose my soldier. Frank Oxley Button happens to be my great-great-grandfather. All the information about him after the war came from my Grandmother and my Great aunt. They were both extremely helpful in the creation of this video and I would like to thank them. If you would like to check out Frank’s war file you can find it here.
Below here lies the competencies we were assessed on for this project.
This competency is all about communication. I think my best example of this competency was my final video. I feel like it used technology to communicate in a creative and meaningful way. I do feel that all video drafts helped me perfect this competency.
This competency was all about us exploring the historical significance of our artifacts and soldiers. These are the parts of this project I feel I demonstrated this competency the best. When I first researched our artifacts and soldiers. In addition to my screenplay.
Throughout the duration of this project I learned so much! This learning includes both skills and knowledge. Some of the areas I feel I improved the most were video skills, and an understanding of how the war shaped Canada. One area I could still work on would be my time management skill as I often find myself finishing work the night before. After taking all this into consideration I now feel prepared to answer the driving question. “How might we use artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI?” This Project taught me that by exploring past footage and photos we can discover the significance of an event. Additionally we can connect the past to the present and hopefully have a better idea of why the world is what it is today.