I had many opportunities to start this post with a corny overused Romeo quote, but I didn’t. No need to thank me. If you haven’t heard of Romeo and you have no idea what I’m talking about, have you been living under a rock since 1591? If you have, then this blog post is for you. Today I’m going to talk about our Romeo and Juliet project. In this project we read Romeo and Juliet, we compared it to other versions of the same concept, and we made a video recreating one of the scenes in a reinterpreted fashion.
The first thing we did in this project was, well, actually read the play. We all took turns “acting” the characters, which just meant that we read what the characters would say while sitting at our tables. This was definitely a learning experience, as I didn’t understand many of the Elizabethan words used, but I eventually figured it out.
We then began to analyze what the writer seemed to want to convey with each scene, and we compared it to different versions of the story. This made me realize how many different versions of Romeo and Juliet there really are, and how much storytellers like to use the concept, although most of the “re-tellings” didn’t have the ending where they both
commit (not sure if I can say this because this is a school post). After doing all of this, we were sorted into groups and began work on the final part of this project, the video.
This was the most fun part of the project, as I quite like making videos. The first thing we did was make a storyboard for the video, which wasn’t amazing, but it did the job.
The driving question for this project was: How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling? In conclusion, Romeo and Juliet has remained relevant to storytelling today because of its unique concept, with a tragic ending. The concept may not be unique today, but this is because of all the people re-using and reinterpreting it into different movies, like Warm Bodies, or Titanic, which performed astoundingly well in the box office. Romeo and Juliet has remained relevant partially because of all the moviemakers or writers using the concept in their own versions of the story.