Hello everyone.

At the start of this project, we did a simulation in the fictional world of Nation X. I did a blog about it, and if you want to learn more about the simulation, go see my Nation X—simulation blog post. The Driving question for this project is: How did revolutions bring down empires and change societies around the world? Before we got introduced to the revolutions, we first learned about Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of a revolution.

This was our first keystone. Briton studied lots of revolutions and noticed that every revolution he studied had four different stages to it. The first stage is the incubation stage. Second is moderate stade, then crisis stage, and the last stage is recovery stage. For this keystone, we had to create a visualization of his theory. My visual is a pandemic, like the covid pandemic we’re in right now.

We had looked at four revolutions that we could choose from.

The French Revolution (1789-1799)

The American Revolution (1765-1791)

The October Revolution of 1917 (Russia)

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)

The only two revolutions that I was interested in was the American and French Revolution. I thought about it for a while, and at first, I chose the American Revolution, but when I thought about it more, I decided on doing the French Revolution instead. The next day, the teacher put us into groups depending on our choice of revolutions. We got in our revolution groups and my group members were Cameron, Christian, Jackson, Mackenzie, and Evangeline.

Then we started our second keystone. It is a graphic organizer of the revolution of we chose, so mine is the French Revolution. In it, we had to have:

The final product

The final product for this is a video of a court case for our revolutions. This was a project where we had to collaborate with the other half of PLP 9 who were doing the same revolution as us. They have humanities at a different time, so it was really hard to work and make things line up, and we weren’t able to do some things that were planed.

One half of the class were the defence, meaning they had to prove that the revolution was effective. The other half were the prosecution, meaning they had to prove that the revolution was ineffective.

The steps to making the video were simple, but it took longer that we first initiated because Mr. Harris, our teacher for this project, was not there. This made us very unorganized, and we had to think of a way to present our final product. We thought a few ideas we could do with a different teacher, and in the end, we decided to make separate videos. But first, we had to write a script. We had a few days to do this, and once we were done, we filmed our videos. All of the videos were filmed in the vortex.

The filming process

The filming process only took two or three days to get it all done, but there was also editing the video as well. On the first day of filming, we had to wait for a couple groups to finish their filming before we could go. We were in a race against time, because one of our group members was not going to be there the next day. Also, there was only like 10-15 minutes left until class ended. We had to stay in at lunch for a bit to get it the parts where he’s in done.

In day 2 of filming, we had a lot more time to do it, since some of the other groups were done. We managed to finish filming with a little bit of time left, and we used it to edit our video and put the sections in the right places.

I really liked learning about the French Revolution. It was fun, and although we didn’t get to see if the revolution was proven effective or ineffective, what really mattered was that we learned something new, ad it was fun.