“So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”
Welcome to the world of PLP Macbeth filmmaking, where fake blood gets on everything, disagreements are easily instigated, and props get lost in random forests. As our enormous and complex major project for this last term, we were asked to create a 20 minute feature film that tells the story of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in the context of WWII. Not only is this a challenge in itself, but we had to work as a class of 25 teenagers, and lets just say that it’s been quite a challenge. To put this all into perspective, we had months to finish it all, and we failed at even producing an end for our movie.

Don’t get me wrong, the project wasn’t always going downhill. There were times where things actually went smoothly, like at the beginning when the idea of the project was fresh and cool, and we were super excited to collaborate as a class. Ideas were bouncing and everyone began their roles working hard and diligently. But then, things began to take a turn for the worst.

I guess things first began falling apart when we picked the roles of the different departments, and had people who wanted certain roles not speaking up. This lead to people being unhappy with their role and beginning an uprising off sorts against the people in power. This resulted in major beef and hatred between classmates.

Our communication sucked! Like immensely! Every time we would sort out a time to film, whether it be in class, or outside, people who said they could come, either were late, or just didn’t freakin show up. And to those of us who actually showed up when we said we would, it showed how little those people had committed to the project. Even if we weren’t specifically needed that day, showing up to help out with extra things would have been good an improvement. I think we needed to create better timelines, schedules, and a list of people we needed, way earlier in the project process, so that we were completely prepared to film in the later dates.

Although there were many ways to improve production, all the different departments worked hard at attempting to make the production a success. All the levels of effort put in, were different depending on what people were working on. I was a part of the script department, turning the storyline, that Luciano and Matthew S wrote, into a full screenplay script. When I was choosing my role, I thought script would be a manageable challenge that I could enjoy and thrive at. And at times it was just this, and other times, it was kind of like a nightmare. Sometimes I felt like all the hard work us script writers were putting into the project was being overlooked by other who assumed it was easy to create a story from scratch. But I believe that this is exactly how other groups felt during the project, like all the work they were completing was going down the drain. This was all due to communication problems, lack of empathy towards each other, and the fact that our work as a class was disorganized.

 

Even though the project didn’t turn out as we’d hoped, doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun. It was kinda awesome to attempt working altogether and testing how it works. I loved being part of a movie production and having all the different departments, almost like a real production would. Overall it was a crazy, strange, terrible, awesome experience that, like many others in PLP, won’t be forgotten.

(Here’s a behind the scenes look at our production…)