Category: Uncategorized

Everybody who knows anything about baseball or the civil rights movement has heard of Jackie Robinson. He was one of the most influential athletes of all time as he was one of the first to break the colour barrier in major league sports. One athlete didn’t quite get the same recognition as Jackie Robinson. He didn’t play baseball but he played with the same level of drive and motivation as Robinson. His name was Willie O’Ree. He was a Canadian hockey player, and was the first black player in the NHL.

This was a partner project that I worked on with my classmate Sofia, we first started by working on learning about everything we could about O’Ree. I mainly focused on taking the information I found and condensing it down to the most important things. It started getting more complicated quickly, as there is not that much information about him as he isn’t the most well known athlete. Eventually I finished condensing the information so that it was ready to be put into a script. Our first draft was too much of an informational video and less of a video that answers a question. It was boring and bland and wasn’t good enough. The first thing we changed was how we explained everything. We added other information that was harder to find about his impact on the sports and civil rights world. It was also hard to find visuals  for the video.

Our second draft was a huge improvement, but it was still missing something, so Sofia and I decided that we should try and get an interview. This was Sofias idea and it was a great one to, I was a little bit worried that it was to ambitions to complete within the time frame. It was a major turning point in out project as it added a lot more depth to it. Getting an interview with the one and only Willie O’Ree. Instead we got in contact with the Hockey Hall of Fame, as Willie O’Ree was inducted not too long ago. The person we got in contact was Kelly Masse the director of corporate and media relations at the hall of fame. We told them what the project was about and asked if it was possible for us to ask her some questions. This is the email that Sofia sent:

We got a response a couple days later. We are very excited to get a response as this would really amp up our video. It made our video a lot more professional and less like it was done by a couple of teenagers. Sofia found a time where she could execute the interview. We developed several questions and  got this interview done. It was very helpful to have some input from somebody who had first hand information about the topic. It made our final draft much better, there was an immense difference between are first and last draft. It was awesome to be able to do a project on a hockey player as it is something I am very interested in. I hope I get to do something like this again in the future.

To start off in class we got to go to a bunch of different religious places such as a two Budhist temples, a Sikh temple and a Hindu temple.My class ended up going to more but I was on a band trip. Anyways these places were quite interesting and we first stopped at a Buddhists temple. In my opinion it was the better Budhist temple because it felt more authentic. When we first got there we were greeted by a monk and he told us to sit down in this room that had some of the most detailed art I’ve ever seen. There was a giant gold Buddha not a small one a giant one.

(Sorry it’s sideways)

That picture was takin from like, thirty feet away maybe more. My jaw dropped when I walked in there. The monk talked to us about most of the basics in their religion and why he became a monk.

The next Budhist temple we went to was more hands on and we did more things. I believe that we prayed 2 or 3 times in different rooms and their temple was more of temple but didn’t go to the same extent inside for detail but it was still pretty amazing.

Actually I think we stopped at a Hindu temple. Anyways the Hindu temple was pretty cool. First we went upstairs and got to see these cool statues that were sitting out in this room. The person who was giving the tour showed us what everything was for and everything symbolized. It was all quite interesting.

The last place we went to was a Sikh temple and one of my favourite parts about Sikh temples is that they serve food there. When we got there the outside was interesting and very cool, it had this cool elephant fountain outside.

(The Picture of the temple it self had my finger over it sorry)

First we had to cover our heads with these napkin like things. Then we went and ate at the cafeteria and ate vegetarian Indian food. Some of it was quite good other parts weren’t as good. After we were done eating we went into this giant prayer room that had a couple people in it and we all got in a line got down on our knees and touched our head to the ground and went and sat down. Then they handed out candy and we went upstairs but we weren’t alowed to eat the candy and we had to put it in our pockets and of course we were sitting down and I was wearing jeans so it was almost impossible to get it into my pocket. She told us things about Sikh religion and asked things if we knew them and she was surprised on how much we knew. After we were done there we left and went back to the school and left at 3:00.

That was my Religon experience,not yours

(Sorry I didn’t have that many pictures, they didn’t save)

 

In class for a long time we did a Star Wars unit, it was awesome just because instead of learning something boring and getting zoned out during class I actually have something that’s fun and I’m wanting to learn and not counting down the minuets till class ended. This was all leading up to the last day of school before winter break where we were going to see “Star Wars the Force Awakens”. Everybody was super excited, but before that we had to do a “Mini Blue Sky Project” that had to be based on Star Wars. Again it made learning so much easier with the subject on something that I already love. My teachers gave us a sheet to fill out that stated what our project was going to be on and you had to fill out everything and if there was something that you couldn’t awenser you would have to make your question more complex.(I had to do that, it wasn’t fun.) I chose how did they create the blaster sound and can I re-create Han Solos Blaster sound.

 

I finished it and everything was good but now I had to start it. My project was one where I might not be able to fully answer the question because all my project is just experimenting. At first when I started I just got the information of all the other sounds and it was all pretty interesting. Ben Burtt (Sound Creator for Star Wars) is pretty creative when it comes to making the sounds and some of the ways he created the sounds were by accident. I made the page that I was working on interesting with pictures just to spice it up a bit.

 

A lot of pages right. Although I still had to see if I could re-create Han Solos blaster sound. One weekend I decided to go out with my dad to try and make the sound and hit things with a hammer, but I never found the right sound. I searched for it all over Deep Cove, just couldn’t quite find the right sound, but I got excellent video of me hitting things around Deep Cove.

 

When we got close to the end my teacher put us into groups with similar projects for the exhibition on the second to last day. To make it feel more like Star Wars our group was assigned a planet, ours was Hoth. We had to make it look like Hoth, have some food/drink, ours was “Hoth chocolate” with storm trooper marshmallows. We also had to have some entertainment like a game so I came up with pin the arm on th wampa. I didn’t know what the whole place looked like because I had on a plane early in the morning to go to Puerto Rico. I didn’t see the movie until the Sunday before school started (It was awesome I highly recommend it.) That was our awesome Star Wars unit that I got to do and I hope that there are more units that are close to being as good as that just because i don’t think it can get much better then that.

If you Read my last blog post you’d know that we had to make a civilization with a hero then put it on a quilt. First of all I have never been good at drawing, but I can trace although I think everybody can trace. Anyways drawing on a screen with your finger made it ten times worse. My quilt square was supposed to be a picture of Posiedon tricking Cordelia (the hero) into getting on plane (telepathically) that she thought was going to Canada but it was really going to the Bermuda Triangle.

At first my drawing was horrible it was one of the worst things I’ve ever drawn in my opinion (I’m sorry I don’t have a picture of it also you would just laugh at it and not read my post.). It sort of got better during my second attempt but not really. I finally figured out would be a better Idea to take a picture of a brain on the Internet and put in the background instead of trying to draw one and fail. Then I found this brain that looked really awesome and really captured what I was looking for.

 

The next thing I had to do is to go into more detail with Posoiedon and Cordelia, which took a long time because I’m not amazing at drawing as you already know.  For this one part that I was drawing a speech bubble and it just didn’t look quite like a speech bubble so Ms. Willemse (My teacher) suggested for me to get one of comic life so I asked her how to do that and she showed me and I put blah blah blah in it and looked just fine. This is what the end of my drawing looks like.

 

Now we’re on to quilting. If you think I’m bad at drawing at the start I was even worse at quilting. I was doing tons of stuff wrong I ended up staying after school to finish stuff everybody else finished in class. My quilting was probably in the top 5 worst in the class. I got a little bit better and met quilt square didn’t look to bad in the end but it definitely wasn’t the best out of my group.

(Those are our quilt squares not yours)

 

(This is my quilt square not yours)

THE END OF THOSE QUILT SQUARES

 

In class we had make a civilization then make a hero then put it on a quilt. Not many people were excited about that last one. We were put into our table groups to make it. My group came up with some pretty crazy stuff. The people in the civilization are goose,beaver,Canadian,fish people. Yah it’s weird. They live in the Bermuda Triangle and they are the main reason why there are disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle happen.

Our hero was a girl from Oregon that wanted to be nicer like a Canadian(Random detail). She was brainwashed/convinced by Poseidon to get on this plane for a better shot life. She got on the plane(Flight 19 the first disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle) and Posiedon created a storm right over the Bermuda Triangle right over top of the Bermuda Triangle. She morphed into a fish,goose,beaver, Canadian to survive the water with one of the pilots. They founded the civilization and to this day it still lives on capturing explorers.

 

Then we had to learn to sew I won’t go in to too much detail but at the start I sucked. If you want to here about my quilt square read my next post.

In my class we made advertisements! I know it’s crazy, amazing, magnififcent, faboulas.  Anyways we did three ads, natural landscape, business, and a advocacy ad. We had a bunch of aps to work with but I mainly used canva and layout just because I was really comfortable with canva and I thought layout was pretty cool. The first ad I worked on was the natural landscape ad. I probably did the best on this one in my opinion. I also thought the place I went to was really cool.

The next ad I started on was my business ad. I did pretty good on this one but not as good as my first ad. For this one I did a good chunk of editing to make it look better. At the beginning it was very blank and wouldn’t catch your eye very well. In the end it popped quite a bit more and was more appealing.

The final ad I worked on was my advocacy ad. It didn’t really change much I was playing around with a lot of the small details like font size and colur to make it pop but not over power the picture.