Hello and welcome or welcome back to my blog. The first semester of our 2022-23 year has come to a close, and with that, our new project. This project was on the shorter side and was called Romeo Romeo, Why are We Still talking About Romeo and Juliet? And as you can probably assume it was centralized around Hamlet of course! We read/watched a lot of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (which is actually what this project is about if you haven’t caught on) and a couple of adaptations to understand how we can modernize the situations presented.
Final product
Our final goal for this project was to create a film of a modernization of a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Through this project, we worked on analyzing text, and parts of a story. We learned about things like plot, conflict, and theme. To help us learn how to analyze text, we worked toward the driving question “How has William Shekespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling”
To kick off this project, we completed the first Keystone called “The Themebook”. The Themebook was a place to record the information that we were bringing in while reading and watching Romeo and Juliet, or the adaptations we worked with. During class, we would read a brief summary of the act, and then we got a few people to read the lines for some of the characters (with Harris narrating of course).
In addition to just summarizing what we read/spoke about, we noted what topic or topics were shown in each act. This helped us look at the text in the right light before making a whole rant to summarize. It kind of set the stage for the perspective on which our summary was set.
There was a section at the bottom of each act to link the adaptations we were watching and talking about, which were Warm Bodies and Gnome & Juliet. It was often difficult to categorize certain parts of these movies into one o the themes because they are in a different format than the original screenplay. I also watched A West Side Story, but I did it later in the project, to where I was too lazy to put it into my theme book. I really liked that film, because it was the most “modern, but realistic” version I watched.
Because of the limiting length of this project, once we were done with the theme book, we moved right into the final product of this project. The final product was a short skit based on a modernization of one of the scenes from the 4 acts. I was grouped with Nolan, Theryn, Dana, and Sylas.
The scene we chose was the scene where Juliet fakes her death. It was interesting to start because of the number of different ideas everyone had. While lots of people had good ideas I think Theryn’s was the best. Because it made the most sense for a parody video. The filming process went swimmingly because everyone had a role to do and they did it. For example, Sylas had a professional camera, and a photography mind he knew what we needed in terms of angles, etc. In terms of improvement, I think we could have improved the length of our video, and we also could have implemented the 3 act story arc. As we didn’t have an exposition or a very good falling action.
To answer the Driving Question. In case you forgot “ How has William Shekespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling.” I think the answer is: Romeo and Juliet has and will remain relevant because of its central themes of love, conflict, and tragedy. These relatable themes along with the story of young lovers, make Romeo and Juliet a timeless classic for the ages.
Thanks for reading da blog. See y’all Monday, May 24 2032.