For the past few weeks, my brain has been curating an answer to “What’s my Canada?”. Basically, there’s this competition in honour of Canada’s 150th birthday. People all over Canada, young and old, are making videos that show what their Canada is. The prizes are pretty awesome ($3000 dollar gift card) and more. Anyways, because most people in my class are busy people, Mrs Willemse decided to make it a school assignment, and give us class time to create. I’m thankful that she did that, because I wouldn’t have found time to do it myself or even known about it if it wasn’t an assignment. (Here’s my Canadas website)

STEP #1: WHAT’S MY CANADA?

So, now that you know what this whole blog post is based on… what does Canada mean to me? What is my Canada? I thought long and hard about this, but after a few weeks I decided my Canada could be described as ‘safety and acceptance.’ I chose those values because I have never felt in danger or not accepted in my neighbourhood, expressing myself, sharing thoughts and my opinion, and just being around people I don’t know. In Canada I can be who I want to be, without feeling scared to be judged or not accepted. In Canada I can sit on a bus with people I don’t know, and feel safe. I’m so grateful for how I can do what I want to do, and decided that is my Canada.

 

STEP #2: TIME TO PLAN AND FILM THE VIDEO.

I personally really enjoy filming and editing. I may not be the best at it, but I have the passion towards it, so this was definitely fun for me. I decided I wanted to go somewhere that makes Canada’s beauty really show. I brainstormed some places and chose a little beach up the street in my neighbourhood. It’s somewhere I go to walk my dog, or just to hang out with friends because it’s that beautiful.

I went into filming only knowing I wanted cool shots of the beach, with text on top. I wanted the text to explain what I wanted to say, instead of my voice because first of all I hate my voice, and second of all I felt the video I had planned would look better with text on it, and music to listen to. So it wasn’t a fully planned-out-plan but was good enough to get going. So I brought my Mom’s Canon EOS 60D up to the beach, and walked around for about an hour taking a lot of videos. The tide was out, so I walked to other little beaches connected to it. The sun was shining, I had headphones listening to music, and overall it was a good time. The tide started to come in so I walked back home and started the editing process.

 

STEP #3: EDIT.

I transported the 30 or so clips onto the computer, then my iPad. I’m pretty comfortable with the app iMovie, so I used that. So once the clips were on my iPad, I moved them onto iMovie, so they were ready to edit.

Before I edited I wanted a audio. Why? Because sometimes the audio defines the videos mood, so it’s a good place to start. All my clips were sunny and bright, so I went with a happy sounding audio. It had to be copyright free, so it was hard to find one that I really liked. I ended up using this one, (audio.) I then went onto my Mom’s computer, and downloaded it off youtube using a “YouTube to MP3 converter.” I used my Mom’s computer because I have n0 idea how to do it on my iPad.

Moving on, I had the audio, and clips ready. Time to edit. I had 20 mins of footage and had to cut it to 30 seconds. I started by watching all the clips and cropping them to around 1-3 seconds. Then I moved them around, and made them change with the beat of the song. I feel that technique of using the beat of the music really enhanced the video. This took about an 2 hours to get it to perfection. I ended up with this.

Now, I know there’s a lot of steps but this is what I did so I’m going to show you all of it. So, I planned on having text overtop of the video, like I talked about before, so that’s what I did. I used the app Vont to layer on the text, because I’ve used it before and liked how it looked. I wanted a simple but not too boring font, and ended up using “Helvetica Bold Oblique.” Before I started adding the text, I wrote out on pages what I was going to say. It couldn’t be paragraphs, because each bit of text only showed for a few seconds, so it had to be short and strong. Once that was planned out, I started adding the text. This took about an hour because I’m a perfectionist and every word had to have the same shading, spacing and size. It also had to change exactly the same time the clip of video changed.

STEP #4: PER-FECT AND POST.

After showing everyone in my house the video at least 5 times to ask if anything needed to be changed, I handed it into the Here’s my Canada website. Overall, this whole experience of filming, editing and figuring out what my Canada was, was great and I’m very proud of my video.

Here’s My Canada: Made In Canada

Now, what you’ve all been waiting for, my video. And once you’ve watched it please leave a vote, for me to have a chance to win a prize. Thank you!