Students from King George Community School in Saskatoon have entered a national contest that could win them a trip to Banff.

The Grade 7/8 class spent months filming a three minute video titled, The Story of Grey Owl.

"The challenge was to have a few kids working on one job for a long period of time ... Any kids who weren't working on one of the video jobs were doing research essays about Grey Owl and that's how we got all this knowledge about him," said Jim Klenz, the teacher.

It wasn't discovered until after he died in 1938 that Grey Owl, also known as Archie Belaney, lied about his First Nations heritage. It turns out that Belaney was born in England and lived in many different parts of Canada before settling in Saskatchewan.

"We all found out that he wasn't always a good guy. He was an alcoholic, he was married more than once," said, Michael Shuba-Pritchard a student, who was surprised by what he learned in his research.

Despite this, his passionate writings on conservation and the environment have lived on.

While making the video, Nefrititi Roesler said she learned about this while playing Anahero - the woman who had an eight-year affair with Grey Owl and influenced his work.

"She was trying to convince Archie to stop trapping and killing the beavers because they adopted two baby beavers that Archie found," she said.

The classmates admit they struggled to agree on everything from the script to costumes and set design, but all of them came away from the project with a sense of pride.

Cassydi Turton worked on writing original songs.

"We didn't get them off the internet, like, we made them up. We played them, Mr. Klenz recorded them and we put them on the video," she said.
Shuba-Pritchard was in charge of building the set, a replica of Grey Owl's Cabin.

"Some people have told a teacher, 'is that really Grey Owl's Cabin, did you actually go there?' And no, we all made this and they were really surprised," he said.

Finishing the video was only half the battle. There are 68 other schools competing for the class trip to Banff. Generating support and fans to vote online is their next big task.

People can vote at myparkspass.ca/video-gallery