Tag Archives: Humanities

我去了唐人街！

Oh. Hello people of the inter-webs, I am, as always, Jason Guan, and this is my official Victoria post.

In this post, we’re going to go over the skills and information I learned, my experience in Victoria, and how I got to my final product, which was this beautiful video.

First, let’s go over the initial project. As always, there was a driving question and ours was:

How can we help visitors connect to BC’s history?

Inspiration

The main project for this unit was, as you’ve already seen, a travel video outlining a specific part of Victoria. Mine was, as you’ve also seen, Chinatown. At the beginning, we watched a few documentaries and videos to inspire us. We watched Michael Palin in North Korea, Departures, and one of our personal favourites, Rick Steves.

Victoria

We then did a bit of research on the sights we were seeing, and researched our locations before departing at a wonderful 5:00 AM to catch our ferry to Victoria.

In Victoria, we visited many well-known locations, such as the Royal BC Museum, the Parliament Building, and Chinatown. We also participated in many tours, such as a tour of Ross Bay, Downtown Victoria, and a spooooky ghostly walk.

In the Royal BC Museum, we recorded story-telling videos about the exhibits in the museum, and Sam, Nik And I had fun recording tales of recruiters, immigrants, and bad Chinese accents.

 

Rule of Thirds

After the trip, we edited our videos and to everyone’s surprise, the great Jason Guan goofed up. Turns out, rule of thirds was actually crucial to our filming, and I kind of messed up my filming partner Nik’s video, as I did not follow the rule of thirds to any extent.

After a few lessons and more than enough disappointed looks, I learned my lesson and realized what I had done. Lesson learned.

Drafts

As is with any PLP project, revision was necessary. In my first draft, I had about 1 and a half minutes of footage, no music, and no voiceovers. It was too terrible to upload to YouTube, so it will remain unseen.

The second draft was much better compared to my first one. First of all, I added much needed music and voiceovers, and scrounged up enough footage to get 2 minutes and 52 seconds of video. The audio was a little inconsistent, and I was 8 seconds under the minimum, but it wasn’t too shabby.

The third draft was not a huge improvement, but progress was made. I rewatched my video and fixed the small inconsistencies in my voiceovers, and added different music to the background. I also added citations, which I learned about during the editing process of my video. I also added a “The end” screen, extending it to three minutes.

The fourth Draft was pretty much the same, just minor changes to the audio and shortening the ending screen.

Now, onto my final draft. As you can see, I came a long way from an audio-less slideshow of Chinatown to an actual honest-To-god travel video. I made some nice 90’s sitcom-ish credits, made my audio more consistent and it was finished.

Reflection

In conclusion, this project was actually one of my more favourite projects. I usually enjoy making movies and this project was, yet again, another refresher on the magic of iMovie.

However, I was also able to work on my perseverance skills through this project. Multiple times throughout this project iMovie messed up my project, un-syncing audio and messing up voiceovers, and many times through this process I felt like giving up and just asking for an extension, but I was able to fight through it and come out on top.

I know, I know, I’m over exaggerating it, but iMovie is no joke. It’s like, like…. I can’t think of an analogy. But if iMovie treats you well, you’ll have a good time but if iMovie is bad to you, it won’t be good.

Otherwise, this project really helped me improve my filming technique through some pretty brutal lessons. Rule of thirds will forever remain in my mind for many years to come. I also learned how to do MLA citations, which will undoubtedly be a big part of any future projects in humanities. In conclusion, I was very happy with how this project turned out. I revised well, and polished and improved many different skills (rule of thirds, iMovie).

This is Jason, signing off.

Religions and Such

Alright. Before I start, I want you all to know that this is going to be a looooong post. So, be prepared to spend at least a whopping 5 whole minutes reading about a socially awkward 8th grader’s journey through the wonderful world of religions.

Hi there again. It’s Jason. In this post, I will do my best to try to explain our latest unit, religion and worldview. So, when we started this unit, we learned about what a worldview is. It’s basically what the name suggests. Your view of the world. Of course, everyone’s worldview is different. This is what led to the first project of the unit, where we used a new app. The legendary Explain Everything. Long story short, the app was confusing. Our project was to pick three of these topics:

My three topics were Society, Values, and Knowledge. Then, you think of some stories about your 3 topics and talk about them in your EE (Explain Everything) with some pictures and animations.

After we finished the whole worldview stuff, we dove head-first into the wonderful and confusing world of religion. First we started with making new groups for a whole new project. I was put into a group with Nik, Grace, and Izzy. Our first religion that we studied was Aboriginal Spirituality, And we were tasked with making a chart of all of the religions that we studied. After Aboriginal Spirituality, we studied Judaism, then Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

After we finished our religion studies, we started on our main project. We were tasked with creating an infographic about a religion. More importantly, it was supposed to be about the worldview of the followers of that religion. First, we picked our religions. We picked Judaism as our religion to study. After we picked our religions, we wrote down what we knew about that religion and any important things that relate to the worldview. Then, we went on field studies to each of the holy places. We had to present our data to each of our respective religions. For us, it was the Synagogue. Also, we went to CHIPOTLE!

Here are some photos from our expeditions:

The Islamic Mosque

The Jewish Synagogue

The Hindu Temple

The Buddhist Temple

The Sikh Gurdwara

And Last but not least, The Christian Church

Then, we got to work on our infographics. Our original idea was for the background to be a desert, but it ended up looking like an old paper, so we changed the image. Then, we had to fix a text problem. The problem being that we had too much text, so we changed that. The app that we used to make our infographic was pages. We had many drafts and were critiqued multiple times on how we could improve it, and then we finally finished it.

We were pretty proud of our final draft and we were one of the first groups to finish our worldview/religion infographic. Here are some of the other groups’.

Ok. I guess that’s it. I hope you learned a lot about religion and worldview from the infographics that we made. I hope you enjoyed this post, and make sure to check out some of my other posts.

Yours Truly,                                                                                                                                                                   Jason

Socially Awkward And Proud Of It

 

The Advertising Project Of DOOM

Before we begin, please know that the DOOM part is a joke. The advertising project was actually pretty fun. Please don’t take that part seriously. Ok. Now that that part’s out of the way, onto the actual post!

Hello there. It’s Jason. Welcome to my first post ever. This post is going to be about the wonderful world of ADVERTISING!

Now, as some of you may or may not know, we recently finished our first unit, which was on advertising. During this unit, we interviewed some businesses and made some wonderful ads.

For our first business, we interviewed local Deep Cove Department Store, A’hoy. So, my group members and I walked down to Deep Cove and interviewed the nice people at A’hoy, who gave us some information for our ads. The product that they wanted to promote was their Herschel Studio Backpacks, which were only available at A’hoy. Here are my first, second, and third drafts.

As you can see, there are many improvements between my weird, confusing first draft and my better third draft. To achieve these results, I used feedback from my peers to improve these ads. The critique really helped point out the main flaws in my ads. I then used that to improve my ads. The main app that I used was Canva. Canva is a design app that I used to create my ads. I also used Photoshop Mix, which I used to crop my images. Something that I’ll probably do differently next time is get more specific with our questions to get a better mental image of what my ad will look like. We are currently writing A’hoy an e-mail with our ads included and hopefully they give us some helpful feedback.

After we had finished up our Deep Cove Business Ads, it was time to move on to the real thing. Our Oregon ads.

In order to figure out what businesses we were doing, we picked pieces of paper with business names written on them. Our first pick was American hunting store Cabela’s, while our second pick was the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Long story short, we got rejected. Twice. Now, you might be thinking, Jason, how did such a professional like you get rejected? Well, Tillamook said that their main marketing team was actually located in Portland, and not Tillamook. The marketing manager at Cabela’s said that she was occupied the day we were visiting. After being turned down twice, we were given a shining beacon of hope. High Life Adventures.

So, on October 1st, 2017, Jackson, Paisley, Anika and moi, (which is me in French), had a nice, long chat with Beau from High Life about the things they wanted to promote and any special requests that they had for the ads. We also showed them some first drafts of ads that we had created before hand. Beau then called in his manager, who gave us some ideas. The things that they were looking to promote were:

– The fact that their business is family owned.                                                                                                                   – The fact that there is a campfire outside so that you can drink beer by the campfire.                                                  – The zwing, which was this really dope zip line that we weren’t allowed to ride because we’re not adults.     – The 7th zipline in the tour, which was one that let you ride into the water.                                                     – The new bar and grill, which was what all of us chose to advertise.

After we got back from Oregon, we made some more ads. The thing was, we couldn’t make our ads because we didn’t have any pictures of the ziplining because of a computer error. (This was before we realized that we didn’t actually need pictures of ziplining to make ads for the bar and grill.) After we had gotten the photos, we made our ads. Why don’t you take a look at them?

As you can see, the improvements on these ads are very similar to my Deep Cove Ads. There’s a big difference between my first and last drafts. We are currently writing an e-mail to High Life too. I hope we get some good feedback. Once again, I used Canva and Photoshop Mix for my ads. This time, I not only got critiqued by my peers, but also by 10th graders. It’s a long story. I, once again, used the critique to improve my ads. One thing I would do differently is get a good picture of the bar and grill to use in my ad.

Alrighty. That about wraps things up for this post. I wrote all of the things I wanted to write about and, as always, did my best to make it interesting. I hope you are now informed about the wonderful world of advertising while learning some things about me.

Until next time,                                                                                                                                                   Yours truly, Jason Guan.

AKA J-Guan