Project Reflections.
Some of these project reflections are past assignments, copied and pasted from Canvas.
Click here to see the Medea website |
Click here to see the Medea website |
What did you enjoy?
Over the past few weeks, I have had a lot of fun working on our final semester project, The Making of Medea: A Woman Scorned. We just saw a first draft of it yesterday, and my immediate thought was “wow, what was surprisingly okay.” My favorite role within this project was being the camera person for the behind the scenes photos. It was very cool to compare our documentary to the behind the scenes pictures. I think it really accentuates the layers of revenge, this class, the project, everything. On the inner-most layer, there’s the radio drama, then there’s the documentary, and finally, the behind the scenes pictures (the real-world layer). What are you proud of? The contribution I am most proud of is definitely the website. I spent hours and hours working on designing, formatting, and adding content, which I think payed off. It was nice to have to the class help out with the Meet the Team bios. I tried to choose people who didn’t have that big of role filming or acting, which was good because most people weren’t doing anything during filming days. What worked? What really worked in this project was dividing up the class into teams. Even though, we had a small problem with people not doing anything, I think it was better than it could have been. More people were working more consistently in this project than the Hamlet project from last year. What didn’t work? Do you suggestions for future Medea project? Some of the filming days were very confusing and many people did not seem to know what we were filming when and who we needed. If we were to take on this project again in the future, I would definitely suggest writing out who you’re filming, where you’re filming, and when you’re filming, and communicate this to the whole class. A lot of our challenges could have been solved through better communication. Final thoughts? Overall, I think this project was a success. Initially I couldn’t fathom how we could film a radio drama within a documentary, but our class did amazing job creating and piecing together a revenge masterpiece.
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Assignment: Complete a piece of reflective writing on the project, your responsibilities within this project, what you've learned as you completed the project (about Medea, about ancient revenge plays, their key characteristics, the many ways you can communicate them to modern audiences, etc), etc. Imagine that you are, in part, contextualizing the project and what you learned about it for an outside audience unfamiliar with revenge plays as a genre, Medea, the project, etc. Over the past few weeks my class and I have been working on our final Medea project. I liked how our original idea of a re-telling of Medea through a simple film turned into a documentary about a radio show. I think it’s a good way to highlight not just the final outcome of the story, but also the planing, conflict, and inner thoughts of each character. My roles within the project included set design, camera person, and website designer. I helped choose the locations, film some scenes, and create website.. In addition to designing and adding everything featured on the website, I took pictures during each day of filing in order to create a behind the scenes page.
From this project I learned just how much planning needs to go into a film project. Communication is key. It was important for project leaders to tell the rest of the class what was going on, the basic storyline, who was filming when and where, and whether or not people needed to bring props or costumes. These things were not always communicated well, which led to some rough patches on filming days. This leads me to my next big lesson: compromise. Once we realized that people didn’t have the right clothes or props for the day, we had to let it go and find a way to solve that problem. I think we did a pretty good job on this part. We found a costume for Gus, and did a okay changing around some of the interviews. All in all, I think that once we got better at communicating and realized the project cannot be perfect, it all went very smoothly. From this project I was also able to discover the complexities of and themes of revenge plays. Each always has a revenger who has their own agenda and is portrayed as somewhat insane. Medea manipulates people for her own gain, and is willing to go to great lengths to get what she wants: revenge on Jason. Other characters within the story also seem to have their own self-interests at heart, but lack the drive for revenge. For example, Jason decides to dump Medea for another woman in order to gain more power, but doesn’t seem to want get revenge on Medea for killing their kids. At first, I wondered if this was just a common trait within female revenge characters because the male characters did not seem to possess that “crazed as a bat” vibe. However, after reading The Spanish Tragedy, I think all revenge characters have this vibe; it’s a shared trait. In terms the cycle of revenge, I think there’s really only two ways revenge plays turn out. ||||||| 1) person A does something to offend person B ||||||| 2) person B takes revenge on person A ||||||| 3) person B either dies getting revenge or goes on to enact more revenge because person A or someone close to person A decided to take revenge on person B ||||||| OR ||||||| 1) person A does something to offend person B ||||||| 2) person B takes revenge on person A ||||||| 3) person B goes off to live a miserable because their just full of anger. Over the past few days our team has brainstormed places we could film.
Set design: Possible places to film • theater (for confession room, storm offs, and interviewing actors/) ◦ If the theater doesn’t work, we could possibly do interviews somewhere outside the recording studio (so it looks like we’re talking to them in between acting scenes), or Dr. Holt’s room? • recording studio (for radio show) • McKerrow (for director meeting) • Galloway Grounds (comedic coffee breaks/discussions) • Food tables (if we happen to come across some) Team: set designers
Pre-production goal: finalize the when and where we will be filming/recording Ideas
We finally got the class divided into their different teams within the three categories of Pre-Production, Production, and Post-Preduction. I am on the set design team for pre-production, the camera team for the production part, and the website designer for post-production. I like the way we divided up the class, so everyone would have a job throughout the whole process. I hope this keeps people focused for the next 3 weeks!
Proposed trajectory 1
Storyboarding + Writers drafting - filming for the documentary (real footage) Pre-production teams begin working once we have an idea of the trajectory of the whole project Assign Roles Set people figure out where we’re going to film the interviews / where to record the radio show(?) Actors Memorize Lines Table Read Filming Editing Done! :D Proposed trajectory 2 Storyboarding + Writers drafting - filming for the documentary (real footage) Film/editing people think about how they want the video to look - i.e. do we want certain footage for an intro / outro - how do we want to do in the intro - introduction text or just jump right in? music people can work with the film people on what they want to intro to look like Pre-production teams begin working once we have an idea of the trajectory of the whole project Assign Roles Set people figure out where we’re going to film the interviews / where to record the radio show(?) Actors Memorize Lines Table Read - film people should make notes about camera angle ideas/how they want the scene to look (save time?) Filming Editing Done! For the documentary
We should first discuss in depth how we want the final product to work. What kinds of things do we want in the documentary part versus the radio show part? Do we want the documentary to show real footage of us recording the parts for the radio or do we want to the documentary to be staged? After that I’ve written a quick draft of what I think we should do.
- photography(?) - voice actors - actors (?) - videographers - musicians - editors Jobs script writers: write the script for the radio show (and documentary?) photographer: take pictures of people working voice actors: voice the parts of the characters for the radio show actors: act in the (possibly) staged documentary parts videographers: video the material for the documentary musicians: make or find a track for the final product editors put together the final video 2) PRACTICE BEFORE FILMING so we don’t have tons of useless footage 3) simultaneously record/film radio show and documentary (if we want real footage of us working) 4) take pictures so we have some fill in material 5) make a B roll? 6) fix everything in editing (#Hamlet2015) - just kidding, hopefully we won’t have that much to fix 7) make final documentary 8) present to Dr. Holt / class 9) win a 4D award |
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January 2017
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