This past week, our class was assigned to create a short video about a location in Vancouver and figure out the history behind it. The project was called the “Namesake” project, and with Adam and Kate, we created a video about Kitsilano. Kitsilano has gone through massive changes over the past century, and before diving into this project, I had known almost nothing about Kitsliano or where the name came from. After doing this project, I now know more about Kitsilano and it’s history and why it is such an iconic place in Vancouver.
To begin the project, we started to compile some research about Kitsilano. The name Kistsliano was named after a First Nations chief who lived in the area. The spelling of his name was actually “Khatsahlano” but for some reason, it is now spelled without the H’s and A’s. Itmwould be much harder to pronounce his name anyway, so I think it was better off they had change dit anyway. The area of Kitsilano is located near the downtown peninsula and is home to a numerous amount of beaches and the tourist hotspot known as Granville Island.
One of the other things we had to add in our video was a myth or interesting fact about the place. Kitsilano was one of the many hotbeds for the hippie culture around Vancouver in the mid 1980’s. Constant parties would happen in and around the streets as well as on the beaches. Kitsilano was a huge part of the hippie culture that hit Vancouver, and is one of its more iconic moments.
To start out our video, I compiled a few time lapses and short clips for an introduction on Kitsilano, then began reciting our script and recording it into the movie. I created a few Explain Everything clips to help showcase our knowledge of Kitsilano using videos. Our video was meant to be a fast paced, short clip video, with lots of cuts and edits throughout. I managed to do this, and I thought the video was great, unfortunately some of it didn’t go so well.
When we presented our video to the class, many of the pictures didn’t show up. It just portrayed as a black screen. This got our teacher to think we were lazy and didn’t do anything about it, but when we told her to re-watch it on her iPad, the pictures came back up. Turns out, the video was a little fast paced and hard to understand. This was one of the things our group revised. Another thing was some of the script was ‘innapropriate’. What I mean by that is instead of Adam saying “A First Nations chief,” he pronounced it “Some First Nations chief.” I didn’t notice it until I re-watched the film after our teacher critiqued, but I realized it was pretty innapropriate and not very kind towards the First Nations people. We changed that too, and our final product turned out much better than our first.
Video
In the end, this was a pretty fun mini assignment. Because of this project, I now know a lot more about Kitsilano. I go to Kitsilano quite often for sports, so now that I know a little bit of backstory and some cool facts about the area, that’s pretty cool.