As some of you may or may not know, I live in a little Canadian city known as Vancouver. It’s pretty cool. We have snowy mountains, lush forests, and beautiful oceans. But more then that, we have a really rich history. In fact,  its this history that I’ve been studying in my class over the past month.

During our studies, my class has learned, specifically, about human rights and the evolution of human rights in the city of Vancouver. We also learned about the creation and evolution of Granville Street, located in downtown Vancouver, and the installation of the Sea bus, which runs between downtown Vancouver and the North Shore.

I have enjoyed  learning about the history of Vancouver and I now think it is important to learn about the history of your city or town. Knowing the history really helps you to appreciate where you live, as well as understand why your city or town looks and acts the way it does.

Once my class was introduced to Vancouver’s history, we where assigned a task. We split  into groups of three and were tasked to create a short, three-minute documentary about a historical place in Vancouver. The members of my group included me, Sam, and Kyle.

The documentary was a video and it had to include the following items:

1. Title (introducing our location)
2. Map of our location
3. Description of the site
4. History behind the name of the location
5. Some stories about the location
6. A bibliography

My group decided to focus our video on Vancouver’s Waterfront Station, located on the waterfront in downtown Vancouver.

We begin creating our documentary by doing some research on Waterfront Station. We were surprised to learn that it is known as the most hunted building in Vancouver. This was great news because it gave us a really interesting theme to steer the documentary around.

To create the images and videos we wanted,  we used photos from the internet as well as video we took when we went downtown and explored the station. One shot we wanted to secure was an arial view of the station. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a drone. But luckily there was a high car park right in front of the station which, when we climbed to the top of it, allowed us to get the shots we wanted.

Here’s the video that we eventually created:

This was a really good project that taught me about my city, its history and how to capture it in on video. I think this should be a project everyone in my school should do in order to learn about the city in which they live because, again, I think it is  important it is to learn about your city or town.