This project in humanities has been amazing. We have learned all about some of the most important revolutions in history, the French, American, Russian and industrial. At the same time we were practicing our video making skills. We had to act, animate, use images, and even sing in the various videos we created. In doing these things I can now reflect on the curricular competency’s and also answer our driving question, “how do ideas drive change?”. The way ideas drive change is when a group of people share a common passion or un happiness creating a shared idea which gives them the motivation to change what they care about or hate. A revolution that showed this is the French Revolution. The people hated how they were being taxed and were pour and starving while the rich partied. With the help of some forward thinking people the idea was formed to get the royalty to be punished for their actions. This motivated the people to destroy the monarchy and change what they hated. So let me take you on my journey of learning to get me to the place where I am now. 

In this project we created four videos. Don’t think we just went out and filmed though! For everyone of our videos we had to do a variety of things in our pre-production. The first video we made was our French Revolution rap video. We decided to choose the rap video for our first video because we thought that this was going to be the most challenging and unenjoyable for our group. The first step of our process for this video was creating the screen play. We all worked as a group to try to get arguably the most important piece of our pre production done. After we had a rough outline off what our screen play would look like, we split our jobs. For this Particular video gabe made the the story board, I did the call sheet and Emily and Malaika finished the screen play. We got most of these things done quickly and I was proud of my contribution. The part in this video we didn’t do well was managing our filming time. We spent to much time making the music and finishing the script, so we ended up filming and editing our entire video in one night. Gabe, Malaika, Emily and I all worked really well at getting the shots done quickly. I must give a big credit to Malaika as she did most of the editing on this video. We got the video done in time and handed it in. 

The next video we made was for the American revolution. Once again we started with the screen play, then split of into groups. Gabe made a story board again while I made the call sheet. At this point I could make the call sheets very quickly, although our story boards still were very basic. For this video we were doing acted out so we tried to put more of a focus on props and costumes. We made sure we had more time to film and edit. Even still we felt crunched for time. We handed in our video and it is one of my personal favourites. 

After that we moved on to the Russian revolution. This was the third video we would be making so we knew our biggest weakness was time management. We were doing an animation which meant we didn’t need a call sheet. Once again me and gabe helped start the screen play and then worked together on the storyboard. This story board was extremely detailed as we needed to know what exactly to animate. We didn’t feel nearly as crunched for time with this video because of what we had learned through experience about time management. We worked as a group to animate and handed in a pretty cool video. 

For our final video we decided to do the French Revolution again. This time we would be doing the acting out video style as we found this was our best video style. This was my favourite video type so I was happy. Once again we made the screen play first but this time everyone helped with everything. We had decided to not make a storyboard and instead make a very detailed screen play. We also had to make a custom call sheet. Because of this we all worked as a team, giving each other feedback and adding our own ideas, to get our pre production done fast. We handed in a pretty awesome video if I may say so myself. 

Throughout our video making process as a group we got more efficient, had better time management skills and also improved our pre production and post production skills. I feel like I now have the skills to asses a topic, find evidence to support it, and create a video. My team work skills also improved vastly through this project and I now feel more comfortable taking the lead and guiding my group members. 

In this project I also began to understand and master the curricular competency’s.

The first competency is Cause and Consequence: I can assess how conditions and actions of individuals affect events, decisions, or developments. This competency was one the most important and I feel like I achieved it pretty well. In all our videos we showed a clear understanding of what caused certain events in history and what consequences they had.  I feel like I played a big part in making sure it was clear. 

The second competency is Evidence: I can assess the justification for competing historical accounts after checking out various sources and investigating the reliability of sources. In my opinion this is the competency that took me the longest to achieve. I found that I was mostly relying on the knowledge my teacher ms Maxwell supplied to us instead of doing my own research. In the final video though, I made sure to do lots of research regarding the four stages of any revolution ( Crane Brandon’s theory)  and I checked many sources to make sure I was getting reliable information. 

The third competency is Create and Extend Shared Understanding: I have exchanged ideas and viewpoints within my group and the class, to build shared understanding and extend my thinking about this project and the video making process. This is one thing I think I excelled at. Not only did I consistently give feedback and ideas to my group in person but I also was communicating my view points to my group through iMessage and eventually basecamp. Over all my group had a great shared understanding of our topics and I think I was one of the people who contributed to that.  

Finally Text Comprehension and Appreciation Strategies: I have applied appropriate strategies to comprehend written, oral, and visual texts to extend my thinking and appreciate how different features, forms and genres of text reflect different purposes, audiences, and messages. I think that I achieved this competency throughout the project. Whether it was using strategies to allow me to enjoy the book we read for the French Revolution Or to comprehend the written, oral and in one case visual information we gathered for our evidence. 

In conclusion I think this project was huge success and a great learning experience for me as an individual and as a group. My video skills, understanding of the competency’s, team work skills and my time management skills have all improved vastly. I feel like I have grown as a student and person, I am proud of the products I created and I have answered my driving question. I hope you enjoyed reading my blog and have learned about my process of learning. As always more post are appearing on my blog all the time so stay tuned. I’ll catch you guys later!