Hello and welcome back to Sincerely Me, globally known for being the most reliable and informative blog out there. In today’s thrilling addition to my blog, I will unfortunately NOT be talking about aquariums, sorry to anyone who got clickbaited by the title. I’ll be writing about a video essay project in humanities that was recently completed.
Driving Question
How do tourist attractions shape and influence the cultural, economic, psychological, and social experiences of visitors?
This driving question can be answered pretty well in this final video.
To kick off this project, we learned how to effectively summarize text. This could mean a video, an article, or any other form of text. Using a 4-2-1 Summarizer, we were able to extract the four key ideas, narrow it down to two, and combine to make one key idea. Once we had the key idea, we then made a short summary paragraph, supporting our key idea. The text we used to learn summarizing was a Ted Talk called The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Anchor which I could probably recite in my sleep at this point.
The Happiness Advantage Summary
While we were learning to summarize, we were also learning how to use Craft. Craft is a notetaking and collaboration app that is new to PLP and we learned how to take full advantage of it this project. For a good chunk of this project, I got to learn a ton about Disney and the field study that I wasn’t going on but hey, at least I learned how to use Craft!
Using my super summary skillz, I summarized an article on How Disney Came to Define What Constitutes the American Experience.
Summary on Disney and the American Experience
I’ve got to say, I was foolishly hopeful in thinking that I wouldn’t have to do that many Disney related summaries. And it didn’t even stop at Disney! I got to learn about the Kennedy Space Center too. It’s almost like I was there from the amount of information I learned about this field study. Although it did feel like we could’ve maybe figured out what the people who weren’t going to Florida were going to do for their project earlier on so it could’ve been the focus instead of Disney.
After the initial PKM entries, we started researching for our actual project. As a group, Fraser, Ariane, Nolan, Ben, and I decided to base our video on tourism in Vancouver and have the main focus be the Capilano Suspension Bridge. (I fought hard for the Vancouver Aquarium but whatever 🙄)
the topic of tourism in Vancouver felt very broad, so in our Keystone 2, which was a collection of PKM entries, we researched different aspects of Vancouver tourism and what gives Vancouver the reputation of being a green, nature-loving city.
during this research, I took a deeper dive into Vancouver’s connection with nature and found out a ton about local tourist attractions that I never knew the background of. Although I found these entries quite tedious and uninspiring, they set me up well for our final video essay.
What was originally a 2000+ word screenplay had to get condensed a ton to fit in the 5-10 minute timeframe.
After taking time to narrow down what we actually need in our script that would promote our answer to the driving question, we ended up with a much shorter and more manageable screenplay.
Then came the fun part; our own little 6 person field study. As a group, we went on a field study to Capilano Suspension Bridge, one of Vancouver’s most famous tourist attractions. We went as a team to get some good a + b roll and interviews with staff and visitors.
Upon arrival back to the school, we realized that our main interview with Brendon Wong, who is a capilano manager, was unusable due to an audio issue. This was super frustrating for our group but we eventually decided to cut our losses and move on. We considered the possibility of a phone interview but decided it would be too much trouble considering we needed to get the editing done as well. However, we were able to make do with the tourist interviews and b-roll we filmed.
Next up was editing. Group projects that involve a video of any kind can be troublesome as the editing usually will fall on to one person. I was that person in our previous humanities project and I know how it feels so we didn’t want to do that to poor Fraser. We came up with the idea of editing a chunk of the video each and sending it to Fraser who coordinated and put the clips together. This solution worked surprisingly well, and the video seemed pretty cohesive, despite being edited separately.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how this project turned out. Despite some things not going the way we planned them, our group managed to get a pretty good video together even though we had a super broad topic to work with. Although this was not my favourite humanities project we’ve done, I learned lots about how Vancouver sells it’s tourism industry and why it’s advertised as “a supernatural place.”
As always, thanks for reading!
Sincerely,
Me
You really thought the blog was done? Pffftt. One thing about being a PLP student is that WE WILL REVISE! Our group’s final video showed an accomplished level of learning which is great, but we were hoping for more. After taking our critique into consideration and meeting up to make some changes to the video, we came up with our new and improved video essay!
Alright, that’s it for real this time. See you next time!
Sincerely,
Me
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