So after reading my title you are most likely very confused. I don’t blame you, I was trying to be creative. Anyways for our most recent project in humanities we made our very own heritage minute. Now if you’re a Canadian you most likely have seen one or two of these even if you didn’t realize it. Heritage minutes are sixty second long videos that each tell the story of a person, place, events, or thing that is a significant part to our Canadian identity today. Things such as responsible government, the Underground Railroad, Maurice “rocket” Rouchard, and so many more. Now before I dive into the specifics of making our own heritage minutes I would like to focus on a few of our stepping stones that we took on this learning journey.

At the beginning of each class we would watch one or two heritage minutes made by Historica and then analyze them. This was so we could start to find some common ground between each one and to work on identifying plot points. For many of the videos we watched we would discuss where the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and impact were. We also did a few simple question and answer sheets about the Act of Union and forming confederation. This is because our timeframe for this project was the 1800’s. So when we weren’t working on our videos we were learning about all the different things happening in Canada at that time. This is a mind map I made about Confederation.

Speaking about the non-video aspects of the project I think it’s time to show Short Story Tuesdays some love. Short Story Tuesdays is something we started in the beginning of the unit as a way to practice our story analyzing skills. We ended up reading three very different short stories and made little reviews for each. We read the Idyl of the Island, Pretty Like a White Boy, and The Moose Hide Gloves. My favourite was the pretty like a white boy because of the deeper meaning. This was about how your race somehow seems to define you without you wanting it too.

Now onto the actual project. I was in a group with Aedan, Fraser, and Anika with the theme of Arts and Culture for our heritage minute. With this theme we could do almost anything we wanted to. This makes it seem like choosing a topic would be easy but it was actually quite difficult to think about where to start. However I believe at some point early on in the process of brainstorming Fraser said something about sports, that’s when I thought why don’t we do hockey. After playing around with the idea with my group we decided to make our heritage minute on the Stanley Cup.

Making this, although it’s only a minute long, was not easy. We had to make a plot diagram, write a screenplay, make a storyboard and shot list, cast the roles, make/find the costumes, film, and edit. So yeah none of this was exactly easy. Now instead of going through every single phase and what we did, instead I will just talk about the key things I learned from each step and the project in general. I think our group’s biggest failure was in the shot list and setup. We hadn’t planned costumes for much and got some plain shirts from Mr Grant last minute. We also didn’t have many confirmed filming locations. In future groups I plan on making sure every little detail is known and were ready to film. We also didn’t realize in a storyboard that you had to write down how long each shot took. We ended up just filming from random angles for random amounts of times. But this project wasn’t all failures, or first attempts in learning as we like to call them. The whole class sent our videos to Historica Canada, the company that makes the real heritage minutes, to get some feedback. Sure enough Ryan Barnett and Joanne Archibald responded back and gave us great feedback. They really enjoyed it and were blown away by our filming and editing quality. Id like to thank them for taking some time to watch our videos as it really means a lot to us. The fact that high school students were able to produce our own heritage minutes, send them to the heritage minute company, and get nothing but compliments is so cool!

Personally the thing I think I best demonstrated in this project was my leadership abilities. I’ve always been a leader in school and people always say practice makes perfect. No I am not saying I was perfect because I wasn’t and perfect doesn’t exist. However, I think the dynamic in our group with me taking the role as leader/DRI and just in general was amazing. We didn’t get into one argument, we were constantly bouncing ideas off each other, and everyone seemed to be genuinely interested in the video we were making. We also all did fairly even shares of the work meaning no one did all of it and no one had no involvement. I hope to keep improving at my leadership skills to hopefully make all of my future groups go as smoothly as this one.