The Grand Premiere of Our Viking Films

This morning we have watched our extremely good videos. 

For some of us it was a little bit embarrassing, because sometimes we had funny faces on.  We liked the videos because everyone had interesting things to do and say about Vikings.  Nobody was left out.  We were surprised by how good they were.

It was good that we could choose which videos to watch on the DVD.

We could tell that everyone had worked really hard on their videos.  It has taken us three months to make these videos, although it doesn't feel like it.  We worked in our groups and did a little bit each week about our different subjects. 

The finished videos were even better than we expected, even though they are shorter than we thought they would be.  Sometimes people made funny mistakes - and this made the DVD even more entertaining.

Today we have been doing some filming.   One of us held a banana up in front of the camera.  This was to explain what Viking long boats looked like. 

We also filmed ourselves rowing and complaining.  We were pretending to be Viking sailers.  We wanted to show what a Viking vogage was like.

When we came back inside we did some more research and wrote our voice overs.  Then we practiced them and said them into the voice recorder.

Then we recorded a piece to camera talking about the artifact from the museum about the boy called Olaf.

Lastly we watched what we had filmed today outside and inside.

We are really, really looking forward to seeing the finished video next week.

Filming a Wedding Ceremony

Today two of us got married - well, not really.  We were only acting.  This was for our documentary.  We were filming a Viking wedding ceremony outside the willow sculpture.  

The man gave his new wife a key to his house.  This is what the Vikings did when they got married.

While we were outside, we also filmed ourselves sewing seeds.  We got some sand from Year R and pretended that this was seeds and spread it about on the field.

The next thing we tried to film was a Viking long boat being pulled onto a beach.  We used sand to make a beach on top of a piece of blue paper (the sea).  But the camera wasn't working!  And we had a big audience.  Everyone wanted to know what we were doing and it was playtime, so everyone was outside.  It was really annoying!  People were crowding us and asking, "What are you doing?", "What is it?", "Why are you doing that?", "Where did you get that sand from?"...

But the most annoying thing is that the camera isn't working and we can't finish our film!!!

Viking Voyagers

We have been researching how Vikings have travelled across the ocean.  We have worked on our own to find out lots of information on the following topics:

1. Navigation
2. Belongings and Equipment
3. How quickly they could sail
4. How their long ships worked

We used the computers to use Google to find the answers to our questions.  Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn't.  The most successful wensite was BBC Schools History.  It had lots information about the Vikings.  It also had some brilliant videos that showed us what they looked like and how they sailed on the seas.

Then we got together with our information and ideas for our video.  We were planning and discussing how we were going to show the information we had found out.  We decided that we were going to have a role play for the part about how quickly they could sail.  We went outside to see where would be the best place to film this.  We wanted it to look like we were at sea, like real vikings, by filming it so we could only see the sky behind us.

The Settlers

Our part of the video is going to be about how the Vikings settles in several countries, including Britain.

We decided to research four things to do with how the Vikings came to Britain:

1. Their reasons for leaving Scandinavia
2. Which countries they went to
3. How they arrived in longships
4. How they lived when they settled here

Once we had completed our research we then worked together to work out creative ways of showing what we had found out in our video.  We are going to...

• film a role-play showing a Viking wedding where the man gives his new wife the key to his house.  We are going to film this outside the willow sculpture because we think that this looks like a Viking house might have looked

• 
  
  show pictures of the Scandinavia to show that the land there was no good for farming and film a role-play to show Viking farmers in Britain sowing seeds on the field and saying how glad they are that they came to Britain because it is much easier to grow food here.  We practiced this on the field to see what it will look like

 

• 
  
  use a map projected onto the whiteboard and a cut-out ship to show how the Vikings came across the sea to Britain and other countries
• 
  
  film a model longship to show how they Vikings would push their longships right up onto the beach when they landed

The Invaders - Researching our Video

The first thing we did this afternoon was to come up with a question to answer in our video.  Our video is about where the Vikings came from and some of the questions we thought of were:

• Where is Scandinavia?
• What are these places like?
• How did they live?
• What gods did they believe in?
• What weapons did they have?

We used the computers to do some reasearch about these questions. 

We looked for the names of the Viking gods and then looked for pictures to show what the gods represented.  For example, Odin was the god of magic, poetry and war so we found pictures of these things.

We also found out about the weather in Scandanavia so that we can try and make a weather forecast.  This will help us to show the viewers what Scandanavia is like.

We also looked for pictures of weapons.  Some of them were axes, spears and swords.  We are going to put these in the video and explain what they are.

The Runes - Planning our video

We have been planning to make a video about the Viking language. First we decided what we wanted to talk about in our video. We decided to talk about the Viking alphabet, Viking place names in England and Viking words that we still use.

We tried to think about how to do our video in an exciting and creative way, not just standing in front of the camera and talking.

Then we went outside to have a look at the playground to see the blackboard to see if we can use it to draw our map on.

When we came back inside we drew pictures to show what our video will look like when we film it in two weeks' time. This is called a storyboard.