Machinima: the scene from Monster
The little movie that I made from a scene in Walter Dean Myers' young adult novel Monster is a good example of the kind of project your students could get involved in through the use of machinima.
My first project was a similarly brief scene from the screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by William Goldman. (BTW, if you haven't read his Adventures in the Screen Trade or Which Lie Did I Tell?, treat yourself to a lively discourse on the nature of screenwriting and moviemaking from Goldman's insider's view.)
In both pieces, I had to dig around in the screenplay (Monster is told through the vehicle of a screenplay) to find a piece of dialogue that could stand alone and serve as the basis for a short but coherent scene. I also wanted to find a scene that touched on a major issue or theme in the book.
With Monster, the story hinges on whether or not Steve Harmon actually served as the lookout for a drugstore robbery in which the store owner was shot and killed. This enigmatic little scene is the only one in the book that deals directly with the issue. This scene deals with Steve's recruitment by an accomplice and, just as in the book, the reader is left to figure out his response.
I made this scene using the PC game The Movies. Machinima options are very limited in most games (meaning that you are limited by the time period, costumes, the very milieu of the game for setting and characters in your movies), but The Movies offers a virtual studio in which you can select from a variety of sets, actors, costumes, and so forth.
In the book, this scene is actually set in a park, but that isn't a choice in the program, so I chose an alternative that made sense. Making these kinds of decisions and then defending them is something that your students will need to do if they use machinima in their projects, either as part of an oral presentation or in writing. Either way, this deepens the thinking that is going on.
I also had to edit the screenplay itself in order to get the subtitles to work moderately well. Even so, there is a lot of reading to be accomplished as the scene zips along. If you want to see the original lines, you will find them on pages 149-151 in the paperback edition of the novel.
I put this together to demonstrate the potential of machinima for teaching and learning in the language arts or literature classroom. Maybe someone from the history department could make a short movie showing the potential of machinima for the history classroom...?
My first project was a similarly brief scene from the screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by William Goldman. (BTW, if you haven't read his Adventures in the Screen Trade or Which Lie Did I Tell?, treat yourself to a lively discourse on the nature of screenwriting and moviemaking from Goldman's insider's view.)
In both pieces, I had to dig around in the screenplay (Monster is told through the vehicle of a screenplay) to find a piece of dialogue that could stand alone and serve as the basis for a short but coherent scene. I also wanted to find a scene that touched on a major issue or theme in the book.
With Monster, the story hinges on whether or not Steve Harmon actually served as the lookout for a drugstore robbery in which the store owner was shot and killed. This enigmatic little scene is the only one in the book that deals directly with the issue. This scene deals with Steve's recruitment by an accomplice and, just as in the book, the reader is left to figure out his response.
I made this scene using the PC game The Movies. Machinima options are very limited in most games (meaning that you are limited by the time period, costumes, the very milieu of the game for setting and characters in your movies), but The Movies offers a virtual studio in which you can select from a variety of sets, actors, costumes, and so forth.
In the book, this scene is actually set in a park, but that isn't a choice in the program, so I chose an alternative that made sense. Making these kinds of decisions and then defending them is something that your students will need to do if they use machinima in their projects, either as part of an oral presentation or in writing. Either way, this deepens the thinking that is going on.
I also had to edit the screenplay itself in order to get the subtitles to work moderately well. Even so, there is a lot of reading to be accomplished as the scene zips along. If you want to see the original lines, you will find them on pages 149-151 in the paperback edition of the novel.
I put this together to demonstrate the potential of machinima for teaching and learning in the language arts or literature classroom. Maybe someone from the history department could make a short movie showing the potential of machinima for the history classroom...?
Labels: machinima, monster, myers, schooladmin
