How does place impact business owners? We visited Alberta for 9 days, interviewing people along the way in order to answer this driving question. 

I made a video on how business owners were affected by place looking through the environmental lenses. We had to focus on the continuity & change and listening & speaking by interviewing people about their business throughout the years. The video incorporated videos, pictures and interviews.

My video is based off the environmental lens which is broken up into two categories, geography and climate.From this trip, I learnt a lot during interviews and stops throughout the trip about businesses and how they are affected. I interviewed George Bell (the owner of Three Valley Lake Chateau) and two owners at the Banff market.

The video turned out amazing as I hoped. I incorporated my own music I created with my brother using FL Studios. The evidence I presented was strong, I answered the driving question and included the curricular competencies clearly.

Photo credit to reddit

We didn’t just do this overnight but it was a process over the span of a month. There were a total of 5 milestones before the final product. With every milestone we came closer to answering the driving question. During the Alberta field study we learnt a lot during interviews with people and visiting many interesting places.

When first starting this project, the most important thing I learnt was what a lens is. There are four lenses that stand for PEES (political, environment, economics and social). These were the foundations of our projects and were what we had to look through. After learning this,  we started planning for the trip by brainstorming questions and a camera shots list. We had to centre the questions around the lens of our choice. The pre-trip plan helped us a lot with the interviews because even when we didn’t have our iPads prepared, we (the business group) could still ask many questions. The answers helped provide a lot of useful information that was used as as a base for the video content.

Visiting Alberta for our field study was an exhausting journey with many stops and not much rest. Even though I was sick the entire trip and came back playing basketball horribly, it was fun and very educational. I should have taken more videos but I didn’t have enough space on my phone. This will be advice that I will tell my brother to do if he does PLP grade 9. We were given Daily notes everyday by a prompt and we had to write about the topic. Daily notes helped me think of the project and what to do mid way through the trip. We had to talk about the environment, the changes over the years and what we can do in the future. We tracked our progress in the project and we went in further detail on questions we needed to ask to complete the video. Sadly, we only had interviews in the first half of the trip and the time we had to write the prompt, I had no more interviews. Despite the limited interviews, I learnt a lot about the driving question and how the curricular competencies (continuity & change and listening & speaking) play a role in the project.

Interviewing people might seem awkward at first, but once you begin talking it is almost like a normal conversation. George Bell (Lake Chateau) and Calum (RAW distillery), both owners were very talkative and extended the conversation. Without questions prepared for our interview with Mr. Bell, we spent 16 minutes talking about all sorts of things. I took away many things from this interview to use in my video.

I did all of these milestones and then instantly made my final video… This is the opposite as to what actually happened. I had many drafts leading up to the final product and they were definitely not perfect.

I first planned out my script to be organized, flow nicely and prove my point clearly. Placeholders help me with writing better and make me write faster. I put lots of thought into the script and I thought it was worth the longer time and extra work. My script included two possible hooks and topic sentences which gave me more options to work with. I received feedback on what other people thought of my options.

For the first draft, my video was lacking and was still developing. I didn’t have photos for my whole video. There was no background music to compliment my dialogue and the audio had no consistency. However, I have learnt through PLP how fast deadlines arrive so even though I had lots of time until the second draft, I knew that I had to be efficient with my time. There were a lot of changes to make but I still wanted to take the time to match my photos to my script. While interviewing people I only recorded the audio so I drew and animated pictures to match with what I was going to say. This work was worthwhile and I was happy with the results that I produced.  As I included a lot of the requirements in the drafts, I could add the extra things to make my video exceeding.

From the final product, I could have done nothing and received an accomplished mark (average) but I wanted to exceed. Rather than using copyright free music online I decided to use my own that I created with my brother. We downloaded clips from a company called Cymatics and we used FL Studios to create the music. It was very fun to create this song using the tools in FL Studios. I first tried garage band and it was better and more enjoyable than last time I used it because I was able to download files. I made a song automation and different clips but it didn’t flow as much. The FL Studios song was really good and I was very happy with the music and how it fit into the video.

This project was really fun to make, design and plan. My video turned out as I hoped and it didn’t make me stay up super late. I learnt so much from the milestones, Alberta field study and interviews. Over the span of the trip I have found that the environment has a massive impact on business owners. If a place changes then the business will change as well.