Building of a nation

Part 1

Confederation

In humanity’s 9 we have been learning about confederation and the people who made it happen, so I though I would give you a quick recap of what went on to unite this beautiful country!

Our story begins in the colonies of Canada, because at this point Canada was just a group of mini country’s and there leader was the queen of England. Now these colonies were covered in problems. Some had to many people, others had no money, some had access to ports, they also had a raging enemy just below them. All in all these groups were in need of change. They had parliament meetings but people could not meet at anything. The main reps were John. A. MacDonald, and George Brown.

These two men had it out for one another, and would never have joined forces without the help from George’s wife, Anne Brown. Anne told George that he was being silly and that there was more at stake than just his pride. Now the men were able to communicate and end the dreadful war between them. They were able to agree on confederation and the building of the railway. And all of a sudden a tiny tiny country was born. There were other colonies that would join confederation but at the beginning it was just Canada East, Canada West, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Our little Canada…

Part 2
Heritage Minutes

In humanity’s recently we have been making our own heritage minute videos. Heritage minute’s are minute long videos that pack a bunch of information on a topic. Our heritage minutes had to be on someone or something that was around at the same time of confederation and had a major effect on our society today. So my group, which consists of Kailey and Robin, decided to do our heritage minute on Anne Brown, the wife of George Brown, and a mother of confederation.

Anne Brown was a mother of confederation because she pushed her husband to become allies with John. A. Macdonald instead of enemy’s. And because of her work we have one country not two separate ones! Anyway after we had done the research on Anne Brown, we had to make a storyboard.

 

Our storyboard failed to show truly what our video would be about but it did help us figure out what to use to portray the story. After we had that down we needed to move on to figuring out a script, ( our first major deadline ) and filming logistics. Our plan for filming was to have the narration as Anne Brown reading the letter she was writing to George, and have clips of what she was talking about on the screen and once in a while flash back to the writing. We mostly stuck to the plan, but throughout filming we tweaked a few things. After we had planned all of the shots that we wanted we headed back to our script, to make sure it was ready to be in the film. We had had a rough draft of our script but now we needed something that would make the video clear and concise to the people watching. Kailey finalized the script and I was amazed, it sounded so good and fit the video perfectly. Now it was on me to edit the clips together, I tried my best to make the video fit to the standards, and I think I did ok! I made a first draft that did not have voice overs or music but it did have titles and all the shots were in place. It was 4 minutes.

I guess its better to have more shots, than less! But I knew it was going to be a tough job to cut down the video to 1 minute, so I got to work and it turned out that I was mostly wrong, it didn’t end up taking that much time and when I was done I was able to watch it and only have 1 minute go by not 5! So now we had to move on to voice overs. The voice overs were done by Kailey, since she was Anne. Our first draft of voice overs were a little crackly, so we put it as top priority to fix, because that day was our first showing to people out side of the class. We were showing the heritage minutes to Mr. Braum’s humanity’s 9 class. It was pretty stressful, and I was nervous to get the peoples opinions. Ms. Maxwell handed each person in the class 2 slips of paper that had some questions regarding the videos on on it, and what feedback they would give us. Our slips came back with really helpful feedback and it helped us to progress and adapt our video to the viewers!

We then had the weekend to fix and edit the video to bring it to a higher level of satisfaction. On Monday there was another due date, The Outro Competition. I dont know if you’ve ever watched a heritage minute but at the end of the video it will fade to some shots of other heritage minutes and then pop up with the logo and some information about the makers of the video. Historica Canada’s one goes like this

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Now that would be extremely hard to create for a group of kids in grade 9, but some kids were able to pull of a really good remake version. We had a vote on which one we liked the best and ended up picking Daniels. This is Daniels

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Pretty good huh! I was super happy at how professional it made our videos look, and much alike it was the the Historica Canada’s. Now that we had an outro we were practically finished. Just editing and fixing all the tiny things, the voice overs were redone, and sounded much much better, and we refilmed a few clips. The final product was sitting right in front of me and I am happy to say that I was proud of all the work that had been put in, and that it was all worth it in the long run. There were a few thing that could have been avoided, and I thought I would share some with you!

Part 3
Things that we learnt

Filming logistics. It is a very good idea to have knowledge of what your story is about, and how you plan on filming it, before heading out into the field and filming. Because when you don’t know what to do while filming it is just a waste of time. And knowing what your filming and where helps you to feel organized an on top of things. Our class did a sheet called filming logistics and it was very very helpful. I am definitely doing it for all of my filming projects!
Script. I think I have this problem every time that there is a script involved. I always write to much and in way to much detail, and then all of a sudden it’s impossible to edit down… Well anyways I did this again and it was hard for me to work with my script that was in such detail, so I had to spend extra time editing and revising, when I could have been planning for filming or maybe even watching TV! So when writing a script try to keep it to the most important things and keep it interesting!
Voice overs. This wasn’t that big of a problem for my group, but it would have been nice to have it perfect in the first draft. Things we learned from this were: – don’t record when there is movement around you, it just causes for crunchy noises. – only use the mic on your earbuds or an actual mic to record, if your just recording without either of these then there will be a lot more noise filtered in. – add emotion into your voiceovers, with out emotion it sounds like your just reading it off the paper, but with emotion it really feels like your there!

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I hope you like my video!

Till next time

Adlih

 

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