Well. We’re back.

Another year, another project, another blog post. So lets get into it.

This year what we started working on in PLP is a continuation of where we ended last year, with World War Two. And the main part of the war effort we focused on was in the United States of America. It is something both well known, and also very secretive to this day.

It is: the Manhattan Project. Our task was to create a short 5 minute film in groups of three or four describing 5 different facts about an aspect of the Manhattan project. We were to do lots of research and then use our highly developed script writing and video editing skills to create a peofessionalh looking video. I was in a group with Ethan and Parker. And this was our final product:

And if you want to find out the learning behind this, then keep reading and I’ll tell you all about it.

To kick off this unit, the first thing we did was really look into what the Manhattan project was. We all had a basic knowledge of the atomic bombs that were dropped on the Japanese at the end of WWII, but what we didn’t really know was how those bombs came to be. This, essentially, is the Manhattan project.

 

We needed to fully understand the ideas and goals of the Manhattan project to gain the historical perspective we needed in order to create our video. We studied the beginnings of the project, how America heard that Germany was developing their own atomic bomb research, and that America then jumped right into atomic research. There were three different sites that the American government needed for the atomic bomb creation. Each site needed to meet a specific set of criteria: they needed to be near a large source of water, have access to a lot of electricity and be in the middle of nowhere. The three sites were Hanford Washington, for the creation of the plutonium, Oak Ridge Tennessee was the home base and specialized in plutonium splitting, and finally Los Alamos, the site where they tested the bombs. This was the first bit of learning we did by reading articles and passages in different books, and conducting our own research. Something I found almost astounding was that the government just showed up one day to the farmers and families living on the Hanford area and said they had 30 days to pack up their stuff and leave. They were offered very little money for their property, and a lot of people were quite unhappy to leave their homes. Some went to court and fought for more house payment, and a few did succeed but it definetly wasn’t close to market value. This is a direct form of how the Manhattan project affected the lives of people near the project in any way. This was something I had a hard time picturing, but on the trip we did learn more in depth on that process. But, we still had a lot to learn before the trip begun.

Of course, we knew the final product of what was to happen. The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 90,000–146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 people in Nagasaki. This was devastating. While studying more about the Manhattan project, we did a mini project to help us get a better historical perspective on the times of World War Two. To do this, we were split up into groups of three or four and tasked with creating a short video called a Newsreel. This was to be set as if it was showing in American theatres a few days after the bombing in 1945. This was something that was the norm at the time, because there weren’t any televisions, so people would get the news about the war when they went to see a movie in the local theatre. So, we needed to watch a few newsreels and then create our own using footage we find that supports a script we write. Here is ours:

I enjoyed making this video. I was the “lucky person” to do the voice over, and it needed to be in a specific style, as you can hear. I tried to match with the real newsreels of the time by talking fast and in short bursts. I even used a voice filter in GarageBand to make my voice sound like an old phone. I don’t think I nailed the accent, but other than that I was happy with our end result.

Another mini project we did was to look into one person that worked or was associated with the Manhattan project, and then create a character card for that person. This was so we could learn about all the different roles and responsibilities of the many many workers in the project. I decided to research a guy named Samuel Goudsmit, who was a physicist and the head of the top secret Alsos Mission.

His parents were Nazi concentration camp victims, but he was an aspiring physicist who ended up working for the American government. His job was to be on the Alsos Mission, a Mission that would be constantly watching, spying and monitoring the progress of the Germans attempts to create an atomic bomb. He even wrote a book about his experience where he says that the Germans were not close to having a working atomic bomb.

But let’s get back to the video. Before we even went on our trip we were to create a really rough draft of our video. Most of the footage would be us when we are on the trip, but in the rough draft we would just have our script recorded, background music ready, and indicate where different clips, interviews and photos would be. I think this stage actually helped me more than I thought at first because it really put what we were going to create into a product that I could see and visualize rather than just think about. I could figure out timing, and where ideal spots for interviews would be.

After this, we embarked on our trip. Four days in Oregon with 17 students and two teachers. It was a lot of fun, I have a post about it here if you would like to find out more about it.

And once we returned, we began editing and putting all the shots and even more knowledge we gained on the trip into our video. And after a few sets of peer and teacher critique, me, Ethan and Parker ended up with the video you saw at the top. I’m extremely happy with the end result, as I put a lot of hours of hard work into it, and I’m glad to see how it turned out. I actually tried a different app for this video other than regular iMovie, and it was awesome. It’s called EnlightVideoleap and you can get it on the App Store for free.

 

Well, that’s all for this post.

 

See you