One of the hardest things about my paper was trying to fit all of the ideas that I had while researching into 10 pages. Some of the ideas were easily combined but some of them had to be left out of the paper completely. In my interview Dr. Burton asked me to try and think of some ways that I could change or adapt the format of a screen play. The reason for this is that a lot of what I talk about in my paper is Shakespeare's genius in adapting well-known stories for the stage- which was the emerging medium at the time. Now, however, the most popular medium for telling stories is film and so I have been trying to figure out what Shakespeare did so well to adapt his sources for the stage in order to maybe know what could be done in adapting to film. The screenplay is where these ideas would be written down but Dr. Burton also wanted to see what could be done to the screenplay itself to make it more interesting as a medium in and of itself. I have given this a lot of thought and one thing that first occurred to me is that I would need to take advantage of the digital technology of the internet with links to video and pictures maybe just as a way to help whoever is reading the screenplay to catch the vision of the writer. What I concluded about this after some thought is that that might be confusing because the screenplay comes before any footage of any kind is taken and so the writer would have to include links to things that most likely wasn't his work and also wasn't 100% how he imagined it in his head.
Since that approach would not work I tried to think of how the creative process of writing a screenplay could be improved. When talked this over in a group, one friend suggested that it be a group process like through google docs much like how fan fiction is written and produced. Someone would start with an idea and a rough sketch of what a movie would look like and then people could make changes and edit and suggest other modifications. This way it would allow the creativity of a larger community shape the development of the screenplay. I could try doing something like this for my creative project. If I took something Shakespeare wrote and then tried to adapt it but left the adaptation open to others ideas then a lot could possibly be done that way. I realize that this whole post was kind of a stream of consciousness because it was just me brainstorming but if you managed to follow it then I would like your comment or opinion.
Hey brother, this article came to mind after reading your post. Here's the link:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/01/qa-drake-doremus
I really liked the ideas in this link. This is a great example of someone reinventing a script. He is emphasizing the writing and the portrayal of the story over the technical aspects of film-making. I feel like that is something that Shakespeare done that might have set himself apart from other playwrights of the time.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking we should collaborate on the next phase of this project. As I was reading through your paper I just kept thinking that so much of your argument would back mine up and vice versa. I'm thinking that I'm going to try to go the academic essay --> personal essay --> video essay route that I explained in my post. I think we could do that together by combining ideas from both of our academic essays into one personal essay that could then be turned into a video essay. It will take some work but let's get brainstorming.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I feel like our topics are well inline and I wanted to do something with video for my creative project because I feel like just as the stage was the emerging, popular medium of the story in his day, film is the story medium of the masses. Although film has been around for decades it is still evolving and improving and I think that it is far from reaching its full potential.
ReplyDelete