Brits, Booze, And Bribes

Since the turn of the new year, our Humanities has Class has been focused on “The Road to Confederation”; the process that the colonies took to unify and create the country of Canada just over 150 years ago. We started off by looking at Upper and Lower Canada, and how there was a massive divide between the economies. We learned that Lower Canada had a mainly French population, many of whom were poor farmers struggling to cope with the weak economy. Where as Upper Canada was made up of mostly upper class white men, many being British immigrants wanting to keep their money, power and economic class as they moved overseas to Britain’s newest colony.

Over this time we were also watching some of Historica Canada’s Heritage Minutes. This was to prepare us for the project pertaining to this unit. Our project was to create – in groups – our own Heritage Minutes. I believe there were five groups and each group was given a topic (ex. Fur Trade) from which they had to choose an event/person in Canadian History to make their Heritage Minute about. My group (Marshall, Kiefer, Alivia, and I) got Battles and Rebellions. We began to research battles and rebellions during the time period we were working with. It didn’t take long for us to decide our event; The Battle Of St. Eustache. Once the teacher approved us, we started to research deeper.

My Favourite Heritage Minute

There were many steps we had to take before even filming our Heritage Minute. We had to research, brainstorm, create a script, create a storyboard, etc. It felt like a lot of extra work at the time. As we were writing our storyboard I felt like our ideas were not feasible. For instance, we planned on having a shot of a church burning down! However, we just thought we would somehow figure it out, instead of doing what we should have done, which is think of ways around the problem. This is definitely something I learned from this project.

In total, we had three drafts of our Heritage Minute video. The first draft was better than I was expecting, but nothing I would have been proud to hand in. Me and Marshall weren’t even it as we had some miscommunication as to where/when we were filming but I think Kiefer did a good job with the editing.

Our second draft was a huge improvement in my opinion. Me and Marshall filmed our scenes so the video featured all of our group members, which was an important part of the criteria. I completely re-edited the video and did as much as I could with the clips we had. I added music, sound effects, transitions, panning, etc. It felt more like a proper Heritage Minute with all these extra elements. However, it wasn’t perfect, in fact, still extremely far from it, especially in my opinion. We got a lot of feedback and we took it all in and made changes.

Our third and final draft was obviously the best of the three, but as much as it pains me to say it, I’m not proud of it. It doesn’t feel like a real high quality video. The acting is subpar, I feel like I could have done more with the sound design, which sucks because after re-editing the video for the second draft I was pretty proud of what I did to it, but in the end it was hard to watch. Even though as a whole I don’t think we succeeded, individual parts of the project were really good. Alivia did a fantastic job on the script so she definitely deserves props for that, and it took a lot of time for me to create our storyboard despite it looking a little messy!

So after looking back on this unit and the project, I can definitively say that I learned some techniques to use in the future, and also some techniques not to use again. All in all this was a learning experience. We have only done a few group video projects in the past and honestly this was probably the best one yet, so I guess we are improving. This unit really opened my eyes in to how our beautiful country was formed, and has helped me to depict my own view on the idea of confederation and the debate about #Canada150. If this project was less acting and we had more creativity when it came to visuals, I think I would have both enjoyed more and succeeded in this project.