Hi everybody and welcome back to my last humanities post of grade 9, woop woop we made it. You’re probably confused as to why there is a question mark in my thumbnail. Well, it’s simple. You see World War I is often referred to as The Great War but, it was not that great. There was over 16 million casualties, cities were destroyed, quality food was scarce, and life in the trenches was horrid. I don’t know about you but it seems odd to call something so destructive great, whatever I’m getting sidetracked. This unit was about WWI which you have probably already guessed. The project was to make any style of video we wanted about a topic in WWI to present to grade 6 and 7 students. I know it’s a lot right? Well I’ll get into the process in just a few minutes, but first please enjoy my video about life on the Canadian Homefront.

Now this project was a little stressful as for practically the first two weeks of it, Ms Maxwell was away on the PLP 10 field study. While she was gone we did lots of daily lessons to actually learn about the war. We went over Sir Wilfred Laurier, Europe prior to WWI, how Canada entered the war, life on the battlefront, and my favourite, the domino effect. The domino effect is essentially following the track from a – z of how the war started. It was shocking for me to see how it snowballed so quickly and how irresponsible some people were. For the domino effect post we were supposed to make a video so I made a short whiteboard time-lapse of how it all started.

After making this video I went onto Wikipedia and followed exactly what happened in the beginning down to the detail of who declared war on who for what reason.

Now for my actual project. From pretty early on I had the idea of doing my video about the Canadian Homefront. I believe the reason why I was so interested in this was because this is what my life would be like in those times. If there were to be another big war how would my life work, how would it affect me? Anyways, Ms Maxwell liked my idea and so I started my Homefront research. I was very broad with my research as at that point I didn’t know exactly what I was going to focus in on. One thing that I didn’t know was how important women were back home. Although Kiera’s video was all about women I knew I really wanted to include some of that information into my video.

Next up in the process was writing the screenplay. At first I was confused as to why I had to write an entire screenplay just for a video of me talking. However after filming I am so happy that I was told today it because I would’ve been so lost and stressed without it. It directed me and it let me know exactly what each shot was. In fact even while I was filming I was changing the screenplay and working on it, because even though it didn’t need to be handed in again, when I made changes I wanted it to be on there. Although I’ve done screenplays before this project was the one where I really understood the importance of them and I think I learned how to write them properly. I’m pretty proud of the formatting and how it looks.

Finally the last stage before filming, the storyboard. Now with the storyboard I knew I had to male it clear on what my intentions were. I had told Ms Maxwell that I planned on filming in front of a green screen to show the pictures behind me. I could tell that I wasn’t explaining it very well so that’s where the storyboard came in. Although mine wasn’t very long and it didn’t show each shot, it did show that I knew how the video would run from beginning to end. I knew my story and I showed all the important green screen bits in the video.

Now in this project I got a little bit behind in some points as I had lots of work, I was sick for a 3 days, I had lots of other school projects, and I was lacking some motivation since it was so close to the end of the year. However, despite my little flunk I was still able to produce a video I’m proud of and two previous drafts to show where I started. Here is my very first draft of this project.

In my first draft there wasn’t actually too much wrong, except for one big thing. The length requirement for the video was 3-4 minutes, and my video was 5 minutes and 30 seconds. This needed to be cut down majorly. So for my next draft I took an entire mini topic out and shortened the introduction. I also fixed some green screen issues I had in the first one.

Now from here to the video at the top I just made the music a little louder and added my MLA citations in the description. When I showed this video to the kids at Cove Cliff most of them enjoyed it. All of them correctly answered some little quiz questions I’d prepared and they all seemed pretty engaged. One things if I could go back to the beginning of this project would’ve changed my video style. I chose to do a John Green style which is pretty much just standing in front of the screen and talking. When you travel to a place in person to show someone a video of you just talking it feels weird. I could’ve just talked to the kids for four minutes about my topic. I wish I made a stop motion video.

One thing I haven’t mentioned yet, but was a substantial part of this project was our novel study. I read Private Peaceful and found it quite interesting. At some points I was very shocked at the events that took place but I learned after that some pretty crazy things happened in the War. Each week our novel study groups would have a discussion and show the reflection we did for the week.

Once we finished the novel we were also given a small extra task to make a creative reflection of the book in general. I decided to make a soundtrack. This soundtrack consisted of four songs that I thought symbolised different sections in the book. This was super cool for me since I love music and being able to indetify mood and theme in more than just writing is a useful skill to have.

So from reading about my process and what this project meant to me, you can probably tell that this one was important. I’ve reached the end of grade 9 and all these video tools like storyboards and screenplays are all really starting to make sense to me. Sure I was in a bit of a flunk and was getting things in late, but that’s because I actually really cared about what I was producing. Everything we’ve worked on this year really came together and clicked for me. I see the importance in everything and I learned that it can be stressful and difficult but I’ll get through it. I hope you enjoyed learning about this project and more specifically why this project helped me grow as a learner.