Romeo and Juliet Adaptation

Reflection on Romeo and Juliet-- Psycho-Thriller

Video Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOHo1m1eoI&t=7s

Our adaptation is a psycho-thriller, which tells a story that because Romeo cannot accept Rosaline's rejection, he imagined a lover who is called Juliet.  The story began as a modernized Romeo and Juliet, but when it comes to the end, Romeo realized all the happening to him and Juliet is his illusion.  He is a psychopath living in the hospital.Danny, David, Stella and I are in a group.  I made the proposal and all of us like the adaptation.  Therefore, we wanted to tell an entire story to the audience instead of a part of it, and the thoughts lead us a little bit stray away from the requirement.  Besides the worry, I think our group did a great job as beginners.

I separated the story into four scenes and each member of our group wrote one scene's script.  The script fully explained the story and clearly described the details and character's personality.  The process of making script is quick and straightforward but after the process, we met a lot of troubles like one of our members had too bad experience and a bad mood to continue working on this assignment, Davide hurt his ankle so that he could not run and have intense exercise and so on.  As a result, I wanted to stage the video only in the black box in order to finish recording the video in time, because I do not think we would not have enough time to record the video if people do not cooperate and accidents happen.  However, Stella insisted on shooting some parts of the story outside so that audience can recognize the place clearly.   Under the condition, we had an argument, and in the end, we made an agreement that we will work out together to choose the staging and try to make the shooting work more efficient.  To be honest, I like Stella's suggestion about the staging outside, because the outcome of the video demonstrated that the staging set off a good atmosphere.  Especially for the last second scene shooting on the track in the evening, the spacious background and the dark night add some blue in the theme.  The only shortcoming about it is that we really cannot shoot the scene in the sunset because we all have afternoon activities and time conflict.  Therefore, even though the background is dark, we turned on the flashlight and tried to make the scene brighter. 

I am pretty enjoying this video shooting, and I think I did a great job on it.  I made the proposal, edited the film and chose and added music to it.  I was so satisfied with the music I chose.  According to my trivial understanding of music, I not only chose the music based on the theme of the video but also connect each beat of the music with the video.  I would feel uncomfortable if the music comes out or disappeared suddenly, and I hate music ends in an unfinished phrase, so I tried to put the music in an appropriate moment in the video and trimmed it to work with the tempo of the film.   For the first scene that Tybalt asks Mercutio to take medicine and Romeo comes to fight Tybalt, I did not expect any specific emotion or feelings emerging from the film, but when I edit the clips, I felt the scene was hilarious and crazy because even though the psychopaths treated the conversation and the fighting seriously, the sight in a spectator is funny and ridiculous.  In addition, Danny did a tremendous face expression when he stands up and hit Davide, so I speeded up the fighting clips and slowed down the speed on the Danny's hitting part and added a funny music in it.  It is a humor from a clips editor, so I hope audience like it. 

One big weakness of our adaptation is the speaking in the film.  Our speaking is so quick that sometimes it is difficult for the audience to hear it.  In addition, it is great for us to write a detailed script, but it is a little bit frustrating that we did not exactly follow the script words by words.  The biggest mistake is that we understand the plot and we know what we should say, so we just say what we want to say.  Therefore, the language is not clear, and it is so easy for actors to forget to speak out the important information that the film wants to show. The weakness made me frustrated because if we could spend more time on memorizing lines, we should act better and save a lot of shooting time.  We should correct the bad habit next time.