What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas eh? Well apparently not because we had to document everything! And on that note most of the things I documented I couldn’t find a way to use. This was because I changed my driving question more than the origin story of back in Calgary. Now despite how it sounds it wasn’t all because of me, it doesn’t help when your teacher tells you to scrap your idea a day before you leave! But I digress. You didn’t come here for a rant, you came to learn about the Atomic City.
The start of this roller coaster ride begins with the dawn of our Cold War unit. We already new a bit about a circumstance like this because of all the tension in our previous MacBeth project. But it was time to learn about the historical side of this type of situation. This unit covered everything from the end of the Second World War to the modern day impacts of its legacy. I have to say upfront, I did find this project interesting. It is a fascinating time period with many holes that your imagination can fill. This is probably the reason it is a popular setting for many major motion pictures. From heart wrenching animated films like the Iron Giant, to what if scenarios in alternate universes like Watchmen, the mind has a funny way of exemplifying the truth. But the movie I made isn’t about the fictional retelling of a historical scenario, it’s about the historical scenario itself.
My first question came about after watching a video about Kinetic Bombardment Satellites. They were invented because of a UN treaty stating that no nuclear arms are aloud in space as it is neutral territory, so they made a way around it. It got me thinking “what nuclear weapons were they going to put in space before the treaty?” So I decided to base my question around that. It was good at first but a day before we left for Tucson Mr. Hughes and Ms. Willemse told me that I should change my question due to the lack of information I would find on the trip. Over the next few days I hastily put together a question but the problem was that it was so complex that most people couldn’t answer it. But I got some good footage of experts talking about mutually assured destruction because that’s what they ended up talking about when they didn’t understand the question.
But enough about the background, you came here for my movie! (I yell into an empty room) Now I’m very proud of the film I made, the problem is that it fell into Flight Fever. That’s one of the things I don’t like about PLP, don’t get me wrong I love PLP and I would never go back to regular English and Socials but it does have its flaws. For example there are projects I think could have been done better like the debate. Some of the groups seemed pretty stacked and most of the topics were one sided but I’ll get into that in my next post. The point is there’s those kinds of projects and there’s this kind of project. I know my movie wasn’t perfect, it was a bit to loud at times, I could have talked more about the transition from people blatantly trusting the government to not trusting it at all, or that people who spent thousands of dollars on bunkers should have just bought a plane ticket to Australia because a bunker would save them from nuclear winter, and I would gladly have spent another 5 hours fixing all this on top of the 15 I spent in the first place if people cared. My video has 14 views and 11 of them are from me trying to get people to watch it. I tried to get critique from people but why should they care about my movie if they don’t care about their own. The person who actually gave me the best critique was Mr. Crowe. He looked at my first draft and though it was awesome and brainstormed ideas with me about how I could make it even better. Then when I brought him my second draft he was excited to see what I had changed. He wasn’t on his phone or talking to somebody well watching it, he just watched and enjoyed.
I think if everyone felt the same about this project it would have been different. Quality would have been better, I would have done my third draft, and even this blogpost would have been in on time if people cared, but they didn’t. Well, I may as well put my film up here, maybe it will get up to 16 views, or 17 views, or a staggering 18 views.