An Adaptation of Macbeth

We have just finished another project and with that, it’s time to reflect! In this project, our task as a class was to create a film of Macbeth set in the 1950s that shows appearances often hide a very different reality. The driving question for this project was “How might we craft a compelling vision of “Macbeth” set in the 1950s?”  After completing the project, I can say that we were successful in completing the film and answering the driving question. I’ve learned a lot from this project and from creating a film as a class because I’ve never worked with such a large group of people. It was completely different from any other PLP project we’ve done before.

A major part of this project was reading the play, Macbeth. To gain a better understanding of the story, we completed our Act Quests analysis. After thoroughly reading through the play Macbeth, we had to complete a written analysis of a specific quote from the play to demonstrate our comprehension of the play.

The quote that I chose to write about was “I am in blood, stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as going over.” I wrote about how the quote was significant to the play because it reveals the guilt that is slowly stirring up inside Macbeth. With every revision that I did, my understanding of the plot, character, and theme of the play grew until I had a strong enough understanding of the story that I could combine it with what we’d learned about during the 1950s. Completing this helped us better understand the structure of the story of Macbeth which helped in the creation of our film.

Now my role in the creation of this film was the assistant editor. I was working on a team with Alex and Anders on the post-production team to help bring the film to life with some editing and special effects. It was my first time editing something with a team of other editors and it was a very different experience I learned a lot from.

This whole project involved a lot of communication between many different people. Creating any PLP video assignment with a small group is very different from creating a whole 15-minute film with 26 others. Everyone had their role and job to fill in the film which is why strong communication between all of the groups was so important. As we started with the creation of our film the communication as well, but as we progressed it slowly started to crumble. There were times on the editing team when we were missing clips that weren’t even filmed yet and nobody knew what to do. Nevertheless, we were able to overcome these issues and fix our communications problems towards the end of the project to complete the film.

A great thing that I learned from being a part of the editing team is the importance of multiple opinions. What I immediately realized from working on the editing team that I never thought about before was why it’s so crucial to have multiple editors. Especially for a project as big as this. Alex and Anders were able to catch small details that I never even realized. Along with that, there were some edits that each of us made that we didn’t all agree with which was great because then we were able to come up with something we all agreed with that looked even better. Although it was a bit tedious and took longer to edit this way, I think it really helped with the editing of the film and why it turned out so well. Getting critique on anything is a great thing because sometimes others can notice things that you need to fix that you never thought about. This can be applied to anything you do in life whether it’s editing or writing.

Another thing I’ve learned about editing is that it can be very difficult working together as a team of editors. A lot of the time there was one main film project that was being constantly updated and edited every day. If you didn’t have the latest version of the project, you wouldn’t be able to edit which was a bit of a problem that we faced. We were able to overcome this by splitting up the editing into different scenes and combining each of the scenes into one project at the end. It was a great learning experience and a lesson about teamwork, communication, and cooperation.

Next time if we ever do a project like this again, I feel that we should have had times where everyone group spoke and said what they were working on and needed from other groups because over time people slowly grew more confused and lost with what they were supposed to be doing. I feel that this would have helped fix the communication issues.

Now to answer the driving question of “How might we craft a compelling vision of “Macbeth” set in the 1950s” our final film and the process to complete it is the answer to the question. The first thing that had to happen was research into the story of Macbeth and what was happening during the 1950s. This research was done through the act quest written analysis and the lectures in class that we took zettelkastens on about the Cold War. From this information, we could then construct a basic story outline for the film and separate the work into groups from there. This project couldn’t have been done without the help from every single person in our class who played a very important role in the creation of this film. I’ve ended this project with new valuable skills that I’m going to continue to take with me and build on throughout future projects.