Hello everybody and welcome back to the first blog of Grade 12! To start the year off we have been studying the well known Shakespeare play in the Taming of the Shrew. The Taming of the Shrew is a play about a woman in the Elizabethan era who is a complete outsider of her town and not liked by anyone. Until one day when a man comes down from out of town and is payed handsomely to marry and “tame” her. In the original Shakespearean story, he does end up taming her and making her into the traditional wife of the era. However it now being 2019, the ending to the story doesn’t entirely make sense anymore. So in small groups we were given an act and a time period, and had to convert said act to said time period in an animation. My group was given Act II in the 1920s:

As you can hopefully tell our goal was to turn Kate into a flapper girl. A flapper girl was someone who didn’t want to marry really early like the rest of the women of the time period. They wanted to go out and have fun, flappers were often seen partying during this very exciting time period. We tried to portray this in both Kate’s outfit, as well as her script. She was dressed up in a very flamboyant dress. Nothing inappropriate because that wasn’t what the time period, however it was very colourful and not very long.

The media requirements for this project was to make a short animation. This was completely new for almost every single one of us here in the PLP 12 class. Since I’m usually someone good with technology and video effects, etc, it was assumed that I could probably do a good animation by both my group and myself. I challenged myself to try using Adobe’s animation software with the original title of “Animate”. However annoyingly even though it looks very similar to other adobe products such as photoshop and illustrator, it worked completely different. None of my shortcuts worked and it was much harder to cut stuff out. This put a giant wrench in my side as I had expected myself to be able to do something very cool with the animation. However the first draft which I was mostly responsible for did not end up being that great. My interpretation of it was that I had done well making the characters look even better than they already did, however the animation itself wasn’t much different from something I could do in Keynote.

When it came to our second and final draft we decided to more app smashing. We still used animate to create a base for the video, but we also used explain everything to make each scene feel more alive. I definitely think this was a good idea and made our animation much more bearable to watch.

Here’s our first draft:

With this being the PLP program, there was much more to the unit then two drafts of an animation. One of the big themes of the unit was talking about classics and what makes one. So after watching the Bard on the Beach’s rendition of Taming of the Shrew as well as studying the play a bit more ourselves, we had to write an essay on whether we thought the play was a classic or not. We weren’t allowed to do the simple process of saying that the play was a classic because it was written by Shakespeare, so we had to use real examples of what makes a classic and how those apply to Taming of the Shrew. I decided that the play was a classic due to the nature of how it is relevant to multiple generations and likely always will be.

Another side assignment we had along the way was a form of multimedia explaining women’s roles in our assigned time period for our animation. This meant making some form of video talking about what it was like for women in the 1920s. Using lots of the research my group and I had already done for our animation, I was felt that I had a solid understanding of women during this time period. Here is my video:

For a unit on Shakespeare I really didn’t find this one too bad. I’ve always preferred socials over English and with this being a predominantly English unit I feel like I got a lot out of it. Also there were some important social studies aspects to the unit as well in looking at women’s roles through history. I found out in this unit just how much my voice had improved over the course of my time in PLP. When reading out my script for the first draft I just felt comfortable, which for me is very unusual. I didn’t really struggle reading the old language either, it just came out really smooth. So that’s something that impressed myself this unit. I hope these skills come in handy when I’m running press conferences as the general manager of some baseball team in the future!