My Home And Native Land
If you’re not from Canada your answer to the following question will most likely be “Maple syrup, hockey, and igloos”, but for those of you who are, do me a favour. Ask yourself “What does Canada mean to me?” Freedom, nature, expensive housing? It’s different for almost everyone. When it comes down to it though, the truth is, we have it pretty good up here.
Recently, a group of people from Historica Canada visited our classroom to tell us about a neat little contest they had cooked up. Blatantly put, here’s the task. Film a 30 second video describing what Canada means to you, that’s it. At first it seems like no problem. I thought it would be super easy to come up with something. However, the deeper I got the quicker I realized that Canada meant more than I could think of off the top of my head.
I eventually decided what Canada meant to me; Freedom. I thought of this because I realized that I’ve never felt worried or confined to doing any one thing. Especially seeing what some of the world is dealing with right now, I feel extremely grateful to live in a place where I never have to think if something I love is going to be taken away from me. After this, I went even deeper and decided to combine the whole freedom thing with snowboarding, and then it hit me, snowboarding is freedom.
Whenever I go snowboarding I can forget about whatever happened in my day, I’m free. It’s my time to let go of reality and just chill. It’s so nice to be able to go up with friends, because I spend so much time with them at school, when there is work to be done, and you are stressing. When you’re snowboarding though, you are with them, but you just get to discard all of that and have fun together, that’s when I love snowboarding the most.
I decided to film my video over Spring Break, that way I would have enough time to get the shots I needed without having to rush anything. I had originally planned to film in Sun Peaks while I was there on a little vacation. Though when I got there I realized pretty quick I wouldn’t be able to get the shots I wanted. I didn’t know the mountain and truthfully, I wanted to just spend some quality time with my family. However, I then decided to just film when I got home. This idea in itself speaks to how lucky I am to live where I do. To be able to have the freedom to just go up the mountain for a few hours to film is something special for sure.
The week I got back I got all the footage I needed to make the video, so I got to work right away. The video had to be completely copyright free, so as soon as we were assigned this project I found royalty-free music so I would have an engaging video. The video took about two hours to edit including music, and titles. The apps I used were iMovie, Vont, Documents (to download the music), and Hyperlapse.
I really enjoyed this project. I had really been hoping for a video project for a while and this came along at the perfect time to satisfy my needs. I don’t expect to win, but I am quite proud of myself for what I accomplished. Shoutout to Calum O. and his brother Liam for helping me film.
Video Below (Please leave me a vote!)
danielw • March 28, 2017