The 3rd and final blog post of this long weekend. Here we are. Each blog post I’ve written these past 3 days have been for different subjects. Friday: Scimatics, Saturday: Humanites and Sunday (today): today we will be focusing on our latest Maker project. Maker is an interesting course to take and we have covered many areas of learning how to use different components of our technology, this year focusing on video skills. This project puts our learning to the test, but this project is also very relevant to the circumstances we are in today. Witness to History, is what we are living through right now. COVID-19, declared a global wide pandemic, changed all our lives in one way or another. Our daily lives and routines have been disrupted, favourite places are closed and with the physical distancing aspect to this crisis, interacting with others has become somewhat foreign to most of us. Physical-distancing, specifically, has changed my community in many different ways. Like all projects in PLP, we aim to answer one driving question. For Witness to History, our driving questions posed as this: 

“How can we, as video storytellers, tells stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?”

MILESTONE 1 & 2 

Milestone one was, in my opinion, actually quite rare. We usually end with a video, not start with one. Milestone one for Witness to History was a trailer video, that was also a stepping stone in humanties! It forced us to combine our video making skills with our knowledge of the Gold Rush so far. If you would like to read about my latest Humanties GOLD! Project click here.

Back to Maker, usually we make videos or what iMovie calls “movies”, but now we were trying a feature on iMovie called “trailer”. All you really do is, first, pick out the theme or type of trailer you like, fill out a storyboard with what you want the subtitles and text in the trailer and film the shots you need. The topic of this trailer was based on our gold knowledge, and you can read more about it down below. 

This was really fun to film, and I even got my dad to guest star in it. It told the story of what life was like for a hotel owner before the gold rush. I liked my idea, and I like how I excecuted the storyboard. I really am proud of how that went. The shots for the film went really good actually until the end couple of scenes where I was running out of footage, and I had to make up with some b-roll. The end looks quite hectic in the video which I wish I executed better, so when I’m planning a storyboard I want to make sure that I have all parts covered so I’m not scrambling in the end to just add random b-roll in extra spots. 

Milestone 2 was back on track maker work, and it was a milestone that helped us for the finishin product of this project. You saw that the driving question was basically us trying to communicate to other about how this has changed certain communities. I decided to focus my video on how this period of time has affected the construction community. My neighbour, whos also a close family friend, works and designs for a construction company in deep cove. This storytelling diagram would build a foundation for us to work upon and build on, during the creation of our final video. 

I had to revise on my storytelling diagram about 2 times before it was approved. Not only did it have to show how this has affected the construction community, but how that is relevent to me and how I can connect personally to it. My parents and sister were planning to buy a space in a new building here in deep cove, which has been post-poned and that was my personal connection to my video topic. 

MILESTONE 3 & 4 

Milestone 3 was probably the coolest milestone I’ve done in a while honestly. For all our videos we always have soundtracks behind, some kind of music, mostly from the iMovie royalty free tracks, but this milestone gave us a chance to create our one track in GarageBand! How exciting! We read an interactive book called “everyone can create: music” which took us through how to overlap tracks and create new sounds in GarageBand. We even got to analyze and remix a Justin Timberlake song, needless to say it was a very cool and different experience. If I wasn’t in PLP I wouldn’tve got this opportunity, so I think I made a good decision when I decided to join PLP! 

I wanted to make my original composition unique, so I added a component to it that made it sound sort of off beat but still in time with the metronome and the time signature that I had cast for my soundtrack. I like my work here as well, I feel I accomplished something that I honestly thought wouldn’t come out too well. You can hear the composition in my final video which is at the bottom of this post. 

Milestone 4 was the storyboard, the final guide to creating our video. Here I was presented another opportunity to create a storyboard and make sure not to make the same mistake that I made in the trailer milestone. We did extensive research on storyboards, looked at examples f past students’ storyboards and even broke down the creation of Star Wars. What is it with PLP and Star Wars? Safe to say we are obssesed on analyzing it to the T, oh well its fun. My storyboard wasn’t nearly up to standard artistically, but I made sure to have a shot and the actual clip for every part of my video. 

You can probably guess what comes next, yep, the video!!! Through this blog post it probably feels like a short process, but this whole project took a lot of zoom calls, and reading through material to get us to where we are now. 

MILESTONE 5

Its finally time for the video! Everything is in place and is ready to be constructed together into one final video. I timeblocked almost a 4-5 hours dedicated to the construction of this video. I wanted to put it together strategically, and I wanted to give an answer to the driving question. I think in my head, showing the impact of regular people is the most important. I wanted to get an interview from a person who had a small family and was just living peacefully, and then show how they’re life was impacted and how it completely changed. Maybe if people in the future see my video I hope they understand how and why construction sites were closed, why physical distancing was put into effect, and along with that knowledge comes the realization of just how bad this virus is. 

I think this video portrays what I said above, and I hope you understand where I’m coming from with this perpective. There’s only one milestone left in this project, Miletone 6, this blog post. I’m going to take some time to talk about our competencies and then I’ll end this horribly long post! 

COMPETENCIES 

Core competencies are how PLP teacher mainly grade us for our work, and we work along side them to make sure that we are fully meeting the requirements for grade 9’s. Our core competencies for this project included: 

*being an empowered learner (how might you use technology to learn more)

*being an active digital citizen (how might you use technology to connect more) 

An artifact of my work that I think reflects a good understanding of being an empowered learner was my trailer. My trailer was a good learning experience because I used my echo logo to learn more about the trailer feature and I will definitely use it in the future, but it also taught me how important throughly completing storyboards are. And when the opportunity presented itself for me to create another storyboard for this project, I took it as a sign to try again. A piece of work I think that could use work on showing a good understanding of being a an empowered learner is my original composition. I think I deserved a developing, because I didn’t add that many tracks and I couldve used more effects to make it try and sound better but I didn’t. GarageBand is different to work with so I think I just got tired of trying to figure it out and handed in what I had and called it my finished product. 

An artifact of work I think reflects a great understanding of being an active digital citizen is my research or storytelling diagram milestone. This was where I had to go our an actually conduct and interview and create a rough plan of what I wanted to execute in the end. It was fun to go out and connect with someone and talk about how this is a really weird time and how they and their family got used to this. A piece of work I think that needs a bit of work to show the understanding of being an active digital citizen was my storyboard. My storyboard had a lot of things in it that ending up being cut out of the video which could’ve been revised and élevé been really good to connect to the audience with. 

And with that I end the third and final blog post of the long weekend! Thank you to the teachers for teaching us and giving us abstract assignments that helps us learn in a unique way! And thank you for reading 3 absurdly long blog posts! Have a great weekend and I will see you for the next and last projects of our 2020 school year!! 

Until next time, 

~Malaika