Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. Today we are going to be reflecting on our most recent PLP project, Hide Your Fires. Based around Shakespeare’s Macbeth or the Scottish play, this project combined our adaptation skills and our film making expertise to create an adaptation of Macbeth set in the 1950’s. This Cold War based Macbeth was made in the form of a short film and was a class wide project. The driving question behind this project was, How might we craft a compelling vision of macbeth set in the 1950’s? With the driving question in mind I am now going to talk about the process of this project and how it helped answer the driving question.
Like all projects this one started with gaining knowledge. This was mainly to gain an understanding of Macbeth and its many versions. Through reading Macbeth as a class we gained an idea of the original version. Once we read the play we look at film adaptations to further our understanding of the play and to give us as a class insight on how we might adapt the play into film. Once we had finished reading the play and watching the movie adaptations we had our first major assignment.
The Macbeth act quest was an assignment for us to choose a quote from the play and connect it to the characters and theme. This was one assignment where I definitely could have done better. One reason I struggled is because I forgot the competencies. I was to focused on the main instructions I wasn’t able to try and use the competencies to create a better product. Because of this lack of competency understanding I wasn’t able to articulate an accomplished level of learning in my first few drafts of the assignment. Through multiple revisions and reviews I was able to complete a much better product. Even though I was able to make a decent final product for this assignment a true accomplished to extending student should be able to meet the criteria for that grade level without revision. If I was to do this assignment again I would have put more effort into seeing the bigger picture and understanding that to go above and beyond I have to look past what is given directly to me.
As this project was a massive class wide effort I think that the product that was clearly the most well thought out and planned was the final product of the film. This effort gave me a whole new hands on perspective of the ways we can answer the driving question. As I was casted as Macbeth throughout the whole production I was on almost every single film set watching and participating in helping craft a compelling version of Macbeth set in the 1950’s. Throughout this process I also realized that the competencies can be expressed through other products than writing. I believe that I actually thought about the competencies when I showed up to film. I tried to use them to give myself a new perspective when I was helping fellow class mates make decisions about the content involved. All this effort and learning has culminated into a final product that I as the main actor is slightly hesitant to show you the audience. To honour my fellow classmates hard work the full movie will be provided below.
With everything in mind from the experiences I had acting to the learning, planning and preparation I did before hand I can confidently state that my answer to the driving question is… To craft a compelling vision of Macbeth set in the 1950’s, we as a class must take great strides to understand and acknowledge the point of view of all parties involved; from keeping true to the original play to the necessary creative ideas from every single person involved.
With this project coming to a close, expect another blog post to come your way once again. Thank you very much for reading and a huge shoutout to all my classmates and my teachers for creating a very interesting and creatively pushing project.