Journal #13

May 11, 2007

This week we continued the Shakespeare video project. On Tuesday students decided on the settings for their adaptations of Macbeth. This stirred very good dialogue about positions of power within our communities. I sat with each group separately and brainstormed ideas with them. With each group, I asked them what position of power their Macbeth would be trying to attain. Would it be a police chief? a school principal? the president? We talked about why those positions are desirable and what it means to have power, as well as what Macbeth would do to get that power. One group decided to use a Pirates of the Caribbean theme as a way to connect the ideas of Macbeth to something that would be recieved by a popular audience. One group, whose scene involves the three witches making predictions about Macbeth, decided on making Macbeth an aspiring rapper who is told by some radio djs that he is going to become very famous. A third group, analyzing the system of power within their own neighborhood, is having Macbeth be a drug dealer trying to make his way to the top. The fourth group chose to use the high school as their setting and their Macbeth is a vice principal who wants to become the principal. Once they had settled their ideas, they began to write scripts based on knowledge from previous workshops about scriptwriting. The groups had to choose a director, a videographer, and a set designer as well as choose who will play which parts in their films. We discussed the different roles involved in the group and what everyone needed to do in order to make the films successful. They had all started their scripts by the end of the session, and Ms. Hamilton had them continue to work on them on Wednesday morning so they would be mostly done by Thursday when I went back in.

Unfortunately, they still had a lot to finish on Thursday morning, so I gave them a little bit of time to do that before we started our workshop on storyboarding. We talked about how a script goes from writing to video and how the creators make a storyboard to lay out the plan before beginning to film anything. I had them watch a scene from the Scotland, PA movie and point out close up versus wide angle shots and how each is used differently. Then the groups practiced their lines and made storyboards so that on monday morning they can begin filming right away. There were several students who really took to this activity of storyboarding--to no surprise it was the same students who were more comfortable working with visual art. Lourdes made a fantastic storyboard with reasoning behind her different wide angle and close up shots. Yessica, Kathy, and Valeria all worked together to create a clear outline for filming as well.

I am slightly worried about the time issue on Monday morning, because the students have testing on tuesday, and for most of this week, so if we don't finish on Monday then I might not be able to come back in until the following week. I think it is possible to finish if I have everything planned out ahead of time and make sure I really stick to the time limits that I give to the students.

From the enthusiasm of the students thus far, I am really excited to see the outcome, and i can already tell that this project is engaging them with a literature that may have seemed inaccessible to them before.