Macbeth Creative Project- Majd Bostani and Jakob Klemash-Kresge

My partner is Jakob Klemash-Kresge

        After considering the options, we chose to make the playbill because we both agreed that we didn’t have any groundbreaking creative project ideas. We thought that a playbill would be perfect because if one of us has an idea, we could always just put it into the playbill. For the cover we chose to use a piece of art that was hand drawn because we thought that this would be very original and very interesting. We put a lot of effort into the cover. We both aren’t the best artists in the world, so we just did a cover of a pivotal part of the story. This is one of the parts  we believe we could’ve done better, but no one is a perfect artist so we just kept that the way it is.
        
The quotes that we used were very important in the play Macbeth and some of the quotes Ms. Giknis featured in class. For example on the cover, we wrote “Is this a dagger which I see before me. The handle toward my hand.” That was an important quote as it showcased how Macbeth felt before the most important part of the story, in our opinion. We also chose ads that were relevant to the theater. For example, the ad we put in for the theater lessons is the real number and dates and we used the actual Barrymore´s Cafe. We chose to showcase Macbeth at the Walnut Street Theater because we wanted to have a theater that was located in Center City Philadelphia. We also think that it is appropriate that we showcase Shakespeare in America's oldest theater. 
        
The characters are in the play of Macbeth and the actors were people in Red Stream.  We thought that this would be interesting because we had them tell us facts about themselves so that we can a make a simulated bio about them. This also gave us an opportunity to collaborate with our classmates. We figured that everyone would e-mail us a short paragraph about themselves, but that turned out to be one of the biggest challenges of our project. When the due date was close, we were thinking of scrapping the idea, although we thought it would be a dumb move. It wasn’t until I had the idea to improvise. Improvising is one of the most important life skills we have learned at SLA! We wrote the actor’s bios of those that didn’t respond to our email based off of what they usually say in class. That turned out better than we thought! The costumes were just pictures off of the internet. We just brainstormed about what we wanted each character to wear, entered it into Google Images, and found the closest match. We did this as we believed that words won't do justice for costumes, but we only realized we needed costumes on the last day so we couldn't draw them.
        
We did research on the Curse of Macbeth so we can put that in our playbill so no one would say Macbeth during our production, unless it’s a part of the script. We also thought it would be important to fill everyone in about it. Majd and I also included a short bio about William Shakespeare in the playbill so that the people would have background knowledge on Shakespeare. We also wanted them to know about Shakespeare’s contributions to literature and drama.
        
We both learned a lot while doing this project, both academic lessons and life lessons. One major lesson that we both learned was to always apply skills that you learned somewhere else in a pinch. For example, with our character piece, if we didn’t learn to improvise, we would’ve never completed it. Aside from that, we also learned some secret stuff about Shakespeare and his theater.
Macbeth-PlaybillBenchmark
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Here's an overhead picture of Jakob typing out ideas for our playbill!
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Here's an over-the-shoulder of Jakob at work brainstorming some ideas for our playbill.
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Doing my work at home. But first, let me take a selfie!
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Come on Majd, if you try hard enough, you have the potential of being the next Picasso!
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Looking at the computer for cover inspiration!
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Jakob typing up some advertisements!

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