What the heck is up everyone and welcome back to the amazing blog know as the Slime Slatt Blog. Today we’ll be covering a topic that may be slightly overdue, the Romeo and Juliet project. Now going into this project I wasnt super exited because I wasn’t tryna read the play book and reflect on it and all that but to my surprise this project wasn’t actually THAT bad. Unfortunately we still had to read the book but we also watched 2 movies in class! The end goal for this project was to take a certain scene from the play and put your own modern twist on it making it your own adaptation. Before you see this adaptation we gotta go through the usual speal about how we got there and such so without further ado, let’s get into it!
Driving Question:
“How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?”
This project probably had the least amount of things to hand in but took a lot of work. We first started out by reading through all 5 acts as a class and discussing what was going on. After every act we had to take note and put it in our theme book which had 5 sections to correspond to the 5 acts. The theme book was the main thing we had to hand, really the only thing, and what it was was that we had to connect modern movie adaptations to the original play while also dissecting different quotes from the play and what Shakespeare was trying to say, and how it connects to the modern movies or modern day. Yeah I know, it’s a lot to take in.
Like I said before we watched 2 movies as a class then me and a few friends watched another optional movie on our own time. Gnomeo and Juliet and Warm Bodies were the films we watched as a class and then me and my friends watched the Romeo and Juliet with young Leonardo Dicaprio. Gnomeo and Juliet is a classic that I remember watching when I was a kid. It puts a funny exciting twist on the original featuring the story told through garden gnomes. I give this movie a low 6/10. The next movie we watched as a class was Warm Bodies. It was a zombie version of the play with the Zombie, R, being Romeo and a human, Julie, being Juliet. I don’t remember the plot too much but it’s something like R begins to gain consciousness and begins to catch feelings for Julie which like makes the whole zombie “race” evolve into semi normal people making zombies and humans being able to live together. I don’t know it was weird and I didn’t like it. I gave this movie a 3/10. Lastly me and my friends watched the modern Romeo and Juliet where it again takes the classic play but puts it in a California 1990s gang setting while still having a very tight connection to the original play by reciting direct lines from the play and being very accurate. This was by far the best as it was funny, had action, perfect amount of corny, and was just an overall well made movie. It dosnt turn off to far from the original which also gave it some bonus points. I gave this movie a 8/10.
Now I’ve been keeping you eager eagles on your edge for too long so here’s the actual theme book I had to do if you are interested in reading it. (P.S. it’s not short)
that was the hard part of this project and also like 90% of the project too but that’s besides the point, because it was now time to take matter into our own hands and make our own version of a small section of Romeo and Juliet. In my g roup I was with Ines, Brooke and good o’l Ben Tuck. ,I feel like I might be missing one more person in the group but that’s fine. Anyway it took a while for us to think of a good idea then we came up with a pretty good one. We decided to model it after a reality tv show. Main inspiration from the Kardashians and Modern Family with like solo cut offs where the characters talk to the cameras. Youll see what I mean in a bit. Now I wasn’t actually IN the short film myself, but I did a lot of the filming and helped a lot with the idea generation phase. So the moment you’ve all been waiting for all this time, the movie…
Overall this project was long and hard (pause) but did have its enjoyable parts to it with the filming of the movies, and watching the movies but with that came lots of hard work and I must say that upon completing my very well thought out theme book I felt very very accomplished and proud of myself which was very rewarding. One of the main things I took away from this project though was how relevant this story is even in today’s modern era of movies with countless movies borrowing themes from the original play while putting their own spin on it to make it more appealing and original while still tying back to the original piece. Now with that being said, to answer the driving question, yes I do believe Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet and his other plays have remand extremely relevant despite them being hundreds of years old with movies still using the ideas from the orginal today, in 2023. Anyways for my overall project rating this one wasn’t too bad but could have been better with a low 6/10 for fun and low 7/10 for learning. Well That’s all for now, cya
SLATT 💚
Landon