By now your guys know the drill. Welcome back to my blog, I’m here today with another project! This project was centred around answering the driving question: 

How can we craft a compelling vision of Macbeth set in the 1950? 

Basically we did a whole bunch of research on Macbeth, the 1950s, the Cold War, and then made a film out of it. Have fun reading!

Something that I was really proud of for this project was my ability to analyze text from the Macbeth play. I found that I really like breaking down words and connecting them to things in the plot, character and theme. I think this is also the skill that I had the most fun practising. When I started writing my analysis on the quote it was like a light bulb went off in my head. It made sense to me how one text can portray different parts of a character or shadow what was to come and all of a sudden I was making all of these different connections that my hands weren’t able to type fast enough. I was really happy with the way my analysis turned out and I didn’t realize how easy it was to make connections like that until I knew what it was I was looking for. The hardest part about writing for me was not going off on a tangent about something completely unrelated because I find that is something that I often do. So, when I was writing about one thing I’d think about something else and go “ ohh this would be a cool connection too” but then read my piece and realize that it wouldn’t make since. Another thing was the number of mistakes that were in my analysis originally, because I was typing so fast. What I found was a really cool tactic was to highlight everything and make my device read out loud what I wrote. The device would read everything and I’d realize how weirdly something was worded or how long a sentence was. This really helped me narrow down my writing into something that was actually understandable to the reader. 

Of course there’s also the final product that I can’t not talk about. The end product for this project was a film that was set in the 50s and was a rendition of the original Macbeth. As a member of the production team I was the props manager. I basically either made or found all of the props and was there to set up and take down the set in between scenes. 

What I really wanted to highlight, now that we are at the end of the project, was the individual skills that brought it together. I was really impressed by some of my classmates this project and thought I’d write about what they did that I found amazing. Our director Kaia (link) for one had a whole Pinterest board going before we even begun writing scripts. I can see why she was chosen for the role considering how strong of a vision she had…

Overall did I like this project? Yah for sure. There were definitely a lot of highlights. What would I do differently? Well maybe get more involved? I felt like I wasn’t doing a lot towards the end because there wasn’t a lot that we can do. I’ve been on movie sets before as a background and I can see how much work goes into a single scene but I also know that there is a lot of waiting around too. Sometimes a scene will take 4-5 hours and your just waiting in the sidelines for your part in the machine that is film making. But alas, I think that I did what I could with what I got and over all? I’m proud of what I did. So I’ll take that as a win.