What Canada Means to Me

Canada is my home. It’s where I grew up, where my history is and where the majority of my relatives live. I proud to call it home and this is why I have recently submitted a video to Historic Canada. The task was to create a short video that explains what we love about Canada for Canada’s 150th birthday. The video will then be reviewed by the people at Historic Canada and then a winner will be chosen and granted a prize of $3000 and then showed as the representative of its birthday. Canada is such a huge part of who I am so I was very excited to get the opportunity to participate in this contest.

First we were asked to think of a category that we wanted the video to be about, for example: sports, food, history. I chose to focus on a lot of them instead of just one. One thing that I wanted to make sure I included, was the beauty of my home Deep Cove. I did this by filming and taking pictures when I went on a dog walk. Even though it was pouring rain, the beach and creeks were just as beautiful. In a way, the rain kind of set the mood for my video because of the serious and emotional topics. After all the filming was done, I needed to edit the clips and put them together with text and music. I used iMovie to edit and I added text with an app called Vont. I started by adding text to the video that said “My Canada is…” in the corner. This would set up an area for me to insert a word or phrase that explained some of Canada’s virtues. I tried to create the theme of a natural looking video, by making the text not as bold and giving it slow transitions. The only thing left to do was add music behind. I found a really slow but interesting clip of music from an Instagram video that I saved and added behind. So here I was, thinking I was finished and done and feeling super proud of my work. When the time came around to gain peer feedback, I was happy to hear that my video wasn’t that bad. The only problem was that I forgot to make sure that the music wasn’t copyrighted. Turns out it was, and unfortunately for me, I had edited the video so the clips were synced with the music. So I found some other non-copyrighted music and added that to the background. Even though the music isn’t as perfectly fit as before, it still can help add depth to my video.

Here is my finished product…

In my opinion, the strongest part of my video turned out to be the words. They may be a but fast, but overall they really do have meaning. When I chose a word to describe something I like about Canada, I didn’t go straight to actual things or stereotypes like maple syrup, or red and white. I chose to focus on words with a more deeper meaning like “Cultural” for example. These can mean many things to different people but I explained what they mean to me. Overall, I think that I gained a deeper knowledge of Canada and what it actually “Means to Me”. I had never thought about this before and I am glad that I actually got the opportunity to look back at how lucky I am to live in such an amazing place.