A classic piece of literature is defined as “To be generally agreed upon as a classic, works meet some common high standards for quality, appeal, longevity, and influence.” In this time many pieces of writing are considered a classic for those very reasons however what does this say about the people and culture at the time of being written. Well to start off the school year, way back in July we were given a classic novel to read over the same so we could get our minds thinking about the very subject. I decided to read (and was the only one to do so) A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.

Once we had finished reading we then wrote a paragraph reflecting on why it is a classic. Reflecting on why it was a classic was then a good lead into the next section of this unit, reading and looking into The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare.

We started reading the play as well as looking into women in the time period because that is a key point to understanding this play as it is all about context.

In order to further understand the play we also went to Bard on the Beach, and saw how the shrew could be interpreted to a different time period.

While we were reading/studying the taming of the shrew we were also looking into how women were viewed and treated throughout different time periods. We looked into these things because we would be put into groups, and assigned to an act to recreate. I was put in a group with Mimi and Ethan and we were assigned act five which in other words is the “grand finale”.

In order to find out a suitable time period to reenact the play we then briefly researched 5 different time periods. My group ended up with the 60’s era because the whole class agreed that we wanted to liberate Kate unlike the original script.

Once we had researched and saw what we wanted to include in our interpretation of this scene it was then time to start actually creating our animation. At the time we were daunted by the fact that we had to animate things since all of us in our group did not feel we were good at animation. So to face this task we decided to all work on the animation so we could make it equal and all learn.

We started off by reading our entire scenes script and cutting out large portions of it. We thought that cutting down the script would be needed because we didn’t want a half hour animation.This process took quite some time however once we were done we were all happy with the results and the time we estimated our animation would take. Before we even started animating though, the only sensible PLP thing to do was create a storyboard. So over a weekend as a group we were able to complete our storyboard. The amount of time and effort we put into this story board I feel really shows in our work which makes me proud. We included everything from the exact seconds to what each character would be doing as they talked.

Next once we knew what we wanted to happen in each scene it was finally time to start animating! This was difficult to split up between the three of us as we were animating over the weekend and wouldn’t be able to meet up to work on it and exchange the file. However we were able to problem solve this and the solution ended up being that Mimi does the first scene, I do the second scene and Ethan works on the audio as well as characters. Though we had put in lots of time into this first draft I would not say that we exceeded in the least bit. That being said this first draft allowed us to see what we still needed to cut and how we did want to animate it. Here is that first draft:

As you can see that first draft there were many downfalls however it gave us a good idea. After reflecting on this first draft as a group we came to the conclusion that scene 1 was not necessary to the point we were trying to get across, so we cut it! We also realized after looking more closely that the characters had a white outline around them which distracted the audience from what the characters are saying, so we split up the work and redid the animation using those images. With all of these changes and a few more smaller ones we finally came up with a finished product that we are proud of, so here it is:

Overall this project was a very interesting one to start off the year with. I liked learning all about how literature throughout time has lasted and what makes a piece of text a classic. I also found it interesting how women’s roles throughout history have changed and just to be able to go more depth then we have in previous years I found very interesting and useful.