Part of Lesson Plan: Serious About Literature and Metaphor

Activity Overview / Details

Serious About Great Literature

Handout: Project Instructions and Assessment

Say: Your task for this project is to create a video using your selected piece of literature that uses both the narrative quality of the piece and visual metaphors to artistically express your interpretation of the narrative. Pick something that you are connected with, something that you really love and care about. You can use both literal and symbolic images to get the ideas across. Do not just read the piece on camera. Re-mix. Make it into your own artistic expression. Update it. Make it relevant to the current day if it is old or relevant to the past if it is new. Remember to adhere to best practices covered in previous lessons when shooting video footage or selecting images.

Note: If the video is going to be more than 5 minutes in length, you should allow students to team up with another person or cut the piece to make it shorter.

Discuss as a class all of the ways that students might approach this task. Examples are:

• Narrate on camera with images super-imposed behind.
• Act out the piece of literature in a dramatic way.
• Use images and words (as titles) to paint a visual interpretation of the piece.
• Experiment with unusual camera angles and perspectives to create dramatic visuals.

(See below for attached PDF version of the above)

Additional Tasks:

Students can use this project as a way to practice chromakey techniques and super-imposition of images that they learned in previous lessons. Have students work toward improving their skills in both chroma-key production and in seper-imposing images at the editing stage.

Have students select images to key and impose that enhance the overall visual aethestetic of the scene while also enhancing the narrative by providing different layers of implied metaphorical meanings. We are attempting to get students to demonstrate their understanding of narrative and metaphor, so encourage experimentation.