Film Project

Please use the time in lab to work on your film(s). Follow the steps below to make sure you are on track:

1. Get an idea (do you have an idea?)
2. Create a treatment/film script
3. Cast or schedule the shooting of your film
4. Shoot your film
5. Upload your film stock and begin editing
6. Complete editing
7. Complete film (export)

By the end of this class you should have completed steps 1-3 and some of 4-5.

Some advice: Don't wait for everyone! If you are the editor of this film project, go ahead and start creating your opening and closing credits. You may also search for pictures/photos or shots to establish setting (establishing shots). If you are the sound designer, find music or sound cues to use in your film. Etc. Editing takes a lot of time. Get working!

HOMEWORK: complete the shooting of your film; complete Romeo & Juliet.

Guest Speaker; Film Project

Today we will have a guest speaker from the RBTL to prepare for the performance of West Side Story. Please participate and listen politely to our guests. We will be joined by other students.

HOMEWORK: Shoot your films. Complete your viewing or reading of Romeo & Juliet.

Film Project, Shakespeare, & Portfolio

For the next few classes, you will be working independently on a variety of projects. Please work at a concerned pace to complete the assignments.

1. Film project:
Create a short film. Film projects due June 7.
--things to do:

a. write a script or treatment for your film
b. begin shooting your film idea
c. upload film footage into iMovie
d. create opening credits and end credits for your film project
e. create a schedule for shooting, organizing, and completing this project

2. Play reading: Please begin reading or watching Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet.
a. Information about the playwright and time period in which he wrote can be found here. It is helpful to know about Shakespeare in order to understand what he's written and how he does it.
b. Information and help about the play can be found here.
c. Videos of productions of Romeo & Juliet can be found here:
Prologue
Romeo & Juliet (animated) part one
Animated (part two)
Animated (part three)

Romeo & Juliet (1954) part one (you can find the other parts on the sidebar)
The Balcony Scene (1968)
Act One, Scene 1
Act One, Scene 2
Act One, Scene 3 You can find the rest by searching for the 1978 BBC version and indicating the act and scene.

Some of the recent Romeo and Juliet blockbuster film

West Side Story: prologue
Maria
I Feel Pretty
America
Tonight (more songs can be watched on the sidebar).

3. Begin gathering your best work of scripts, poems, or fiction that you have completed this year for your portfolio.

a. gather all your best poems
b. gather all your best fiction
c. gather all your best scripts
d. gather your best journalism articles
e. Begin reflecting on your progress this year as a writer

Something Wicked

Please complete your viewing of Something Wicked This Way Comes. You left off on scene or chapter 4. Help the sub project the film. Enjoy, but watch the film. Hint, hint: quiz.

After the film (if you have time remaining) please form groups of 1 to five (5) to brainstorm an idea for a short film. If you have access to a film camera, go ahead and get started. You may need a clear premise and treatment (see previous posts concerning how to go about that...) or a script (refer to earlier posts).

HOMEWORK: Get started on a film project. We only have nine more classes to go to complete the project (and there's other stuff to do as well). Chop, chop.

Lone Ranger...Dandelion Wine

Lone Ranger...Heaven: Published in 1993, the short stories are interconnected, but unique and can be understood on their own. The stories center around Native Americans on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Thomas Builds-the-fire is one of the central protagonists as is Victor Joseph, who uses both a first person POV, as well as stories he relates as a third-person omniscient narrator.

Alcohol and its abuse becomes a theme in the book. How is one to have a cultural identity when having to interact with the larger majority?

The film Smoke Signals (1998) centers around themes found in the collection. The screenplay was written by Alexie himself.

Dandelion Wine: Published in 1957, although the setting takes place in 1928 in the fictional Green Bluff, Illinois. Dandelion Wine refers is a metaphor for distilling all the joy of summer into a bottle (or in this case a book). The stories, then, all center around characters in this fictional town and have to do with summer. Summer is often used symbolically as "LIFE" and therefore the stories deal with living ones life to the fullest (like we like to romanticize about summer) while being reminded of death. Death makes a life more vivid simply by its presence.

Douglas serves as our protagonist, although he is only an observer in some stories. You may equate him with the author. Other stories (like the Happiness Machine found in chapters 8, 9, 11, 13) and the Lonely One tie in common motifs of machines, fear (part of death) throughout the book, as does the feeling of "waking up"--a particularly Zen experience for Bradbury. He seems to be saying in all of these stories: "This is your only life. Experience it! Don't waste a moment!" A particularly wise statement for all of us.

Farewell Summer is this book's sequel. It came out in 2006. Like most of Bradbury's work, it is about death.

May 9, Monday: Short Story Project Due

Please prepare and order your five or more stories into a coherent sequence (beginning, middle, end), give your "cycle" a separate title and print out.

Use your time in the lab to complete this project. Due at end of class.

If you finish early, please read either Dandelion Wine or The Lone Ranger...Heaven.

HOMEWORK: Please read either Dandelion Wine or The Lone Ranger...Heaven.

Short Story Project

Use your time today in class to read or write. Your projects are due next class. Use this time to write if you are behind. If you are finished read. If you are stuck, read. When you are ready to write, write.

As you read your chosen collection, please pay attention to how the author creates a beginning, middle, end, interesting characters who interact with their setting, and how the authors use literary devices to create tone and imagery.

Both authors are quite skilled at dialogue, too. Pay attention to how this works. Stories should have a beginning, middle, and end. Note how the author wraps up a story: sometimes to a definite conclusion, sometimes to an open-ending. Think about WHAT the authors write about. What's their theme or point?

Pay attention to these things. They will help you write your own stories.

HOMEWORK: Read your collections. Attempt to complete the collection by Mid-week next week.

Various Poems

Two poems that connect with your reading. Read and enjoy.

Summer in a Small Town by Linda Gregg

When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it’s Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is grey, the air hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.

She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with long, pointed breasts.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren't afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse."
She had horses who called themselves, "spirit." and kept their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

Dandelion Wine & The Lone Ranger...In Heaven

Information about Sherman Alexie can be found here.

For information on Bradbury, see the previous posts.

Whether you are reading Bradbury or Alexie, both writers attempt to tell stories that interest a reader. Examine, as you read, how these authors tell stories that make an impact on a reader. Use yourself and your own tastes as a guide. What interested you in each story? Which characters were most vivid? How does the author present conflict or theme in a story? Does the story leave you with an image or feeling or idea? Keep track of these observation in your journal.

Bradbury Project: Fifth Story

Having four stories now, you will write one more. This one requires you to consider the other four.

Bradbury builds his plot by having one story relate to another in theme, setting, character or concept. He arranges his stories to build tension, suspense, and build the narrative structure to a climax of sorts. Now it's your turn.

You will reorder your stories. Which story should go first? Which story should follow it? Which story is most dramatic and climactic? Reorder your story drafts (even if you wrote them in the order requested).

Haven't written a "beginning" or "climax" for the group of stories? Now's your chance.

Write one more (at least) short story that takes into consideration the group. Do you lack a theme? Try a story that ties the previous stories together. Do you lack a beginning? Try a story that attempts to help explain a character, setting, or conflict's beginning.

When you are done with all five stories, you will want to go back over them and correct, make changes, proofread, and in general polish your work. Give the whole sequence (like the previous poetry cycle project) a title.

HOMEWORK: Please keep reading Dandelion Wine or The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.