Hello friends, and welcome back to my blog. Another post means another adventure completed! This time, our destination was the beautiful capital of British Columbia— Victoria! Of course, visiting this place means that we’re learning about it, and before we get into the trip, I’ll talk a bit about why we went there in the first place. However, feel free to check out my video of Victoria first, it’s really the most interesting part of this project!

We began with a new unit called “the Wild Wild West.” But this isn’t the west that you’re thinking… no cowboy boots! We’re talking Western Canada here. More specifically, British Columbia, where I and many others live in harmony with the rain and trees. Our driving question this unit was, “How might we help visitors to Victoria connect with BC’s history?”
We began to learn about multiple happenings in British Columbia; the First Nations, the Cariboo gold rush, and especially the government. It began generally with the different governments in Canada: the federal, provincial and municipal. Our focus was the provincial government, and we learned about parliament, the important roles of individuals in the government, and more. This was mostly in preparation to visit the Parliament Buildings in Victoria, and even have a little question period with MLA Jane Thornthwaite.

On the other end of this project was the task of documenting our voyage to Victoria. We planned to make travel videos, in a sense. So, our research began with watching a lot of Rick Steves, who we all love very much.

After watching and taking notes on how some of the professionals do travel videos, we were each assigned a place that we were going to visit in Victoria— I chose to do Ross Bay Cemetery’s Emily Carr. We had to make videos about our chosen locations, similar to travel videos, but also informative about the history of these places and the history of British Columbia. Following a lot of research about Emily Carr, I was ready to plan my video. The aim was the advertise and encourage people to visit Victoria and its historical sites, while still educating them on the chosen site, hence our driving question, again “How might we help visitors to Victoria connect with BC’s history?
By this time, our research was finished and we were ready to embark on our journey throughout Victoria. Though I had to get up at 4:30am to be at the school at 5:15, it was still very exciting waking up ready to take the earliest ferry over to Victoria. It was my first time visiting the capital of BC, and all of this research on the interesting places we were going to visit resulted in rightful anticipation to actually visit them!

I won’t go too in-depth about every place that we visited, but I will highlight my filming location; Ross Bay Cemetery. I’ll also talk about the ups and downs of making this video. First of all, it’s harder to write a script for this kind of project because we don’t know exactly what we’re going to be filming. When I got to the cemetery, I decided to get a lot of B-Roll for my video, but the other thing is I had to go through how Emily Carr got to Ross Bay Cemetery, which required that I use a fair amount of images when I was describing what art schools she went to, her family life, etc. But I also didn’t want to be caught without enough footage of the actual cemetery, so I took a ton anyways. My filming partner was supposed to be Aedan, which means that he would have been filming any shots of me talking that I wanted to get. Unfortunately we had to change everything last minute because our trip to Fort Rodd Hill was cancelled, so Aedan ended up having to film at the cemetery too. It was also difficult with the time restraints, and we had to film everything pretty quickly. Luckily Lucy was free to film me, so I got all of the talking shots that I needed.
As we were returning home on the ferry, we had to hand in our first draft of the video… I wasn’t nearly ready! I didn’t have a title sequence yet, and some of the images I needed were missing due to a lack of good wifi. Luckily, I had gotten some pretty good voiceovers the night before, so I didn’t need to re-record any later on. I didn’t upload a version of this to YouTube, because it was a pretty rough draft and we were advised to just airdrop these videos to our teachers. This one uploaded to YouTube is a bit edited since the original first draft. 

After this draft, we had more time to revise and make another. I added in a title sequence with an animation, which I am pretty proud of. The problem with this draft is that it is wayyy too long. I had a 4 minute and 30 second video when I needed one 3-4 minutes. This was the most difficult revision— cutting off 30 seconds of my video! I shortened the introduction, and cut off some of the unnecessary and repetitive voiceovers. I also added a couple more animation bits to make it more interesting than still images.

The final draft and the 2nd draft I have here are fairly similar. I simply changed the ending to be less finicky with the audio, but other than that, they’re the same. If I was to change anything else, I would probably make the introduction more sophisticated, and add more animation.
Now that we’ve finally finished these revisions, it’s almost spring break and time to move on to the next unit. Victoria was an awesome field trip, and I’ve got a lot to learn from these travel videos. For any upcoming video projects, I want to improve on using the rule of thirds, which is making sure that points of focus are situated in shots in the right places. I also want to focus on having better B-Roll, as in more artistic angles and interesting shots instead of a bunch of landscape panning shots. I’m sure we’re going to have opportunities to act on our improvements in the Humanities projects to come!