When I heard that I was going on a school trip to Texas I didn’t know what to expect. Why we’re we going there? What could we learn? Regardless, from what the teachers were saying there would be a lot to take in. When I heard that our task was to create a video I was very excited because those are my favourite types of projects.

The first steps of this project were all about preparing for the trip. I had learned from loon lake it was clear that I needed a plan before I left. From the research we had been doing, I had a better understanding of what a story of hope was, and what resilience and adversity meant. To answer the driving question I wasn’t sure what I was missing. But I had the framework of my answer and decided I would fill it in on my trip. For my storyboard and screenplay, I left for Texas with a rough plan. I knew I wanted to focus on gun control, and my teachers agreed that I could find a story of hope within that topic.

The trip was awesome. Lots of great food and unique experiences made it something I won’t forget and a great way to end PLP. On the other hand, the video creation was off to a rocky start. It was hard to get all the shots I needed when we were often in the middle of other learning experiences, and I wasn’t solely focused on my video. Finding connections between topics on the trip was also a challenge. Luckily, before the trip, I already knew that many of the places we were visiting would work for what I wanted to create. The texas tower shooting was an important intro for my video because it is known as one of the first televised shootings in the US, and was a wake-up call to many about the amount of mass shootings happening. On top of that, two other events were heavily connected to gun control. The Oklahoma City bombing and invasion of the Branch Davidian compound were both caused because of gun control issues. The main part of my video was about showing the reasons gun control wasn’t already excepted in Texas and these two events were perfect examples of that. The hardest part of the trip was finding people who were creating hope for gun control in the US. This is one part I feel I missed in my video which could have made it better.

One of the gun control advocacy groups making a difference.

Creating the final project was difficult for a couple of reasons. Using a combination of my footage along with stock or news footage is often challenging. It’s easy to get confused about what you’re trying to show, or even miss key scenes. On top of that interlinking my story and giving an answer to our driving question was a challenge. Luckily on the trip, I did find the answer I was looking for. What I decided was that the lesson we can learn from the story of gun control in the US is the importance of bravery in creating change. Overall I managed to create a video I was happy with but I think with some more interviews from Texas it could have been better.

An interview from the mall shooting that took place in texas.

To conclude, this project was a huge rush of information and learning, from our early work understanding stories of hope, to what I learned in Texas, to finally creating my final video. I’m happy with how I answered the driving question and with what I created as a final product. One thing I wish we could have done differently would be to have more time before we left for Texas to build an understanding of what our teachers wanted us to create because I feel like I still don’t understand what they had envisioned. I think by doing that it would have helped me create a better final product and also caused less tension during this project.