Hello and welcome to the halfway point of our project. This project is all about NATIONALISM and it is one of the longest projects we’ve done this year. It’s a four-week marathon project. So far we’ve covered everything from the unification of Italy to how nationalism affected oppression in Canada. It’s been a wild project and it’s only halfway done. By the end of the project I will be able to answer to question: How can nationlism help us with understanding today? Let me recap some important things I’ve learnt…

This whole year we’ve focusing on our video making skills and every time I make a video I learn more about what I’m doing. Our first video was an interview with our parents about nationalism. I had to learn how to film an interview, I had to learn how to use good lighting and how to direct people who weren’t my classmates. For future films learning how to use proper lighting was important.

The next video we made was animatic, and wow was this ever-challenging. I didn’t even know what an animatic was before this so I had to learn a ton of new skills. For starters I learnt how to use keynote to my best ability, it has way more power than I thought it did. I made a whole two-minute animatic only in the keynote. 

This first week we started to answer our driving question. To start we had to figure out what our parents knew too about nationalism and turns out my mom was pretty clueless. 

You can see the interview here:

Then I learnt how nationalism can form or tear apart a nation, as an example, we used the Italian unification. In this case, nationalism caused the states of Italy to unite and become the country we know and love today. You can see my animatic here:

In our second week, we were given the task of explaining the story of the Canadian confederation through a tutorial video. So we had to learn the story of the Canadian Confederation and how to make a tutorial video. Nationalism had a huge role in Canada’s history. And now I had to explain why while making cookies. Making a tutorial was different than our other videos, this one was simple and basic. For this video, the lighting really came in handy. I had a ring light set up with a tripod over my mixing bowl. In addition to learning about Canada and lighting, I learned how to make cookies! You can see my video here:

I’ve learnt so much already but I’m still far away from answering the question, I still need to learn more, the part of the question I’m still missing is how an understanding can even us understand today. I feel like I now understand how nationalism has built the world we live in but how can it help us now? 

I’m excited to continue this project and I’ll see you when I’m done!