Hello, and welcome back to my blog. This post will contain all that I have learned from our most recent project in this chaotic year, “Storm the Barricades!”. I hope you enjoy this post, and be sure to check out my teammates blogs as they are covering their perspective on this project (check them out here Ryder, Sophia, and Jakub.

This is the man himself, Crane Brinton.

This project was based off of the theory of revolution by Crane Brinton. His theory was, in short, that a revolution is like a disease with a high fever. Similarly to our bodies after a fever, we return to a state very similar to what our body looked like before. Brinton theorized that revolutions were the same, and not only that, but that revolutions had a formula to them. It went like this, an economic crisis, political weakness, intellectual opposition, and or class antagonism will be the lead causes of the revolution. These causes lead to the “Phase 2” of the revolution. This means the beginning of the end. Here, the economy will crash and burn, the people will start to take action into their own hands, and begin leading movements against the current regime. The old regime is overthrown, and the new one, ruled by moderates, will emerge. This is normally short lived though, because the radical people begin to take control of the country, which can even lead to wars. This is called the reign of terror. It is called this because the radicals normally rule thought force and fear. As the reign of terror burns to the end of its wick, the moderates once again attain control, and the rough and bumpy road to recovery begins. As this happens, nationalism arises, and for a short while, the people are hotheaded and may start wars to prove that they are the most powerful country. Soon after though, the revolution ends very close to where it began, only changing the society enough to realize that something had happened.

Anyway, enough about the theory of revolution, and onto the reflection. In this project we learned a lot about video skills and the ability to tell a story through film. In my opinion, this was one of the hardest projects we have been given yet. And I think that even though our group didn’t do perfect, this was our FAIL (First Attempt In Learning), and I think that opportunity makes way for even more learning. In the duration of this project we made a lot of mistakes and a lot of corrections, but to make it that much better the second time, you need to realize what really went wrong the first time. For example, in my groups video, the audio’s volume seems to fluctuate which is an issue regarding not watching it back enough ourselves, this could simply be solved by posing as a viewer and watching it back to see what keep you engaged and what puts you off. Another issue we faced was with the pace of the video, we didn’t think about it much until the final product, but our video was just too slow paced and not super interested to someone who for example, just clicked on the video because it looked interesting.

(Yes I know the beginning is a little funky)

Now onto assessing the competencies.

Creative Communicator: This competency is based on your ability to communicate your thoughts and messages through a creative means. I think that in our final product, we showed this competency by using a variety of tools to create the video that had our full message.

Establishing Historical Significance: This competency is about, well, establishing historical significance. This competency was showed in our project when we made our video. During this time, we had to decide what to include and what not to. To create an educating video we had to choose the most important events relevant to what we were trying to say with our message.

Analyze Cause and Consequence: Here, we take a look at the domino effect of sorts. I call it this because the cause of something creates the consequence which might subsequently become the cause for another event and so on and so forth. I think that I showed this in an individual assignment called “an outstanding paragraph” this is because we analyzed the causes and consequences of actions and problems during the French Revolution.

Designing Texts: This competency assesses how you planned and executed your video while considering the purpose, audience, and the message of the film. I think that we definitely could have improved on this in many ways, but the main one being the audience. While making the film we didn’t consider how much the audience would want to keep watching.

Discussing, Listening, and Speaking: This competency looks at how you shared your opinion in a respectful and constructive way within your group. At the beginning of our project, my group members kept coming up with a bunch of ideas that could never realistically be demonstrated with the time and materials that we had. I recognized it and did my best to get the group to think of the “how” side of things when pitching an idea. I think this demonstrates this competency because of the constructive manner that I showed when putting my group back on track.

Thanks so much for reading this far and I hope you’ll stick around for the next project!