Here is my recommended song for this post.
So, we are back for the school year (my last in PLP) and to kick it off we started with some heavy English work. Now I, personally, am not the most English oriented person so to start the school year off like this was not my idea of fun. Despite that it turned out to have some high moments.
Here we have the final project which is an animation taking the original Shakespeare script of The Taming of the Shrew and doing alterations to reflect the historical perspective of women in a different time period. As you can probably tell (hopefully) our time period was the 1920’s. More on that later though, first we are going to start at the beginning.
We hit the ground running at the beginning of the school year. Before coming to school we had to read a classic. We were given a list of books to chose from, we had to read through it and look for aspects that make the novel a classic. Once we got back we wrote a paragraph defining if we thought it was a classic and why.
Classic novels have some common aspects that make it a classic, from lasting the test of time to being a work of literary art. Stanley Park, although a recently published book, incorporates qualities that make it a classic. The story has a variety of aspects that make it a universally appealing novel. It includes relationship struggles, ethics and anthropological ideas that force the reader to think deeper into the way people act in different environments. The two main aspects of the story explore the main character’s culinary career and his father’s anthropology research in the city’s enormous park. Both parts intertwine at a grand opening for the new restaurant manned by the main character. He realizes that his father’s work in anthropology is very similar to his style of cooking “Blood cooks were respectful of tradition, nostalgic even. Canonical, interested in the veracity of things culinary, linked to “local” by the inheritance or adoption of a culture, linked to a particular manner and place of being.” His father is researching what moves people, specifically why people go to live in the local park. From this research the main character begins to adopt the traditions of the people living in the park and cooks their ingredients, from raccoon to squirrel. The underlying themes from this main plot line can evoke a variety of responses to different people but they all force the reader to think and question how people act when presented with new environments. The idea of a classic is to share a message that reaches each reader.
The classic I chose was a fairly new book but it still had some strong aspects that made it a modern classic. It had some very universal themes that are current to today and will be for many years to come. It highlighted the ethics of cooking and what animals are ok to cook and serve and which ones are not. I found it really interesting to see that, because I do eat some more unique animals, like geese and grouse. Many people wouldn’t really want to eat those birds and that’s a really modern issue with veganism and all of the environmentalism around it.
After we completed the paragraph we began to look more at the overall unit we were doing. We haven’t done any Shakespeare since Grade 8 and it was bound to come along again. This time in The Taming of the Shrew. On top of looking at the play we were also looking at the roles of women in different moments of history and how that’s reflected through media. We began by looking at literature and other media from different time periods and how they reflect women’s roles in society and the expectations they had.
Then we went on our first field trip of the year. We went to go see The Taming of the Shrew at a local theatre, Bard on The Beach. This version of the play had been altered into a new setting, time period and script. It was set in the American West in the 1870’s. They also changed the script as some of the actors wouldn’t have been apart of the production if it had reflect the views of Elizabethan England. If you were to read the original script it would come across as very sexist in today’s perspective.
The play, overall, was pretty entertaining. The one thing I personally struggled with was the language. Most of it went in one ear and out the other just because of the speed and how much I wasn’t used to the language Shakespeare used.
After we went to the play we started to go through the actual script and start to try to decipher it, at least certain parts and aspects of it. We watched two movies as well that are more modern reenactments of the original play. The first was the 1967 film named “The Taming of the Shrew”. It wasn’t changed all that much from the original script so it is the main visual material for studying the play. The second movie we watched was a more modern take the play. A lot of the script was modernized and changed to reflect the current time period. This one was called “ 10 Things I Hate About You”. I found this one to be really helpful in seeing a very different version of the play. They still used the events but did very modern takes on them and heavily changed the script. It was pretty much what we had to do for our main project. But before we discuss that we had two more assignments to do before.
First was an essay. This goes back to the paragraph we started the year with about classics. We now had to explain why The Taming of the Shrew was a classic, or wasn’t. We had to delve deeper into a specific aspect of the criteria of classics and try to explain, using various sources, why the play was a classic. I wanted to focus on how the play has stood the test of time through its themes. I did research on the various editions of the play over time and the differences between how the directors took the original play and changed it. There was a definite parallel to what we were doing in class with how the play reflects the social norms of the time it was performed.
The other assignment we had, was a multi-media reflection on the historical perspective of women during the time period our group was assigned for our final project. My group’s time period was the 1920’s.
In the past we have covered the 20’s only briefly. So I found it really great to do some fresh research and it was really interesting. The 20’s was a time for a bit of revolution in the roles of women. In the past they didn’t really have much of a voice and they were expected to work towards marriage and then hold a household and raise their children. The 20’s saw women gain the role to vote which gave them more of a say in what they did. The world saw them in a different light. Women had more of a say with who and when they married which lead to higher divorce rates as well as many women choosing to stay single longer.
Now it’s time for the final project. I’m sure you can piece together what we were supposed to do for our final assignment. We had to create an animation using an act from The Taming of the Shrew to reflect the historical perspective in a given time period.
It was a pretty open ended project in the sense that we could do whatever we wanted with the script, how we did the animation and how we went about reflecting the time period. This was done in groups, I was with Ryan, Sofia and Chiara.
We began by doing research on the time period, partially to help with our multi-media assignment but also to gain perspective on the social norms of the time and what the societal roles of women were. From there we began to edit the script and work on the story board. The script was the most challenging aspect of the project. At least I found it to be. Mostly due to me not being all that familiar with Shakespeare language. It was difficult to tweak the script to still depict the events of the act but to change it to reflect the different perspective. We did some rough editing on it before we put together the story board.
After we completed the story board we began to work on the first draft. I went through the script once more, doing a few more edits. Meanwhile the rest of the group was working on our characters and animation. We used Adobe Animate to create the first draft. What we didn’t predict was the amount of work goes into it. It took Ryan, 45 minutes for each character to turn it into a workable vector within the program. So it was a real struggle to get it all together in time. When the due date rolled around there wasn’t much animation, mostly just character entrances and exits.
That was the biggest thing to alter for our final draft. Also to tweak the script much more. That was my job. For the first draft I left a lot of the original script as I didn’t really know what to do with it. After getting seeing what the other groups did I got a better sense of how to try to go about it. I cut out a lot of various aspects and changed a giant section in the act, shortening it but also changing it to reflect the 20’s and what was going on at the time. Then I also put together our animations. I was up in Kelowna this last weekend touring UBCO and in the car I turned up the music and got to work. I used Explain Everything to do the animating. I’ve had a lot of successful experiences with the app and I find it a really good resource to have. After a couple hours, a visit with my grandma and a full day of touring the campus I had the animation complete.
Overall, this wasn’t my most favourite unit but I found it a good start to the year. It established, for me, what I need to work on. I mostly need to focus on my writing skills, transferring those ideas I have onto paper, backed with solid evidence from other sources than my thoughts. So moving forward I want to really focus on that with the next few units to see where that will take me. I also found this unit to be a good sense of what the year will look like, in expectations and class dynamics. I’m really looking forward to some really interesting topics and working and developing my skills to head off to post-secondary. Hopefully I don’t scream while I get through the next unit. It’s horror and I get scared easily.