Our hide your fires Macbeth project was an otherwise successful project that could have benefitted from more time.
In this project, we were tasked with the goal of Creating a class film of “Macbeth” set in the 1950s which shows that appearances often hide a very different reality.
To complete this task we had to first learn the ins and outs of “Macbeth” as you cant modify and create a film adaptation of something you don’t understand. This is where the first issue in this journey emerged, my trouble understanding the Shakespearean dialect, as you may assume this leads to some issues when it comes to dissecting a piece of literature. Luckily I feel as though I was able to overcome that issue through a mixture of youtube videos and lessons from my teacher. In Future, I feel as though it may be beneficial to do more research into Shakespeare’s writing style so I don’t need to rely on youtube videos in order to fully comprehend his writing.
A big part of our journey in understanding “Macbeth” was my act quest. The act quest was an assignment where we had to dissect a quote based on the information we had from the first three acts. This assignment was different as we were tasked with creating the best essay we could through many revisions. In the end, this ended up working out quite well although in future I need to stay more on top of feedback and revisions.
For the film portion of this project, we had to be put into roles. In order for that to take place, we had to apply for roles. Now, me being a naive ambitious teenager I decided that I would either apply for screenwriter or director. My reasoning behind that decision was that those roles sounded fun and I had a little experience in both of those fields. However, I could only choose one. In the end, I chose to apply to screenwriter, this was because I felt like that was something I had more experience with. For our application, we had to write about why we wanted to have this role, what we would bring to this position and finally Any ideas we had for the production. That last step was where I made a catastrophic blunder, This was because I didn’t really have any ideas for the production aside from a few specific non-cohesive scenes, so when it came to my application I chose to leave them out. In the end, I got the role of script editor, as much as this was a disappointment I feel as though it is what I deserved based on what I put into my application. If I were to do this again I would have definitely spent more time on each part of the application, especially the production ideas.
Before I was able to do my job of editing the screenplay we first needed a screenplay. Normally the screenwriter would be in charge of that task however, this specific screenplay would be written by the entire class split into groups Each working on a different scene. Despite my initial dislike for this idea for reasons I won’t get into, it ended up going pretty well and was an all-around fun experience. One thing I do have to say about this process of having the class write but then a dedicated screenwriter is that the screenwriter basically became an editor, so by the time it came to me I was like the script editor editor.
As the script editor, my main task was formatting but I also would occasionally fix some continuity issues. In the end, I think this role worked out quite well as it allowed me to learn new formatting rules that I otherwise wouldn’t have learned. One issue that did arise in my editing process was my stubbornness when it comes to what program I use for screenwriting which at times leads to issues, which I was luckily able to fix. In future editing endeavours, it would be beneficial to compromise and use different screenwriting software.
At this point, this is where my job ended if you don’t include bringing in some props as a job. Now however this was not the end of the project, there was still a lot more to be done by my peers. This included the rest of the pre-production, production, and post-production. I can’t comment on the inside dealings of those parts of the project as I had nothing to do with them, but what I can say is from what I did see they were doing a great job although it seemed like the production could have used more time for filming. In the end, I feel as though the other teams created a great product that honours and lives up to the screenplay.
At the end as mentioned before I feel as though we were able to create a compelling entertaining film. This is thanks to all of the great teams that helped put it all together. Overall this was a great learning experience, if one thing, in particular, stands out to me it would be the change in roles which felt like a great learning experience.