What does the cold war and a Shakespear play have in common? While this sounds like a really obscure question it’s part of what we set out to learn about in our recent project on Macbeth and the 1950s. 

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Shakespeare but when we went through the play act by act in class, I got a good impression of “Macbeth”, the 1623 play by William Shakespeare. We were mainly tasked with breaking apart the film to understand characters and their roles in the story.

We also watched a lot of different films clips. There is a surprising amount of remakes in film with drastically different tones and styles. I really liked how much divergence there was with the films, even though they were all based off of the same text everyone perceives it in a different way. 

This was all building up to our project, our own interpretation of macbeth but with a twist. Ours was to be set in the 50s but retaining the same rough plot and ideas.

We had been actively researching the 50s over the course of the entire project so we had a lot of material to work with. Even then, this project on hindsight was a massive undertaking as our whole class worked together to create one film.

We were very organized and right off the bat after formulating what direction we should take the story in we were split into groups based off of what we were working on. While the job didn’t seem like too much work at the time, being in charge of the music in the post production group would really turn out to be a hassle later on. 

But we didn’t need the soundtrack, for a few months at least so I had some time to help with other things, like my least favorite part of the whole thing, the acting. 

Now I didn’t hate the acting itself but because we were set in the 50s my hairstyle would not work with the setting. So for the sake of historical accuracy, every shoot I needed to get my hair gelled. I really do not intend on doing that again. 

The shoots were organized by location with certain people needing to be there on certain days to help with things like lighting and filming, as well as whoever had a part on that day. I only needed to go to Luca’s house as I played a very minor character. What surprised though was just how many re takes we did. We must have spent hours doing only a few scenes before we got them to an acceptable level and the whole process was tiring but also really fun.

Our filming was sadly cut short by illness with our lead and the planned post break filming being cancelled by covid so we couldn’t film the whole movie. Instead we took what we had to make a shortened version.

I still needed to make the music so I spent some time trying to get that going. I’m not too proud of the end product, I think if I had more time spent understanding the film and seeing the footage I could have gotten a better feel for tone and had some more inspiration. I’d say that the final music I put out is a 3/5 and could use some re doing so if we pick it back up again in September which I’m pretty sure is whats gonna happen then I might remake certain aspects.

Overall it was a fun project before it was prematurely cut off, even with the hairgel.