Modern Shakespeare: Criterion A

The Unit Question was: How can we create a video presentation of a Shakespeare play that will appeal to the modern day viewers?

Shakespeare has been considered to be one of the greatest writers to ever live. However, most of his plays were written in old English, making them quite difficult to understand. As we had just finished reading the play, “Much Ado About Nothing” he have a fair understanding of the play, mostly because our teacher, Mr. Thompson, explains the events going on in our language, so we can understand it. What about the not-so-good-at-english people? Can they understand it? Probably not. This is the purpose of this new unit. We have to make a modern day, news report about the scandalous things going on in the play, in the format of a celebrity gossip, news, and other stories. The characters in the play being the celebrities of course. Today, during English class, we almost finished watching the movie of the play, and I found out that seeing the characters actually act, and perform the characters in the play, it is much easier to understand. So even making the words modern would make it even simpler. We have to make it so anyone, even a person who has never heard of Shakespeare, understands the events happening in this play.

The format of the news report I chose is to do animation, utilizing toys and materials to make a little cartoon, or stop-motion movie, in the style of Robot Chicken, which takes modern events and depicts it into a cartoon. Now Robot Chicken is basically meant for humor, but I will also be adding maybe drama. I watched an episode of the show, and got the basic style of it, which would be short random little skits, transitioned through like TV static.

Good news is that I already have a program for stop motion, called Framebyframe, and it allows me to take a picture of an object, move it a bit, take another picture, and so on and so forth, until I have a moving picture, resulting in a movie. I will have to find the correct dolls, and dress them accordingly to the play, and that will be quite difficult. I will also probably make a set, with little props and realistic materials that will be used in the cartoon. The program used the built in webcam on my computer, so I have to connect a external camera, get a working tripod, and make sure nobody touches it. I think this will be a long and hard process, but it will be fun working with tech like this. I am always interested in working with things I’m interested in.

We chose Communicators as our learner profile because it is mostly talking, interacting with each other, making it easy to understand, taking confusing text and explaining it to people, and it is basically speaking and talking all the way.

The English A students will be writing the scripts for the class, and we will be assessed for the script in English class, and the acting, editing, all those things in I.T class. I will be using Final Cut Pro for my editing, it is a professional video editing software, exclusively for macs. This will take some learning, but it will do. This is gonna turn out awesome

Criterion E: Evaluation "Cell Phones"

The unit question was “How to inventors come up with their inventions?” and what I concluded was: First, you have to have a big idea. You have to solidify that idea, and commit yourself to it. Second, have the resources, materials, and perseverance to build, test, and tweak. Through trial and error, you make the invention complete. This unit was fun, since I was doing something I was interested in. Technology was always one of my major interests, and I always love to see new and amazing tech coming into reality. The Cell Phone is definitely an important invention, and I personally would not be able to live without it.

Investigation:

The Investigation was easy because we had the sheet that had all the basic information about the cell phone. The sheet had easy and understandable text so I had no trouble.

Plan:

I chose to make a movie, giving basic information about the history of the cell phone, and then a video about the evolution of cell phones since the beginning. I wanted to something fun, and not something boring like an essay. I had fun doing this movie, all the editing and adding music and all that stuff. I was happy I was doing something in a sort of “official” type of way.

Create:

First I needed download an evolution of cell phones video off of YouTube, and that was only available on computers that had RealPlayer support. All the computers in the I.T lab did, so I couldn’t do it at home. Once I downloaded it and mailed it to myself, I had realized that it was in “flv” format, which means it can only be played on flash players. I used Mrs. Wilson’s computer to change the format, but I didn’t work out so well. Once I got home, I used an online video format converter to change it to MPEG-4 format, so I could use it on iMovie. I started to edit the video, but I couldn’t get it the way I wanted, and I realized I had iMovie ’08, and iMovie ’09 had all the new features, but I couldn’t download it because it costs money. So I downloaded it the illegal way. Haha. Then I started to make the movie and it turned out really well. I realized I needed more information than just the evolution of cell phones, but I couldn’t make slides on iMovie. Luckily the other day, I found out there’s a way to take a screenshot of the screen already built into Mac books so I took advantage of that, made slides on PowerPoint, and took pictures of that, and used it as a slideshow of pictures on the video. All I needed to do now was add music, and the final touches. Unfortunately we had moved on to the new unit too quickly and I had no time to make a survey. From the comments I got from the video, people thought my video was good. That was a relief. However, I had forgotten to include the unit question in my video. Hahaha =]