Okay, where to start? This project required a tremendous amount of effort and with this effort came some ups and a lot of downs. When the idea of this project was brought upon the class, everyone had high hopes and did not know the gong show that was ahead of them. The plan was to recreate the Macbeth play or should I say the “Scottish play”. Oh you think it sounds easy, but in PLP no task is this simple. This reenactment came with a twist, to recreate Macbeth but during the World War II era. Here comes my explanation of the Macbeth project crammed into one blog post. Commence the intense debrief: A long time ago in a far far away peaceful PLP room, laid its happy and humble pupils, then the enjoyable play of Macbeth was brought upon our midst.

(Peaceful PLP students in their natural habitat)

At first it was delightful until we randomly started to skip the “non important parts” of the play, and then I was lost. But after a skim of the play I built up some confidence, then a darkness began to surround the classroom, the long and anticipated project of Macbeth. During the beginning, the project didn’t seem too bad, the class had spilt into different so called “departments”. The department I was placed in was videographer and I was joined by Nash. Now jump ahead a couple days, no problems had occurred until now.

(How everyone thought of the project….. and cashel)

Multiple complaints about the script happened. Keep in mind Ms Willemse was away and she told us that we should have started filming days ago and some of the class was complaining about how the script was not finished and why it didn’t flow conversationally. I knew the script would take awhile because it was a huge task to complete, they had to capture the Macbeth play in a 20 minute long movie, with limited help, constant complaining from others, and not to mention they had to change it into the World War II era with the same message being conveyed. After a long and agonizing couple of days, we were able to start filming, I can tell you there were promising results after the first day of filming. Although only a couple of scenes were filmed we thought it was just because the project had only started and once we got going, we would fly through filming. As time went by only a scene or two was being filmed a weekend, this was due to many complications. The props department would take up to an hour or more to set up a tent, makeup would take awhile, and the actors didn’t know their lines.

(Tent building skills on point)

Also the most difficult part of this project I would say, was getting everyone to show up. Getting everyone to show up was pretty much virtually impossible as we are all in grade 11 and have multiple commitments outside of school and have heavy work loads. After a month or two of suffering, Ms Willemse decided she had had enough and the project came to a hauling stop. The class begged and begged to keep working as everyone had put in a significant amount of effort and we were granted an extension. Due to the the mass amounts of complaints about the project Ms Willemse came up with the brilliant idea to write a paragraph ranting about the project and who did work and who did not.

(Here is my rant about the project, click to enlarge)

Even with the extension hardly anything was filmed and finally Ms Willemse put the boot down and no more was to be done of the project. Even with Ms Willemse saying no, the PLP students, as outstanding learners, put the work into our own hands and we used some ingenuity to finish the project without having to drag the whole class down somewhere to film. An idea sprung up and that was to film a monologue and a narrative part to fill in the missing gaps throughout our movie, which ended us with a complete not so complete movie.

Insert fully completed movie

(Michael gives this movie a whopping 10/10)

 

 

(Here is some behind the scenes footage, courtesy of Matthew Dandar)

 

Throughout the duration of this project I have learned a lot, more than just the subject being taught, which is a surprise. I was taught many life skills, for example organization, time management and most importantly teamwork. First off, organization was key to this project as a lot of organization went into this project, courtesy of Marley and Maria, but non of it seemed to follow through, either people skipped or were busy during the days of filming.

(A list of what scenes have been filmed)

(A breakdown of what had to be done and when)

Time management ties in with organization, there was a set time table of what had to be completed and when, once again this was ignored.

(List of who was supposed to show up to filming)

Finally teamwork, this skill was incredibly important to this project as it required the whole class to do, throughout the project our teamwork started off excellent and drop abysmally.

 

If this project was to be completed on time it would require everyone in the class to have all these skills, which most do, but not to the extent where the task could be completed with somewhat of ease. I would be interested to see if we could complete a similar task from what we have experienced due to the last project, whether we would improve or no improvement would be visible. Although this project failed in its own way, I’m still glad we attempted it because everyone came out of this project with a new skill and to me that is what’s most important.

 

To end this blog post I leave you with some humble words from Zakaria “What goes up, must come down.”