In the immortal words of Dora, Hola mis amigos and welcome back. As you probably suspected the start of a new blog post means the finish of a project and this project would be so, many, videos. In actual fact this project is about the four videos we did on revolutions. In this project our driving question was how do ideas drive change? We were trying to show this in our four revolution videos as well as trying to achieve some of the other competencies. For each video we had a similar structure for how we created all of those videos, we made a screenplay, call sheet, storyboard, and then finish the filming and editing. (By the way my group members are Grace, Ciara, and Finn, enjoy the shout out guys.)

Cause and Consequence

The first competency was Cause and Consequence. This basically means in the case of a revolution what caused the revolution and what were the consequences of it. This was a tough one to learn at first because it’s sometimes hard to phrase exactly what happened in a revolution, and when you’re making your video you don’t think of the content first but you usually just think of what it’s going to look like. I think my group and I did a really good job of explaining this competency. In all of our videos we always made sure the state a few key causes and always talk on the important events that that happened because of the revolution. I think we showed it best in our American revolution video where are we clearly stated the key causes and consequences of the American revolution. We could’ve worked on it more as not all of our videos showed cause and consequence that well, but I think we definitely understood the competency and achieved it.

Evidence

Our second competency was Evidence. This is a bit of an awkward competency because not all of the videos I made used evidence. For some of the videos my group did entirely acting or clips of ourselves which meant we didn’t have to credit any sources or do a lot of extra research. But the one really good example of this was in our russian revolution video. For this video we chose a John green style video where we used a lot of images from the Internet. This meant as a group we had to find these images and credit them using them as evidence as to what we had learned. We could’ve definitely developed on this competency though. In our last video we did a lot of extra research because the revolution we covered was not one we had learned in class which meant we used a lot of sources to learn about it. Unfortunately no one in our group really kept track of what sources they were using so we didn’t credit them, which was definitely a mistake that we shouldn’t have made but I will remember for next time.

The app we should have used!

Create and Extend Shared Understanding

Our third competency was Create and Extend Shared Understanding. This competency was all about teamwork. Since we’ve been doing solo projects for the last couple months it was very strange to jump into a big group project and it definitely took some adjusting. It’s a lot harder having to agree on ideas as a group instead of me just getting to pick ideas for my own project. It’s also a bit harder to communicate because you have to keep track of your work and three other people’s work to make sure your group is moving together as a whole. There’s also the iffy issue of having to trust other people to get their work done because you’re not doing it all. As I said there was some adjusting. Once my team got our groove it started working out. Although we struggled in the first video to agree on rolls, assignments, and ideas in general we managed to figure it out as the project went on. The one thing I think my group should’ve done differently was try to use Basecamp more. It would’ve been so much easier to share documents and show Ms. Maxwell our progress if we had just used Basecamp. Instead things got confusing over text and we didn’t get feedback when we probably needed it. And I think we could have done much better if we had gotten feedback earlier.

Text Comprehension and Appreciation Strategies

Our final competency was Text Comprehension and Appreciation Strategies. For this the main thing we did was read the revolution book. This was a book about two girls one in the past and one in the present. The girl in the present is suffering from mental illness and the girl in the past is in the French revolution. This is where it tied into our project, because alongside reading the book we learned about the French revolution and several other revelations too. For this competency it was all about analyzing texts and learning to appreciate different things about them. I think I definitely showed this in my creative book reflection. My ability to look at the characters and create poems for what I thought they truly represented to me, definitely showed my ability to appreciate the authors writing and the messages she was trying to send with her characters. The other thing that I think showed my proficiency in this competency was my first revolution poem. It showed all the words that meant revolution to me and that was based off of the message that I taken from this book. I got the sense that the book is about the revolutions in history but also the revolution inside of you and what revolution can truly mean to each person. Whether it’s just a simple change in your life or a rehaul of your entire world revolution is a term for you and everyone has a different version of revolution to them. And that poem was my response and form of appreciation to that message, it talks about what revolution means to me and how it could be different for anyone.

“How do ideas drive change?”

Now that we’ve covered all the competencies let’s talk about the big question, no I’m not about to ask for your hand in marriage but I am going to talk about the other big question, How do ideas drive change? This question was really interesting to me. At first I had a very different answer to what I answered in the end. When I started this project I thought the driving question was just about the idea. The fact that the idea was different is what drove the change, but I don’t think that’s the case anymore. To me I think it’s not just ideas that Drive change, it’s the people. Absolutely anyone can have a good idea but not a lot of people can do things about this idea. I know so many people who have had so many cool ideas but they’ve just never done something about it. But in every single one of these revolutions it was the idea that started the revolution but it was the person who drove the revolution. All the people with these ideas decided to do something about it and it was them that truly drove the change. For example in all of the revolutions but we’ll choose the Russian revolution as an example, there was serious unrest in the people. All those people wanted change and they probably all had ideas for change but none of them did anything about it. It was only when Vladimir Lenin came along but things started to happen. He had ideas of course that were probably different to other peoples, but he generally acted on a collective idea of the people and made that change happen. I’m not sure if this theory applies to every single revolution but it for sure applied to the ones we learned about and I believe that it makes a lot of sense.

Our first video…

Video Skills

For the final part of this abnormally long reflection is a little bit about our video specifically. Let’s say the videos changed a lot over the course of the project. Our first video was very interesting. We were so focussed on having it look good that we ended up leaving out most of the content and not doing too well and forgot to share any information about the revolution. Luckily we learned over the course of the next couple videos and we managed to improve lots of things. We improved our videos by trying to use clips and footage that made sense, as well as trying to improve the content so that we could explain more clearly what happened in the revolution and the cause and consequence of it. It was definitely a tricky process and we had highs and lows, but in the end I think we really learned and improved our videos. If you watch our first video and our last video you will see a very drastic improvement in almost every part of it. Our last video is more interesting, shows cause and consequence much more effectively, and in general just has better footage that’s more themed to the video. I absolutely improved my video skills over this project and I certainly know a lot more about creating a video in a short time span.

Our final video..

Overall I feel like this project went extremely well. I definitely learned a lot and manage to have a little fun too. It was a good warm-up for getting back into group projects (in time for the exhibition), and definitely help me improve on my not only video skills but getting videos done under extreme time constraints and a lot of stress. I also found the topic of revolutions extremely fascinating and thought the driving question for this project was incredibly interesting to and I had fun answering it.

Anyways folks, this post has been far too long so…

Au revoir mes amis.

🄷🄾🄻🄻🅈