First Video

Video one is up!

 

 Here is my first video. It is called The Somme. It is about our class's experience in the Somme and our explorations of some of the July1, 1916 mine craters.
The video is on youtube and also in my tourbuilder tour. 
I added annotations to my video that link back to this blog and to my tour. When my next video is up tonight I will link the two videos to each other as well.

Here is the finalized version of the script:

" In September of 2013 the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s Gorgraphy of the Western Front class, led by Professor Joe Hupy, visited France. As the world approaches the centennial of the First world war, our objective was to research, survey and map land that is still scarred from battles that happened one hundred years ago. Our first battlefield was the Somme, over the course of several days we learned about some of the elements that make the post-war landscape of the Somme unique.

July first 1916 is touted as the first day on the Somme of World War One. In the Somme offensive more than a million men were wounded or killed making it one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War.

The Somme Offensive took place in the north of France on the rolling planes of the Picardie region. Picardie is sparse farm country and the terrain looks suited to ancient pre industrial battles. But, according to historian Fred R. Van Harts-  veldt in his book The Battles of the Somme, 1916: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography, the Somme was a proving ground for modern war machinery and tactics.

While tanks and airplanes are the shining stars of the battle of the Somme and the most prominent modern technology used in the First World War, the Somme also featured less famous innovations that have had equal cultural impact.

Those innovations were mining and the moving picture. (Hawthorn mine vid.)

To open the battle of the Somme, the British detonated the largest mines ever used in war. According to a propaganda video made by the British Topical Committee for War Films and filmographer Geoffrey H. Malins, soldiers tunneled under the German lines to place the charges. The tunneling company had to be ever vigilant for German counter mining efforts. Once the charges were place the men returned to the surface and the charges were detonated with an electric current.

The two  largest mines contained 24-thousand kilograms of ammonal. Two mines, the Lochnagar mine, and the Y-Sap mine were detonated at 7:30 am near La Boiselle. The third mine contained 18-thousand kilograms or explosive and was detonated under the hawthorn ridge redoubt. According to Malins in his book, “How I Filmed the War” the hawthorn ridge mine took seven months to construct, but meer seconds to explode. This third mine was detonated at 7:20am. Malins, who was filming on a hand-cranked camera at the time, described the explosion in his book  “The ground where I stood gave a mighty convulsion. It rocked and swayed. I gripped hold of my tripod to steady myself. Then, for all the world like a gigantic sponge, the earth rose in the air to the height of hundreds of feet. Higher and higher

it rose, and with a horrible, grinding roar the earth fell back upon itself, leaving in its place a mountain of smoke.”

After the mining the British troops were ordered “Over the top.” Troops were assured that the mining and bombardments had done all of the work and they just had to march over no man’s land and take the German trenches.  That was not the case. The early explosion of the hawthorn mine tipped off the Germans, and many British were killed or wounded because they entered no man’s land unprepared for a real fight. According to IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM’s Voices of the First World War Podcast, “the casualties” on July 1, 1916, “were the heaviest ever suffered by the British Army in any 24-hour period.”

Today the Somme is still pock marked and scarred with craters and trenches. On our  recent class trip to France we visited both the Lochnagar Crater and the Hawthorn Ridge Crater.

At the Lochnagar Crater there is a small shrine to commemorate the lives lost in the war. Surrounded by farmland, the crater is one of many small memorials in the area. At the Lochnagar Crater the class put up a kite with an infrared camera and a regular camera. The hope was to create a digital elevation model from the pictures but the wind was two strong to take a good picture. 
On the other hand, the Hawthorn Ridge crater is hidden in a stand of trees and unmaintained. There is little evidence from the road that the stand if trees hides part of history’s angry past.

Inside the crater it is clear that the area was shelled many times after the initial explosion.  The hole is so deep that the nearly hundred-year-old trees growing inside barely reach the lip of the crater. The tree cover prevented us from using the kite, but in the crater our class explored the micro topography. The ground is still rutted and hilly. And it is evidsent that incredible force and violence lifted and twisted the earth here.

As we left I was able to capture the hill from a point of view similar to Malin’s famous Hawthorn Mine film.

After our adventure at the Somme our Class moved on to Verdun."

 Next Video: the next video I am working on is the stollen video. The script is shorter, but I am going to let the video do most of the talking.

Script Audio

Script:

" After leaving the Somme, our class ventured to Verdun.

Verdun is south east of the Somme in the historically contested Alsace Lorrain region. While the battle’s for the Somme and Verdun happened at the same time during the same war, the geography of the regions forced the armies into very different style of fighting.                 

While the Somme is a land of flat rolling hills, the terrain around Verdun is a series of cuestas. The city of Verdun lies on the Meuse River, nestled among the ridges and hills and surrounded by forts.

This geography and heavy fortification slowed the advance of the German army. They were forced to dig in and fortify their lines for the long haul.

Even now a hundred years later the ground to the north and east of Verdun is crisscrossed by a large network of German tunnels, and underground command posts.

On our class trip to Verdun we found a small collection of these bunkers------ outside the Village of Azanne-Soumazannes in an area of the forest managed by the French forest service, the Office National de Forets.

We were looking for Professor Joe Hupy’s old research site when we found our first bunker. WE were traipsing through the woods when we found a rocky mound. This was likely a bunker that was destroyed either by shelling or by a grenade. We then found an opening in the ground and decided to go inside.

The entrance to the bunker was small, but it was likely larger when it was in use. Most of the class squeezed head first into the bunker.

Inside was surprisingly roomy. At one end was a collapsed tunnel that likely led to the rubble mound we found earlier in the woods. There were also remnants of communication wires.

We then found Professor Hupy’s field sites. He used a GPS unit with the coordinates to lead us there through the forest.

After looking at the field sites we found some more bunkers.

The entrances to the bunkers were steep and often obstructed with rubble or brush. These bunkers, unlike the first one had much larger openings.

The next bunker that I explored had a very steep entrance. I was trying to steady myself on an tree and I almost fell in. In the entrance there was a very long balck pipe that was possibly used to pump concrete into the bunker from a narrow gauge rail line near by. Inside the bunker we found remenants of what may have been bunk beds or barracks of some sort.

The second bunker we entered is the largest bunker that Professor Hupy said he had ever found.

The tunnels branched in two different directions. In one direction the tunnel was collapsed, but in the other direction the tunnel turned twice and then stretched off into darkness.

Inside most of the bunkers we found remnants and artifacts. There were shovels, bottles, ration tins, and what may have been part of a grenade.

Inside the largest bunker we even found bones, but in closer inspection we decided that they belonged to an animal.

Climbing into these bunkers was dangerous. The entrances are steep and they are filled with debris. SOMETHING SOMETHING CAUTIONARY TALE"

For this video I am struggling with two things:

1. Do I include in the video the GPS data over Google Earth images, or should I put that in my tour builder and have the video display at that tour stop. Or both?
2.  I feel like I should include a "do not try this at home" warning at the en d, but I would like some help phrasing it. 

My plan is to put together the video and audio tonight.

Up Next:

1. The Monday after Thanksgiving, I will have my third video finished. It will be about the Forts around Verdun. 
2. That day I would also like to gat video of the class to make a reflection video. 
3. The following Monday I would like to have the reflection video finished. 
4. As I finish the videos I will be updating my tourbuilder accordingly.
5. I will also be adding many more pictures to my tourbuilder tour to flesh out the project more and give the viewer more stuff to look at. 
6. As I upload the videos I will link then between each other, back to my blog, to the website and to my tour.