It is finally time for me to reflect on the entire Shakespeare project. For the last month we have done quite a bit on the topic of Shakespeare, this includes multiple podcast episodes, script writing and reading, and even creating a modern version of Romeo and Juliet. Overall I have had a lot of fun with this project, I was a bit confused when I first heard about the project but as we progressed through I found I actually enjoyed what we were creating for this topic. This post would be very long if I was to go through everything we did so I’ll just go through the important parts. Enjoy

To get a grip of what the project was our first task was to rewrite the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet to fit a different audience. For me I thought it would be cool to try and rewrite it so it fit an athletic audience. I switched up the names of the houses for popular brands and changed the location to match the sports theme. During this I got a good understand of what the original Romeo and Juliet play was about and what order the events happened in. This was important for me because I have never read or watched the play so I had no idea what it was about, besides things like characters.

Now we hit the major part of the project. This was the part where we started to look at why we are learning about Shakespeare in the first place, why is his work something we look at even though it is 400 years old? To answer this question I teamed up with Alex and Matthew to create a co-hosted podcast that explains why Shakespeare’s work is considered a classic, and also to explain what an adaptation is and what types of adaptions have come from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 

 

We split these two topics into two separate podcast episodes. During our discussions is where I think I learned the most about our project. As we did created the podcast we also had to relate Shakespeare back to our main podcast topics, mine of course is about sports but Alex and Matthew’s were much more different than mine. I thought it was interesting hearing how their topics connected back to Shakespeare. We also did research on Romeo and Juliet and and found not only some interesting adaptions based on the play, but also some cool facts on Shakespeare, did you know that he is the creator of the knock-knock joke, well that is something we found during our recording for the first episode. Of course this podcast wouldn’t be any fun if it was just us listen off facts so we always joked around when creating the podcast which created a better environment for us to record and overall made our podcast fun.

I would say that during the podcasts is where I learned the most about Shakespeare and is plays. If you want to hear more about those episodes and how they went then be sure to check out this post  Podcast Post

After the podcasts was another difficult step. We were split into four teams and told to create a modern Romeo and Juliet play in one week. Now it sounds like a lot but when you split the work between four teams who each have their own tasks, it’s a lot less than you would think. I was put in the technical team and our job was to be in charge of the sound effects, mic’s, music, and how we were going to broadcast the performance.  I wrote a whole bunch more on our teams and things like that, if you want to read it check out THIS post.

In the beginning I thought our group was doing very well, we had everyone sharing their ideas and we had some really good ones as well. However when it came to dress rehearsals we realized that we in fact were lacking a lot of sounds and music. The problem was that we were to restricted to our own beliefs of what sounds should be included, we thought that the sounds had to relate directly to what was happening in the performance. We learned from our teachers and other teams that we needed to think about sounds that anything could make, for example in the play when the say “ saucy boy” we should have a funny sound to go with that word.

another obstacle we over came is when we were told to cut almost all of our music. We had focused on our music and some of our more talented musicians ( myself not included) had even created multiple pieces that were to be played during the show. This was definitely something we had to work hard to get around, but in the end I think it was better for the play overall.

With this helpful information we were able to add more and more sounds that highlighted characters, words, and important parts of the play as well.

Then we final made it to our show. I think I was the most concerned about our show about four days before as we did not have many sounds, the script did not make sense, and we had only practiced once or twice. However days before the show I became less concerned as I could see the play coming together. After many more rehearsals and honest critique we finally made it to our final performance, and we did great. I honestly don’t know how we got it together so quickly but I’m glad we did, and I think overall it was a very good show. I was proud in the work that our class produced, but I was more proud of the sound team and how much better we got as time went on.

Overall I think I that I learned as much about Shakespeare as I did working with a team. During this project I learned why Shakespeare is important and how it affects us in our everyday lives. I was also able to figure out how to best work/ manage a team in order to create a performance that is able to entertain audiences of this age, which I thought would be much tougher to do when first reading the play. I also was able to help create a modern Romeo and Juliet that I thought was actually quite good. 

that’s all for now.