Hiroshima and Nagasaki were one of the most devastating events in history, and for this blog post I want to reflect on how that affected the world and our project.
Hello and welcome back! This is officially the first humanities final blog post. If you read my last post you would know that we have been learning about the Manhattan Project for the past month. With all that knowledge we had to create an animated explainer video on a topic relating to the Atomic bombs and how it affects the world today.
Here is the video so you are able to understand my post a bit better:
My learning:
This project was one of the heavier projects. We learned about some really gruesome elements of the atomic bomb but also the affects it had on an entire country and the rest of the world. I had a bit of background knowledge due to a couple watches of Oppenheimer and some long conversations with my dad, but it definitely was a topic I was lacking a lot of background knowledge on.
To start out our projects we began to read a book called “Hiroshima” by John Hersey. It was a story of seven average Japanese citizens who lived in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. It was important because it didn’t make Japanese citizens the “enemy”, which at this point in time many Americans were quite hateful to the Japanese.
The most powerful thing that I learnt from this project was the effect it took on the lives of the “survivors” of the bombs. Now you may have noticed that I put quotation marks around the word survivors and that’s because many of the “survivors” didn’t feel as though that word described them because they felt as though it didnt honour the dead.
The project also definitely consisted of A LOT of notes. Throughout all these notes I felt like I started becoming more and more intrested in a certain topic…Japanese samurai code. Now you may be thinking that that is so far of topic, but in reality if was a one of the elements that drove the Americans to use the atomic bomb.
My process:
I faced quite a bit of a hard time with the creation of the video. I was not very educated on animation in keynote so my video wasn’t the most developed. I had to do a lot of work to figure out how to use all the special transitions.
All the notes that we took were in the Zettlecasnant format, which I briefly touched on last blog post. Using some of the knowledge from the lectures I began to formulate notes and plan what information I wanted to include in my video
I definitely learned a lot of new skills including some very helpful tools in keynote but also a lot of Japanese history.
My takeaways:
I think that this was a really important project and it taught us a lot about the nature of humankind. I think the reflections on how it affected the views of the Japanese to the Americans and vice versa.
I hope that my video helps to educate people about something they may not know that much about. I think that this topic is an important aspect that isn’t talked about as much as other components.
For next time I think that I need to get ahead of some of the deadlines a bit better because I feel like this time I had a bit of a struggle.
Thank you for reading!