Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on my portfolio! You’ll be seeing quite a few posts coming in soon as the end of my grade 11 year is coming to an end (what’s the end of the year without a mad rush to get work handed in?). Anyways, for this post, I am going to be taking a look at our Cold War unit from this last term, and reflecting on what I have learned, from atomic bomb detonations, to Las Vegas Mobsters.

The unit began in March, where we were introduced to our topic question; “How is fear used as a defensive, political, and cultural tool?”. I knew that we were analyzing the Cold War and I also knew that we were venturing down to Las Vegas in April, but what I didn’t know, and what our teachers didn’t tell us until much later, was that we would be making a Visual Essay that told an intriguing story about something to do with Las Vegas and the Cold War era. But not only were we creating a movie, we were writing a major essay beforehand that we would be converting into our movie! If you think it sounds easy, then it was harder than it sounded. And if you think that’s hard, then imagine something even more difficult! We had to chose to either work individually or in partners, and since Alanah and I were both going on the trip and have a similar work ethic, we decided we would work as a team!

As we began studying the end of WWII and the Cold War in class, by watching movies as well as listening to Hughes’ note taking lessons (don’t worry Hughes, I listened intently), we made continuous notes and generated ideas for what we could base our movie on. Before leaving for our 7 day Tucson, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada trip, we had to make sure we had a plan of what we needed to film, what the point of our visual essay was, and had to have a solid path we were going to take with it. And of course I believed that I had everything laid out properly and ready for the trip, and of course these things never go according to plan!

Alanah and I thought we had a solid direction for our movie, which was “How does Las Vegas thrive as a city, while it faces limited resources and its exposure to harsh climates?”. We thought it was pretty solid, and we got it approved by our teachers as our thesis question. But when we arrived in Las Vegas (because our work didn’t begin until then as our topic was based in Nevada), we realized we needed a new topic, because to be honest, we weren’t interested in what we were talking about at all. We needed something that we were excited to talk about and learn more about, so we came up with the ideas of “How was atomic and nuclear energy promoted to the public in the 1950’s to instil security rather than fear?” And “How did the perception of atomic and nuclear weapons transition from security to fear, after the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”. After we agreed that atomic culture was something we both were happy to research, we finalized our thesis to “How did the era of atomic and nuclear weapons and energy cause a cultural boom?”.

As we began constructing our ideas for this new topic, Mr Hughes showed us a video essay sample that gave us a taste of the level of excellence he expected from us, and I was super impressed. I wanted our movie to be just as great. In the sample, a common innocent banana was used to emphasize the horrors of the industries behind it, and this all tied together to give us an interesting and eye opening short movie. So taking this idea, Alanah and I put a spin on our thesis and asked ourselves the question “How did Miss Atomic Bomb, a major icon of the atomic era in the 1950’s, cause a cultural boom, in Las Vegas, and around the world?”. So we began to write our essay: The first step to completing our final project!

Alanah and I wrote efficiently and easily together and came up with our essay within the time frame, and it was a piece that I think we were both very proud of! I contributed some great ideas in my own writing style, while Alanah did the same, and it all worked out great.

Once our essay was approved and edited, we could finally begin constructing our movie, from the clips we captured on our trip, and the world at our fingertips (also known as the internet if you didn’t catch on). We began by breaking our essay up into the intro, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion, and laid it out on a storyboard. Afterwards, we marked up our essay on Notability, explaining what we wanted our visuals to be for each different thing we were going to say. After many long nights working on putting our visual essay altogether, and many rounds of critique, we handed in our first essay draft, and it turned out to be one of the best in the class (according to Ms. Willemse). Even so, there were still plenty of things to fix up, such as our visuals, our conclusion, and voice overs. After raking through our movie multiple times after the feedback, we handed in our final draft, and I think i could name it my best piece of work from the year!