Hello blog readers welcome to another…………..humanities blog post. In this recent unit we took a journey back to 1939 and learned about World War II. We were split into three groups, each with a book telling the story of survivors of WWII. My group consisted of Ruby, Kiyaan, and Fraser and we read the book Maus. In this book we learn about the author’s jewish father who went all over Poland in hopes of surviving the horrendous holocaust. It was awful learning about the state the world was in at that time and it really opened my eyes to the brutality of WWII. Our driving question was “How can stories of survival deepen our understandings of WWII?” Reading about the story of Vladek Spiegelman (the main character in Maus) really gave emotion and feeling to all the horror stories we hear about WWII. Following a family and their escape from the Nazis and how simple daily tasks can be so difficult and so scary really proves to you how hard it was to be a Jewish person in those times.

For this project after reading our books we were required to make a trailer for our story. Whether we chose to do it as a book trailer or a movie adaptation it was basically the same thing. We planned costumes, filming locations, shots, and scripts to make this. I hope you enjoy.

Obviously this project wasn’t just reading a book and making a trailer because that would be “too easy”. Instead we learned about most operations of WWII; Canada’s contribution, the sides of the war, and a little bit about the atomic bombs. For me learning this part of history was really interesting because it is the reason why a lot of things are the way they are now. It also feels very rewarding to me to actually have a deeper understanding of many common knowledge things. Things such as the atomic bombs, I’d heard of them but had no clue when they were used or what they really were. We also spent a lot of time looking at cause and consequence and a big example of that was how the ending of WWI and the Treaty of Versailles allowed for Hitler to rally up Nazis and start the Second World War. There shouldn’t have been another huge global conflict but that was partially a consequence of the treatment Germany got at the ending of WWI. As far as creative assignments, we had book chats every week where we had individual roles to reflect on that section of the book. I used this as a chance to improve my writing and as Ms Maxwell pointed out I needed to watch out for typos. I also made a poster about victory gardens when we discussed Canada’s contribution. Another ongoing assignment was to kept a running vocabulary sheet of WWII terms. This got quite long by the end of the unit and one day we even played a game where the class tested it’s knowledge on each term.

Now for making the trailer we had to go through many steps. First our storyboard, then a screenplay, then a call sheet, and finally we could start to film. We spent many rainy days filming and tried to come up with unique techniques. The other obstacle we had to overcome was making the music. At first we somewhat forgot about that and then we asked Kiyaan to create a backing track in garage band as he is a very musical person. It ends up working out well. Now for the not so fun part. My role in the group was to be the editor which I was perfectly fine with as I enjoy editing and I like to do quite high quality fancy videos. However, during this whole project I was in the Deep Cove Pantomime and didn’t have very much free time as well as constantly being stressed. One night after rehearsal I was able to finish the video and then my app crashed before I could save. I couldn’t get back into the video and had no clue what to do. The next day at school our group discussed and we said if I had the time I would create the video again as I knew exactly how to do it and Fraser would create a backup in case I had trouble again. It worked out well and we created a video I’m quite proud of but it was certainly hard to reach that point.

Overall this project gave me a really deep understanding of the Second World War and using historical perspective I could understand why things happened the way they did. I also am proud of the many individual assignments that I put lots of effort into. However out of all my videos I’ve made I know I probably could’ve made this trailer much better with more time and less stress. I had to accept that with the time constraints I had I couldn’t spend all night trying to make it slightly better. Sometimes you just have to let things go. It also gave me a very big reminder to constantly save your work and make sure you can use trusted apps. It was heartbreaking for me to see my app crashed and the whole video gone. I didn’t want to sleep till I could get it back but sometimes you have to accept things don’t always work the way you want them to. It was good for me to see this failure and learn from it as well as gaining lots of knowledge about a very significant time in our history.