Thinking all the way back to April and what we have done since then is a lot harder then you would expect. I honestly had to go back in Showbie to remember, give me a break it’s the last week of school. Anyways lets start at the very beginning of the Fear Factor Unit. During this unit we learned what fear really was. The main topic question being “How is fear used as a defensive, political, and cultural tool? And the project being a video essay! What’s a video essay? You may ask… Well its basically like a video/ movie in the style of an essay. But before we started any of the video work or went on the trip we learned all about fear and fear during the atomic age and WWII. We watch a ton of different movies for example “The China Syndrome”, “The War Game” and defiantly a lot more I cant think the name of.
Since PLP for grade 11 in a combination of english and socials while we were learning about fear we had to write a synthesis essay about how fear shapes behaviour around the book “Fallout” by Todd Strasser and “The War Game” movie.
Then we moved on to the video essay project. First off we had to narrow our topics down to eventually form a thesis. After many times of revision we thought we had a topic that we were happy with and so were our teachers. Until we arrived in Las Vegas and realized that with our topic it was going to be very hard to find information and research to go along with out topic. So during the trip we had to keep revising our thesis and I don’t think we actually got one we liked until we were back from the trip. And that didn’t work to our advantage, we ended up only have one interview clip and not a ton of footage that went along with our video. But lets go back to before the trip when we were still planning out our video little to know that we would be changing it all later.
After we narrowed our topics down we had to map out the main points of our video, so it would make it easier for us to start our video and know which direction we are taking it.
Then we actually left for the city Las Vegas, on April 22. Other then the lack of good food, a few people getting sick, and a hike in 38 degree weather it was an awesome trip. The days were jam packed full of things to do, museums, exploring the strip, shopping, hikes, tours, and much more. Throughout the trip Brianna and I were gathering photos, videos, and information, and interview to go with our video that would soon change. After arriving back we figured out our new topic and starting having to go through all our footage and see what could work.
Finally after we figured everything out it was time to start writing the essay, again after 3 or so drafts and revising we could start working on our video and bringing everything together. I am not sure if it was that we didn’t fully understand what we were trying to achieve or we just didn’t put in the effort, our first draft was so terrible, we had like half the movie filled with “coming soon” pictures. After that we went back and made some changes and rerecorded the audio. For a much improved second draft. After much more editing, revision, and revising we finally had a product we were proud of.
https://youtu.be/a-eWsb8jAL4