Once a year there comes a time when the PLP class get stuck in the project hamster wheel, meaning the amount of work surpasses the learning. Before, it was (is…it’s ongoing) the Chinatown Podcast, and now it is the Macbeth WWII movie. The Macbeth Movie was a class project with a goal of recontextualizing Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a movie about WWII.
We first had to write a story idea. This was the job of Matthew S. and Luciano. They both came up with some great ideas. Here they are side by side.
Some ideas were mixed together but the storyline we decided to go with was Luciano’s. The next step was to start preparing to film in our roles while the script was being written. Not exactly like a real movie set but pretty close.
As soon as the script crew was done the first half we started to film. It then continued poured rain for all the following film sessions, making it a little harder for our technical crew, but a little easier for continuity.
Here is some of the production behind the scenes.
Looking at the behind the scenes there is a lot going on in the creation of this movie. The quality of the costumes done by Anatolia and Brianna, the quality of the special effects by Matthew D. , the leading roles acted by Chris, Spencer, Michael F, Michael S, Gabi and Zakaria, it was all incredible. So why did it fail in the end? Despite popular belief I personally don’t think the class attitude toward the project was the biggest issue, I believe that everyone had a Growth Mindset towards this project at one point or another, the most immediate example of this was not giving up, we may not have finished what we planned but we still managed to salvage something we can point to and be somewhat proud of. However, the underlying problem is that the success of this project relied heavily on the collaboration of the entire class, and the reason we failed was because a growth mindset was not unanimous. The more immediate setbacks, easier things to pick out, were small things that would be easy to give up on, but with a little more thought they were solvable and dramatically impacted the quality of work. An example of this would be a day when we didn’t have enough props to properly make the set. We only had one sheet for a tent that was supposed to be enclosed. The solution was to film from angles where you couldn’t see the openings, and when the angle had to change we would move the sheet. Other small obstacles like this among other things made for constant collaboration and brainstorming on set. I don’t think this project lacked effort from the class, but when you zoom out to see the bigger setbacks we faced like scheduling conflicts you can see that we lacked flexibility and that was in my opinion the downfall of the Macbeth Movie. Maybe we should’ve called it the Scottish Play.
*There will soon be the actual movie!*