What’s the nature of evil? Read on to find out….

Imagine a class project with 25 people…well this year my class didn’t have to imagine it, in fact we had to face it head on.

After Christmas our class began learning about WWII and Macbeth. We’d spend one class going through the play, and the next learning about the key points of World War II. Once Ms. Willemse felt we had enough knowledge to begin our project she assigned it. Of course, the minute she told us what we were to do, the whole class knew it would be a disaster.

Our project was to create a movie of Macbeth, as a class, in the time period of World War II…yes the whole class….working together…on one project. We knew this wasn’t going to be an easy task. Trying to get 25 opinionated teenagers to work together is one thing, but when the thing they’re working on involves outside of class time work it’s a whole other story. We all have extremely busy schedules, but I’ll get to the issues that created later.

This project didn’t go as well as our teachers had hoped, here’s the story.

We started out this ambitious journey ready to face the struggle we knew was ahead. Most of the class believed at the beginning that they were willing and ready to do anything necessary to create a strong product at the end, of course thing don’t always go as planned, people get discouraged and important ideas get forgotten.

The first thing we did, when beginning this seemingly eternal project was create roles for production. We assigned a director, a producer, story boarders, actors, script writers, camera men, editors, costume designers and set designers. I got the role of assistant director and as an actor, but by the end of the project I became responsible for finances.

Our Roles

Then, the story boarders had a few days to come up with a story board, which the writers would then use to write the script. Meanwhile, props and costumes were being made, sets were being designed, actors began learning their lines, and schedules were being written up. While all this was happening I was focusing on figuring out how much each department was going to need, and how much to ask the class for.

Trying to schedule

After a little while of script writing we thought we were ready to film. But that meant finding days outside of school, because 80 minutes is not nearly enough time to set up the cameras and the props, get in costume and get a scene done. So filming was done on the weekends. Of course I wanted to do what I could for this project, but my weekends are 100% full already. I work basically every Saturday and Sunday, and it’s kinda hard to get out of going to work. The one Sunday I did get off throughout the production of the movie was the one Sunday no filming was happening, otherwise I would have gone. The fact that I had to work during the most important part of production made it hard for me to do my part in the project, so I tried to do what I could in school. I hate the fact that I couldn’t help as much as I would have liked to during those long weekend days, and feel bad about not showing up. I did manage to make it to a few after school filming sessions though, where I got to hold umbrellas over cameras and have the script open for any actors who needed their lines.

Costumes!

The filming setup

At one point Ms. Willemse just wanted to scrap it, but being as ambitious as we are we asked for another week. After that week we still wanted more time, and we knew this was going to be a never ending black hole of a project that we could keep working on forever, at the expense of our happiness. But we did want it to amount to something.

In the end we decided to do voice overs to make the movie flow more smoothly and get it over with. Of course, when that will be done no one knows.

I don’t know if Ms. Willemse was expecting such failure or if she believed we would do it, but either way I did learn lots about teamwork and the production of movies. It was eyeopening to see who would step up in such a big project, and who would sit back and just watch it happen.

Of course, the most important thing I learned through all this is: the nature of evil, aka this project.

Behind the scenes: