This year in PLP 9, our big field study was an 8 day trip around Alberta, with a few stops in eastern B.C. We started the trip up in the Rocky Mountains, them went down into Calgary for a while with a day spent in Drumheller.

This trip was somewhat a video making boot camp as most of our projects this year will be videos, and we needed to learn how to make good ones. We were tasked with four videos to make on this trip, two in group, two individual. The biggest one was the identity Video.

Some of the other videos we made were the silent film video, the Royal tyrell museum video, and the enchanted forest video. I will start by talking about the silent film. The task was to create any genre of movie however it had to be an old silent film and w had to film in a ghost town. My group included Kyle, Sam, Amelia, and myself and immediately we knew we wanted to do some sort of horror or drama. Kyle really wanted to do horror however me and Amelia wanted to be very cheesy so we came to a compromise. We made our storyboard and then planned out our shots so that we would be ready to film as soon as we got to the ghost town.

Filming this video was super fun and I’m really happy with how it turned out!

The other video I want to talk about is the video we filmed in the enchanted forest. For this video we were tasked to make a video including at east three of the figures in this forest and make some sort of story out of it. My group included Nik, Gabby, and Jason. Our video was super fun to film and when I was given the clips to edit I couldn’t help but have a little bit of fun with it. I hope you enjoy this comedy.

Anyways, back to the idea of identity. To try and give some perspective of what identity is, I made a short book talking about the main things that make up my identity. I mainly just talk about how my topics can make an influence on someone’s identity and then specified a little about how it affected me personally.

My favourite days were the Drumheller day first, since I love dinosaurs and the day we spent in Banff, as I really enjoyed cave and basin, the lake cruise, and the delicious barbecue dinner. However, it’s not just the places we go that make these trips so good, it’s the people we go with. In the past year I’ve grown to see my plp classmates as my family, and they made Alberta so much fun. From Jackson slapping Kyle with a horse head, to Taylor fantasizing about greys anatomy, to Nik repeating the same joke over and over again, I couldn’t stop laughing.

Even though we had so much fun together this trip was not a vacation. We were working the whole time and constantly learning new things. For example we learned in drumheller that the badlands used to be flat and very similar to Florida. The climate was hot, there were palm trees, and rivers, but now the land is very rocky and has lots of cliffs and rock mounds. Each place taught me different unique things but one of the biggest ideas we were learning about was identity. At almost every stop I was started to notice more about people’s identities, which then led to me realizing more what mine was. Also we got a lot of practice at using our general skills such as problem solving, creative thinking, thoughtful questioning, and video making. Basically what I’m trying to say is that although we had a lot of great times in this trip our brains were growing and working hard.

Overall I really loved this trip and I was sad when it ended. But luckily Hughes accidentally revealed a trip to Victoria so I’m already looking forward to it.