Hello and welcome back! We have just finished a project on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  With only 15 classes to start and finish this project it ended up being pretty short. The driving question for this project was “How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?”. I answered that by creating my own adaptation of one Romeo and Juliet scene. 

When we were first introduced to this project we were given a theme book to complete as we read Romeo and Juliet. In this theme book there was a spot to put evidence from the text as well as a spot to define what the text was trying to say. As we read Romeo and Juliet I felt I did a good job at keeping the theme book updated and completed ahead of time so that I was not rushed. While we were doing the reading, I made sure to take notes on things that stood out to me to bring into my theme book later on. I feel this is one of the key things that helped me stay on task as I already had all the information written and just had to input it into my theme book. Then later on we used what we already had written in our theme books and connected each part to a movie adaptation that we later on watched in class.

Within the acts I was able to find specific topics throughout. Some of those include Honour and Obligation, The Naivety of Youth, The Power of Love and Hate, and Violence & death which I talked about in my theme book. 

As this project was quite short we only read a few scenes in each act of Romeo and Juliet. In between scenes we had class discussions to build a complete understanding of the text. While we were reading I had the chance to volunteer to read one of the characters lines. I am super happy that I volunteered as this was a good way to practice my public speaking. 

To extended our learning even further we watched adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. The two we watched in class were Gnomeo and Juliet as well as Warm Bodies. There were also other adaptations provided like West Side Story and Romeo + Juliet. Although I only got around to watching the two in class I still feel I was able to connect them well to my theme book writing very well to show my sophisticated learning. Like I already mentioned I think my theme book turned out very good and I am happy with my learning.  

Once understanding the key scenes in Romeo and Juliet we were able to move onto the final product pretty quickly. This was creating an adaptation of one of the acts in small groups. Once we were given our groups we had to decided which Act we wanted, my group chose Act II balcony scene. After brainstorming ideas we ended up going with the modern theme of technology focusing specifically on Snapchat. We then were able to start writing an idea pitch along with a storyboard and log line. After being approved we started to film and although the rainy weather was not on our side we still managed to get the shots. My group and I ended up having to re-shoot some of our scenes but once that was done we got to editing. In the end we successfully accomplish our adaptation of the balcony scene. I feel if given more time we could have shown an extended level of learning by using more of our resources like apps used in past projects. 

In conclusions I was able to improve my collaboration skills, my creative writing skills and also a bit of my public speaking skills throughout this short project. I feel that the work I completed shows my learning. Anyways, thanks for reading this post and I will be back with more soon!

-Makenna