Have you ever lived in a place? No? Well now I’m concerned.
If you have, you may find it interesting that the grade 9s most recent project was about Geography! There are 2 parts to this blog post, this is my maker blog post. I encourage you to check out my humanities blog post as well! (Once it is complete). Ok enough preamble!
On our recent trip to Alberta, we learned how to tell a story through the moving image centered around questioning, and collecting information. The driving Question was “How does the geography of the West shape us?” We were required to make 3 videos in Alberta, and 1 during our time at home. The style or topic of these videos included, TikTok, investigative, silent, and inspiration. Our task was to tell an effective and engaging story during each of these videos.
As a fun and an unexpected (by me) twist we created TikTok style videos! I worked with Monica and we made 2 different TikTok’s. One is a trend that compares how we see things through social media vs the reality. Thinking it would be entertaining, we chose to highlight the difference in what is shown on PLP’s instagram account, compared to the reality of PLP trips. The second trend is done with another person and shows a variety of different places. The requirements for these videos were that they followed a TikTok trend, had music behind them, and told some story of the West. I believe Monica and I worked well together to accomplish the assignment and had fun while doing it!
Moving on to the Investigative video. We were instructed to create a 3-4 minute video including interviews from people in the West. Having to approach strangers with the intention of an interaction that for the most part exclusively benefits me was slightly intimidating. However, as with anything, practice makes better and after a few interviews I was getting the hang of it. Not having planned interviewees or timeframes for the work, unlike in a classroom, stretched my thinking by forcing me to think on my feet and encouraged me to be opportunistic. My investigative video was my favourite as I feel it turned out the best (I’m proud of the results, and the points I made were clearly supported).
The first and most exciting to plan was the silent video! I feel my group collaborated and compromised productively, and that our overall strength laid mostly in our preparation. I worked with Hazel and Sebastian Harrison. Our story, though confusing to understand, still turned out to be relatively good! It follows the story of a person going about their day, when they run into a murderer!!!!! (Dun, dun, dunnnnn!) they shrug it off, not really noticing the very obvious crime afoot, and accidentally become an accomplice to the dysfunctional murder. Somehow when the detective shows up they are convinced to lock up the dead person! Check out the video here! (Insert link) If you liked it, I edited it. If you didn’t… the editing was all Hazel!
The final video and one that has the most room for improvement, in my opinion, is my inspiration video. it is lacking excitement and the music could have been made to better enhance the video. I liked aspects of it but if I were to do it over I would’ve made it funnier and more visually pleasing by adding animations having the voiceover be succinct. If you are thinking of clicking on this link, think again for both our sakes, (please). If you must watch it, here’s the link.
I enjoyed making all these videos and learned so much about geography and creating videos by reworking them when they had kinks. Overall I am proud of the work I have done, and will take my failures and successes and continue to incorporate (or drop) habits I expressed within this project!
Congrats! You’ve reached the end! 🥳