Taking Macbeth from page to virtual stage

Taking Macbeth from page to virtual stage

Taking Macbeth from page to virtual stage

PUBLISHED 21 September 2020

An article by Jessica (now in Year 9)

Last year, during our lockdown learning experience Year 8 learned about the play Macbeth. In the first lesson common phrases that were shared were, "Why does Shakespeare use such confusing words!" or "I didn’t understand a word of that".

Luckily as a few lessons passed, a favourite being the lesson where we used a Shakespearian insult generator to create our own deadly dialogue, we got to grips with Shakespeare’s use of language and the emotions behind each word. During our Skype lessons we focused in more detail on the duologue between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

In our Skype lessons the boys focused on Macbeth and the girls focused on Lady Macbeth. We first interpreted the characters. From our group discussions I decided that Lady Macbeth was an extremely cold women who and was madly ambitious, so much so she was blinded to the idea of what was right or wrong.

Using the information we had on the characters our next task was to annotate our script allocating each line an emotion that suited how the character was feeling, not a sentence, word or utterance went unconsidered. Feeling confident in our delivery we next set up our cameras, using our knowledge from our Acting for Screen lessons. Once the perfect angles were confirmed it was lights camera action! With all the footage uploaded to Teams, Miss Worthington was able to edit all our videos together to create our very own virtual performance. It was fascinating to see the different character and performance interpretations from my fellow peers.

We learnt so much studying Macbeth, and I'm so happy to say that our drama experience during lockdown was full of laughter and fun. I can't wait to start our next drama projects this school year! And if there is anything I've learned from this past year is that we cannot "Look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not", Act 1 Scene 3 Banquo.

You can see our performances on film here.

AUTHOR: Alex Brown
CATEGORIES: Creative Arts
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