Exeunt 232

Shakespeare, you have been engaged!

When I woke up yesterday morning, I must admit I was a little stressed out. Amy hadn't made it to class and I hadn't received the recordings of the book to send on to J.J. and Austin. BUT when I got on my computer lo and behold, there was an email with the recordings! So I quickly downloaded them and then proceeded to piece them together using Windows Movie Maker. While that was saving I went online and looked at LibriVox and Audible to see how I could have the world hear our book.

There was no luck. It seemed as if you needed to download their software. So I came up with the next best thing and headed to YouTube! When my movie finished making itself I uploaded my first video ever on YouTube. Success!! We are online (here is the link again and we've had three views!).

After getting the video on YouTube I proceeded to choose a cut for our sample for Engaging Shakespeare and then I sent everything to J.J and Austin, and we were ready to go! Here's the sample that we chose to play, I think people really liked it!

That night when it came time to go to Engaging Shakespeare, I put on a purple dress and went up to the JFSB! I arrived and walked in the door to see the art group putting up their pieces. They looked great! I was super impressed with how many pieces each person in their group did. As the night progressed and we saw what everyone had done I was even more impressed. Everyone was so good and you could tell a lot of work went into all of the projects.

I thought that the audience also got more interactive as we went on. I really enjoyed telling them not only about our book project and the work that we had put into them, but also about my blog post. It was really fun to see people respond to something I had written about and had such a fun time doing!

Learning Outcomes, you have been met!

Gain Shakespeare Literacy

I would say I have definitely gained a breadth and a depth of Shakespeare's work. I have never read four of the plays this semester, let alone heard of two of them! But I actually enjoyed these ones so much. I especially loved a Winter's Tale. It was also reading a Winter's Tale that I feel like I really started getting into blogging and analyzing the text. I think it's evident in these two posts.

What I loved even more was being able to see this play performed on stage. I thought that the performance was phenomenal and it really captured the emotions I had been hoping to see come through after reading the play. Seeing the play also helped me understand the role of the Clown and the Fool in Shakespeare's plays. I understand now why he incorporated them into his plays and how they are much funnier in a performance than in the reading.

While this isn't related to a Winter's Tale, I also enjoyed seeing parts of other Shakespeare's plays, or at least related themes, pop up in books I was reading this past semester. The most obvious one is the connections I drew through my reading of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, but I also found connections in All Creatures Great and Small.

Analyze Shakespeare Critically

I got better as the semester went on analyzing Shakespeare both textually and contextually. I must admit that the contextual analysis took me longer to catch onto and it was harder for me to do for a while, but I think that I finally caught onto it. Here are a some of my textual analyses posts and a few of my favorite contextual analyses posts.

Engage Shakespeare Creatively

I think that this aspect of the learning outcomes was mainly fulfilled in the final project. I consider the recording of an audiobook to be a performance in many ways. We were each first of all assigned to cut down the script (which I think we did rather effectively). Then we were cast into our characters, which we had to, or at least I did, consider motives and emotions behind the lines. Then there was the recording and the rerecording! It got easier as we went on and we all, well at least I did, got more comfortable in the sound booth the more we recorded.

I also think some of my creative engagement with Shakespeare has been in my attempt to connect with nature in the text. This was harder at the beginning but the more I got into the works the more connections I was able to find. This might just be because King Lear has so many nature, especially bird, connections!

Share Shakespeare Meaningfully

I think the blog posts were a big part of helping me share Shakespeare meaningfully because they gave me time to think about and then talk out my ideas. The project also helped with this as did the requirement to try to connect with people on a local and global level. I think I did this through the previous assignment, but the final project also now helped with this because our book and all the other projects are on the web!

Adieu....

Well I guess that's everything. I can't believe the semester is over! It went so fast and I can't believe that we got through six of Shakespeare's works in that time! Hopefully I'll continue to see Shakespeare in the world around me and I'll remember all of his insights. I guess if nothing else I can just pick up another play and start reading on my own. In some ways the conclusion of this class is just another end leading to a more enlightened beginning.

We're Online!

Hey all! So our Hamlet audiobook is now on Youtube! I put all of the recording that Amy edited together, set a background and uploaded it. Now the whole world can enjoy our version of Hamlet!

Thanks for all the hard work everyone put in and I will see you all at the showcase tonight!

That's a Wrap!

We're done recording! We definitely got much more comfortable and in character as we recorded more and so I'm pretty excited about the final product! We just need to piece all of the recording snippets together and Amy has been kind enough to volunteer to do that using Garage Band. So that should be ready by Thursday!

As far as presenting the audiobook goes I'm not really sure how we are going to do that. I guess we can just show a snippet for a sample and then show people how to get to the book on the internet so that they can listen to it!

Or like was suggested in class we can use parts as some of the trivia questions....

Pro Readers and Recorders

So today was our third day recording and I must say we are doing better! Not only do I think we have better emotional quality, but we are also faster. This is really important because we don't want the pace to be too slow or the listeners of our "book" will get bored.

So basically the rest of our plan includes meeting Saturday and finishing recording the play a second time through (we got about 2/3 of the way through). Then we'll listen to it and decided what to do over, where to edit and so forth.

Wish us luck!

You Lost Me William...

So I've been on two kicks this whole semester with Shakespeare. The first concerned how characters set up and perceive their reality, and the second is with nature. Now I love all of the nature references in Shakespeare, because I love nature, I mean the focus on my major is the natural world. This being said I love all the insights and knowledge that Shakespeare has of the natural world and I can relate to all of them quite easily. That is until Act V of King Lear. Yes, I met my match in Shakespearean nature lingo with this line of Lear's:

"She's dead as earth."

This is of course speaking of his faithful daughter but the simile just doesn't make sense to me. Because, well, earth or (as I'm taking it for this post) soil/dirt is really quite alive in many ways! See even when major disasters come through the earth rebounds. It is in the soil that life springs from. Earth, dirt, soil whatever you want to call it, is the foundation for life.

Confused by my logic? Let my try to be clearer. When a disaster such as a fire goes through an area or ecosystem almost everything is wiped out. Animals flee the area if they aren't killed and vegetation burns to a crisp (just watch the fire in Bambi if you don't believe me). Then there is nothing, just the earth/soil and the charred remains. While this may seem like a bad thing, in many ecosystems it is actually needed. For in the soil life begins to stir.

Soil contains bacteria, microorganisms, nutrients, small animals and seeds (hello, life!). Plants such as the aspen tree actually depend on fire for their survival. When a fire comes through an area containing aspen, sure all the big aspen are decimated but their root system senses the heat and when the flames are gone the roots send up green shoots called suckers. These are brand new trees! The aspen has grown so dependent on fire that it is now almost virtually the only way it can reproduce.

Now that's a little off topic but it's important. If there wasn't soil/earth this life couldn't first of all be preserved because there would be no substrate, but secondly it couldn't come back. Because soil in in some way seemingly invincible the life that plants such as the aspen store in the soil is saved and then continues.

Many other plants store on their seeds in the earth and then depend on it to grow out of and provide the nutrients necessary to grow. When the plants grow you enter the food chain. Plants are eaten by herbivores which are then in turn eaten by carnivores! This also is true in the ocean! The seafloor often contains eggs of animals as well as in shallow areas it grows aquatic plants and provides the foundation for coral.

The whole biosphere is dependent on the existence on soil or earth!!! That is why Lear's statement "dead as earth" is so confusing to me! Shakespeare has me stumped!

Unless I guess, Shakespeare is trying to say that Cordelia may appear dead and of no use but her previous life and now current death has provided spiritual life in many ways. People see the errors of their ways and learn. We as readers also see how we can be and can then improve ourselves and our lives....but I just don't know about that...it seems like a stretch.

Any ideas? (And I'm sorry this sounds like a lecture, but I guess that's just how it came out.)

Gertrude Reading

Just a quick update. I read over the script and so I now I know my lines, well I've read them. I'm really hoping to go over it again and just get more comfortable with them. I just want to get to know Gertrude more if you know what I mean.

Overall I think we did really well with our script cut. I think we managed our goal of keeping the plot true while having key components.

I've also just realized how little time in school/class we actually have left! It's crazy but I think we should be able to get through the recording all right it will definitely just take a lot of dedication.

Yep! Those are just my thoughts for now. Sorry I forgot to post on Tuesday!

Recording, Day 1!

So we have our script and yesterday we read through half of it! I think our cut might be slightly longer than an hour but I still think its good.

I really like recording. It was a little frustrating at first when the technology kept acting up but we figured it out when some help.

Amy's going to put up some of the recordings we did but we're probably going to redo all of them. I think it was really good practice though to go over some reading and get a hang of how recording is going to go.

Over Thanksgiving we're going to go over my lines so I'll try to do some research on Gertrude and how people have portrayed her. I think it is harder though to portray a personality on audio. But I'm going to look at my lines and see what motivations are behind her lines. Why does she say what she says? Why is it important? (Obviously it is because Shakespeare put it in there and we kept it in our cut!)

Yep that's the plan!