Looking Back

Reflection
This project was a really fun way to end the quarter and a lot more entertaining than taking an exam. At the beginning, we decided that it would be best to pick a text to work with first, then decide which type of production to do. We thought that knowing the text would make it easier to decide what to do with it. At first, we decided to work with “Do Not go Gentle into that Good Night” and make something similar to the video we saw in class, but we figured it would be too close to what we saw. We all decided that we wanted to do “A Rose for Emily.” I found a song by the Zombies called “A Rose for Emily” and it seemed to be written based on the story so we thought it would be cool to use. From that, we looked at the list of options and the music video seemed to be the best option. So, we got started.
We started by just looking at main things that happened in the story and getting pictures from the internet to represent those events. One thing that is often noticed about this story is the random, mixed-up chronology. We decided that we wanted to demystify this aspect of it by placing the representative photos in the order of Emily’s life and that the events actually happened in. We started with the beginning with the few brief details that we had about Emily’s father. Then continued to a few pictures that we believed Emily may look like from the descriptions in the story. It also said that, at one point in her life, she was an instructor who taught people how to paint China so we put in a few photos of that to show that she was normal as a younger person.
Morgan Freeman may seem randomly tossed in there, but we used him to represent Emily’s servant. Part of this decision had to do with the fact that we did not want to confuse viewers by having too many characters to represent one person. For example, with the servant, we wanted to use Morgan Freeman because we thought of Driving Miss Daisy and wanted to use those pictures. We put him in there just before the pictures of her and Homer, who was her boyfriend. The story also mentions that he was a foreman and helped out with paving the sidewalks in town and that is how they met.
Emily never pays her taxes because of a fabricated story that the mayor made up that they were paying her taxes as a way of paying her family back from a loan that her father helped out with long ago. Later in her life, the town stepped in and a letter was sent to her asking her to pay her taxes. She sent it back. We put in a few pictures of those things for that reason. At one point in the story, a Baptist minister goes to visit her and he never discloses what actually happened.
This is the point where we decided to put in the part where Emily goes to the pharmacy to get arsenic. We put in a picture of the part where the pharmacist looks concerned to compare it with the part in the story where he asks her what the poison is for. He ends up writing “for rats” on it, so we put a photo of a rat as well. The town assumes that she will use it to commit suicide and they are always watching for her in her windows and around her house because she never comes outside. They see her up in the window and say at one point that the town is reminded of angles in stained glass. The town started to smell a stench around her house so she watched them spread the lime so we put in photos related to that. Then, after she passed, we included pictures of what we may think her grave would have looked like.
Working with a group on the project was fun too. It was nice to have the input and be able to do everything together. We put all the pictures in and re-organized them so that they would be in the correct order and then put the music in and final touches and it was good to go!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xenEseHCWY