💘 In the Fair Halls of Seycove, Where We Lay Our Scene…

In fair Seycove Secondary, where we lay our scene…

We just finished a project on William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” In this project we created a theme book to analyze the play and worked in small groups to film a modern day adaptation of the play. I got the pleasure of working with Makenna, Alicia and Max to create this recreation of Romeo and Juliet:

Our driving question for this project was:

How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?

My theme book provides an excellent answer to this driving question, but to summarize: themes from Romeo and Juliet can be seen in many movies today such as Warm Bodies, West Side Story and Gnomeo and Juliet, just to name a few.

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The first and second Keystones were rolled into one assignment: a theme book analyzing the themes in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as connections to adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, like West Side Story and Warm Bodies. I initially struggled with this assignment trying to find themes and expand on them. That being said, I am very happy with my final theme book. In order to make our theme books, we got to read the play. Thankfully, Mr. Harris made summaries of the less important scenes so that we could get through the play quickly as we only had 2 weeks to do this entire project. We read the play in class with different people reading the roles of different characters, which I feel was much more entertaining than it would have been to read it on our own time. We then watched Gnomeo and Juliet and Warm Bodies in class, which I really enjoyed. We then found scenes in our theme books to connect them to. I believe that this assignment was a great way for us to show our ability to improve upon the curricular competency “Questioning: I can share ideas, ask questions, and research information from a variety of sources.” It was very interesting to see how much Romeo and Juliet has influenced the themes of so many romance stories.

⬇️ Tap below to read my theme book ⬇️

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Keystone 3 was to work in groups to brainstorm, script, storyboard and film our own modern adaption of Romeo and Juliet. I was pleased to be grouped with Alicia, Makenna and Max.

We decided to make an adaptation of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. We decided to make a story about two high schoolers – one from a fancy private school and one from a poor public school – who find each other on Snapchat before realizing they go to rival schools. Makenna, Alicia and Max wrote the script while I drew our storyboard.

⬇️ Tap below to read our script ⬇️

⬇️ Storyboard ⬇️

We then filmed, Max played Rowan (Romeo) and Alicia played Jessica (Juliet). I filmed and Makenna directed as well as played a friend of Alicia’s in one of the scenes. Big thanks to Susan, Theryn and Zach for their roles as extras! If you didn’t watch our video at the top of this post, make sure to do so now!

 

In reflection, I wish we could have had more time to film and that we had used something a little nicer than an iPad to film, not to mention our audio….

Overall, I enjoyed learning about Romeo and Juliet, the lasting impacts of it in today’s storytelling and I really enjoyed working with Makenna, Alicia and Max as everyone did their part and I think we all worked really well together. I hope you enjoyed our adaptation of Romeo and Juliet!