Welcome to the b l o g  p o s t of the century. Today we will be talking about how power alters relationships between individuals and society. We will talk about the story of Louis Riel, John Franklin, animations, and much more.

Part l | The Book

Throughout this whole project we read a book about Louis Riel. Louis Riel was a great story where the power got passed around many times, this made it perfect for this project. Louis is also partly responsible for CPR and the formulation of Canada, but more importantly the Métis and French rights. Instead of explaining everything that happened in this book I will put some summaries of it below. The book was split into four parts, and for each part we had to make a summary. At the beginning I was making my summaries waaayyyy to big, but throughout all of the summaries I feel I have gotten better at focusing on the main points and identifying what the important parts that impact the story are. Anyways, below are my summaries of the book. Read if you’d like, although there are spoilers.

Part 2 | The debate

This part was actually later on in the unit (at the end), but I thought this would be a good place to put it since I just talked a little about Riel. Through his time Riel did some crazy things that some people think were heroic, but others think were bad. A perfect example is the execution of Thomas Scott who some thought was murdered by Riel for no reason. It’s an ongoing debate to this day whether Riel was a hero or a villain. Mrs Maxwell had us put into two sides for a debate. I got put on the side that was trying to say Riel was a villain. I thought the debate was a great experience, but it did get a little heated (we should have won). The other side rooting for Riel being a hero won even though Mrs Maxwell said it was tied going into the ending statement. Not to throw Emerson under the bus, but during his final statement for there side he was like ‘wait what.. I don’t know what I’m talking about’ and somehow won with that. Anyways it was a great debate and it was fun hearing both sides and seeing how people’s power can be seen in different ways.

Part 3 | John Franklin – The Research

Now this is the main project we have been working on. We got to choose a leader from before confederation 1867 and create an animation about one of his adventures and about his power. I chose John Franklin because he had some interesting stories about his adventures discovering the NorthWest passage. This first bit of the project took a while, the research. Below is my research after about a week or two on John Franklin. In it is all about his expedition I wanted to animate and some ideas for the animation itself.

Part 4 | John Franklin – The Animation

For my animation I had a different vision than most of my peers. Most people were doing an animation on their IPads that was all drawn out. I’m not the biggest fan of drawing and I always wanted to do something a YouTuber Dan Mace was doing. I did a style of stop motion where you have cutouts and move them around frame by frame. I also made my script for the voiceover in a first person view. The first thing we did was create a script and storyboard. My storyboard was rather rough, but it helped guide me when shooting. I decided to make the animation about his final exploration to discover the final 500 km of unexplored arctic coastline in the NorthWest passage. Anyways below is a piece of my storyboard and my script.

Since I had now planned out my animation, it was time to start shooting. It took a little while, but frame by frame I got it done. After a few drafts I had my final project. I added music, polished up the voiceovers, and had a more understandable ending. Here’s my film.

This was a great project and I touched upon some very important curricular competencies including listening and understanding my classmates views with empathy. Comprehending written text, such as Riel, using different strategies. Making an ethical judgement on the people of power we learnt about. And of course using technology to create an innovative design, my animation. That’s all for this post!

Until next time… Aedan Loughran