Well we thought that the Macbeth movie experience was over, but we were very wrong.
Our last unit in PLP was all about horror. From books to movies to what makes them scary, we learned it all. The driving question of the unit was: How does horror reflect and comment on our society?
Our first task of the unit was reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. We would have to analyze what makes the story scary and understand the key themes of the book. While Frankenstein is considered a classic, I did not thoroughly enjoy it. The language seemed outdated and it quite honestly wasn’t scary at all. I was able to realize however, why Frankenstein was scary to readers at the time it was written. A book about a Monster and the science of necromancy would have shocked the predominantly religious readers of the 19th century.
Next we watched two classic horror movies: The Exorcist and Halloween. The Exorcist was exactly what I expected, a lot of gross scenes filled with vomit and blood. But as for actual horror, I did not find this movie particularly scary. Yes, it is very suspenseful, but that doesn’t make it horrifying. I just couldn’t picture this happening in real life, which takes away all of the horror for me. Similarly, Halloween was full of suspense and cheap jump scares, but it is not actually horrifying.
In the following weeks we read another book, went to a haunted house, and most importantly, learned about the elements of aversion. These are basically the main things that make horror scary and little did we know that we would have to master these for the project that lay ahead. These are my notes on the elements of aversion:
Finally, we were ready to learn what our project for the unit would be. Want to know how to take the enthusiasm out of a class? Tell them that they have to retry a project that has already failed massively. That’s right, we were assigned Macbeth 2.0: horror version. We would once again have to make a movie as a class with little to no guidance and see how bad it would be. Despite our hesitance to begin this project, we mustered up as much optimism as we could and dove headlong into making the movie.
The first step was applying for what position we wanted to be. Just like in Macbeth I applied for screenwriter. Writing is my biggest strength and it seemed like the job where I would fit the best. Much to my surprise, however, I was assigned the job of editor. Having basically no editing experience I was pretty shocked by this decision, but thought of it as a way to learn some new skills. The one thing that made me upset was the fact that I would have to work on my own. Every single other department had at least two people to share the work, but I would have to work alone. Having just one other person to help me would have lessened my workload immensely.
At first there wasn’t much for the editor to do. I tried to learn as much about editing as I could but as far as actually editing the movie, I couldn’t do anything until I had some footage to work with. I also read over the script and storyboards to help me better understand the story. To be honest though, most of what I did over the first week was watch the project deteriorate in front of my eyes.
There were several things that made this project a failure right from the start. For one, no one paid attention to the storyboards at all. This was extremely frustrating as it made filming take an extremely long time as we all tried to figure out the shots. It also made editing extremely difficult as many of the shits did not match the storyboards I had been given. There was also too much indecisiveness. We would spend such a long time haggling over small details that our time was often wasted. Also, almost every person in the class has a lot of extra curricular activities. This mad it difficult to film outside of school as we were constantly missing people that we needed. This is no one’s fault however, as we all have other commitments that we cannot miss.
In the end, our movie had good parts and bad parts. However, there was one main problem, it didn’t actually fulfill the criteria. Our movie was meant to answer the driving question of the unit about horror and society, which it clearly didn’t. So there’s not much I can say about our answer to the driving question, because we didn’t really have one.
In my opinion, there were also a lot of good things about our movie. I though most people worked really hard and it showed. Making a 25 minute movie in under 2 weeks is almost impossible, and I think we stood up to the challenge quite well. We spent so many hours of our own time working on the movie and that hard work really showed. The acting was really good considering most people had little to no experience, and the sets and costumes were excellent as well. The script and storyboards were very strong and the cinematographers did a really good job getting some great shots. So even though our movie may not have been a success, we all poured everything we had into it, which in my opinion, is what really matters.
As for my contribution, I worked really hard on not just the editing, but the project as a whole. Since I was there for all the filming sessions, I often found myself having to step into other roles. This was frustrating at times but I knew it had to be done.
As for the editing process, I poured hours of my own time into the movie. From editing until 2 am to waking up at 6 am I can’t even count how many hours editing the whole movie took. This was not only because it was insanely long but also because I wasn’t extremely familiar with iMovie.
Well, here’s the movie. Although it might not fulfill the criteria, it still took so much work and I think that is evident:
https://youtu.be/KwD8aCgTo30