Group Project

Throughout the months of being in the Capstone Project, my group and I have faced many trials and errors. Firstly, we discovered how broad and far reaching the topic of food security is, especially throughout the strong and tight-knit network here in Whitehorse. Because of this, we needed to put effort into narrowing down our focus within the project. Secondly, our group has now become a team of 2 after Ali left the program – now it’s just me and Nedaa. Since Nedaa is an online student in Alberta, a lot of ground work has had to be done by me, while decision making has been made through our intricate discussions over Zoom, and Nedaa has engaged in interviews and meetings through Zoom for us. Thirdly, our project has become highly focused on Beaver Creek, the second most remote community in the Yukon. Once we found out Beaver Creek hasn’t been discussed as widely as some community members would hope, we decided it was important to shine a spotlight on them through our work.

Here’s an early record of the food project, which shows how overwhelming the narrowing down process was from the beginning:

After I collected this information, we began to realize how difficult it was to narrow down a specific focus within the topic of food security. This began our process of delving deeper into how we wanted to approach the topic, as well as the ethics behind it. We wanted to get a good perspective from remote communities in the Yukon – but in order to do so, we had to figure out the most ethical way without being intrusive to the communities. We brainstormed several approaches to resolving this before landing on one, all of which helped to slowly patch up the rabbit hole we had began with.

After considering the most ethical way to get a human perspective on dealing with food insecurity in the north, we thought we landed on a decision when we came across Voices Influencing Change, a YAPC initiave dedicated to training people with lived experience to share their stories. Because members of the program are trained and certified to tell their personal stories in poverty and homelessness, they are used to being open about their situation with the public – thus taking away a layer of ethics concerns. While I pitched our idea at a Voices meeting (thanks to Kristina at YAPC), and while we did hear of some interested candidates to interview, by this time we had already discovered what our focus was going to be. After talking to Meesha, the Comprehensive Community Planner in White River First Nation, we came up with a game plan to interview locals out in Beaver Creek, as a means for Meesha to share their voices when pitching their Food Sovereignty Program for funding. While Meesha has worked tirelessly to make plenty of things happen with this program, there are limited resources she has to work with at times. Getting the work they’re doing in Beaver Creek to become more recognized is one way to combat this issue, so they can have a far reaching network and supports.

In order to assure we had the right approach, Nedaa and I decided to get in touch with the Ethics Coordinator at the YukonU over Zoom, when I was visiting her in Calgary. While they usually deal with ethics issues related to research projects, we felt it was appropriate to bounce our idea off of them to assure we weren’t crossing any lines into research territory with our questions. Through this, and through Meesha’s direction in writing up interview questions for locals, we came to a nice middle ground on how to approach the interviews, which discussed food security issues in Beaver Creek without getting too intrusive.

Beaver Creek Roadtrip

On Friday, March 17th, I met Meesha in Haines Junction so we could drive to Beaver Creek together. Our journey came with a few setbacks, such as the fact that we’d originally planned for Thursday the 16th (which was halted by a snowfall), and getting stuck in the snow in Haines Junction. We found a local who was happy to patiently help us out, thankfully! We headed on to Beaver Creek, where the air pressure gave me a killer headache for the night. The next day is when the magic started happening.

On the Saturday, we started interviewing locals. First, we went over to Annette’s place, a member of Voices Influencing Change. She had two elders with her, who were keen to participate as well. The background noise such as her puppy barking, and people opening and closing the door to take care of the dogs, made it difficult to get clear audio at times. Despite this barrier, we got pretty good interviews from the three of them. After this, we headed over to interview an elder who was watching her grandchildren for the day. The toddler was also a bit disruptive, but it seemed to bring a certain charm to the interview! (We still don’t have a permission form from the kids’ mom, so we may not be able to use that interview, unfortunately – unless Meesha sends it over immediately.) After that, we interviewed two girls who have grown up in Beaver Creek – one who’s a teenager, going to highschool in Whitehorse, and one who’s in Elementary School in Beaver Creek. They both seemed pretty keen to be a part of the project!

On Sunday, I took B-Roll around the community on a bit of a time limit. Meesha and I drove around to spots that she thought would be good to showcase while she was running last minute errands. We’d hoped to get shots inside one of the stores, or of Buckshot Betty – a well-known storeowner out there – but unfortunately she wasn’t around, and nobody was there to give us filming permission inside of the store. After this, I got the interview with Meesha done, but I forgot to change the camera settings to 29.97 fps from 59.97 fps… Which I’m hoping to be able to edit in Premiere Pro. Along the drive home (which by the time we got to we had very little time left), I took shots of some of the road conditions, signs, weather protection devices along the road, and more.

Over all, the trip was short-lived and informative. Nedaa and I are currently a little behind on getting the clips together, but we’re working towards it. I’m hoping the footage I captured is good at telling the story we wish to share with our audience, and I hope that the interview Nedaa did with Sara McPhee-Knowles works out well in the video! (There was a lighting error on her camera’s end in the video, and I’m hoping it’s editable so we can use her face at some points.)

Personal Project

As for my personal project in the Capstone class, I’ve been working on animating my digital illustrations into GIFs, or learning how to turn them into SVGs so I can show the in-depth detail I’ve put into them, alongside the poetry a lot of them contain. Originally I was hoping to animate them more than I currently have, but I’ve learned that using web design tools is a slow learning process at times. My most recent Illustrator piece is something that took a lot of trial and error in the end, because the SVG wasn’t showing all of the elements in the illustration. Details were lost, and I had to figure out why and how in order to fix them. I discovered it was because PNGs and rasterized elements don’t work in SVGs – only vector shapes work. To fix this, I had to redo several parts of my illustrator piece. The ripple effects were something I couldn’t figure out, but I think it’s because it’s font that I created outlines from, then compressed the shape of. For some reason, the lines don’t show up nearly as bright as the rest of the image… which is a design flaw I’ll consider moving forwards.

Depending on how hyper-focused I get on the website this week, I may delve further into animation methods with them, through a tool such as SVGator – but I need to be aware of the time I have. This would be a great skill to have, but the most important thing is making sure I get all of my assignments done – and in my “humble” opinion, my Illustrator artwork and the GIFs I’m making from them show how much skill I have gained in creating detailed, intricately shaped, and well designed digital artwork – which I think is something to celebrate in and of itself.

Conclusion

As a whole, the Capstone project has come with a lot of barriers on time, patience, brainstorming, YukonU ethics, and much, much more. Considering we still haven’t finished some of the Multimedia classes that would help us to implement the kind of work we’re doing in the Capstone, it’s been a lot of learning as we go. I’m not expecting it to be perfect in the end whatsoever, but I’m hoping our efforts, and the work we put into it, shines through clearly.