Well, I am delighted to say that my team and I are finally done with both the script and the final presentation. I admit, we met quite a lot of difficulties, and just after a week I started to feel unconfident about the outcome of this project. Nevertheless, things turned out great. In fact, today we finished up the presentation, consisting in a Garage Band file we created a few days ago. And, although we didn’t have it completed for the beginning of class this morning, Mr. Chase received the final file thanks to Mithun, who spent all the remaining time working on the audio version of the script. Thankfully, despite the first misunderstandings with some of my group members, all of us did what we were supposed to do. Strangely however, we eventually decided to make audio version of the script, based on the audio version of the book itself. We did so because after a while we realized that half of us had pronunciation problems, and therefore we weren’t able to speak fluently and perform well.

Almost a week ago, we faced a technical difficulty: Naadir didn’t come to school that particular day, and we absolutely needed his part of the script. Unfortunately, he wasn’t even able to post them on the Google document. But, I knew he actually had them done on his laptop. So, after a couple of hours I lost hope, and decided that I had to find important lines we were missing, since I was the team manager. In that occasion I read the act in which the characters are waiting for Otello to arrive on the shore in Cyprus. I identified a very relevant line, which very few people noticed. I am talking about the one when Cassio takes Desdemona’s hand as an act of courtesy. It actually is an act of courtesy where Cassio comes from, but to the eyes of everyone else in Venice and Cyprus, it symbolizes a simple interest toward that specific woman. In essence, it can be interpreted as a Cassio’s mistake, by showing this supposed “attraction” for Desdemona. Today, I also found an interesting quotation from the writing Analysis of Iago, and it is the following: “However, it is not that Iago pushes aside his conscience to commit these acts, but that he lacks a conscience to begin with.” I have to say, I disagree with this statement. You see, if Iago does not have a conscience, why in almost every scene does he try to justify his immoral acts with pointless subterfuges and pretexts? I thought about the answer for a while, and I realized that by doing so, Iago shows to have a certain, although undefined conscience. 

My team and I have already started a Google Doc and we have found almost all lines we need for each scene of the play. It's not as easy as it sounds though, there are some difficulties in finding lines and dialogue that goes along with our theme which is revenge. Because every scene isn't extremely lengthy we've had to cut some scenes out for lack of enough informati. My group is well put together I feel. None of us are slackers and we get what needs to get done because we know that others grades depend on our owns. No one is selfish about it and tries to bring us down by not doing what they're assigned to do. That's a good characteristic about us that I can't say I've experienced many times throughtout the schoolyear. 

    The way that I'm choosing to edit pieces of this play is to make it so that people will be able to tell what my team's theme is and still get the just of the play by seeing these.When I first started reading the play then I was really into it and I still am as I go through this whole benchmark process. As I get deeped and deeper into the benchmark I'm starting to look at things beneath the surface and think more about how the dialogue relates to the theme we've chose. 

5/30/08

    So far, in the progress of this project, my group and I have been doing some good work. We have identified our theme and began searching for lines that illustrate both the theme and the plot. The theme we chose to show is loyalty. It pretty much comes up as an issue for every character in the book and is the prelude to many of the events. We have also narrowed down on how we are going to present our script. We have decided between either a sock puppet show or a paper bag puppet show. So far, I would say my group and I are working well together. Our personalities and work habits mesh pretty well and cause for few conflict.
    One success we have had so far is working with the GoogleDoc. I personally, am in love with how easy it is making it to collaborate with the rest of my group. Also, I’m just a huge geek and I think it’s quite cool. We set it up in a chart, one row being the act/scene, the other being the person responsible for that section and the final row being the lines found that will be put into our script. We have color-coded each of our names, so we know who it is when someone writes in blue, red, ect. We even have a section for questions or conversations to have about different group decisions. Basically, we are talking about what to do over the GoogleDoc and either answering it then or later. Like I said, huge geek about it.
    As of now, the only difficulties I have reached are finding the perfect lines. It is really hard summing up an entire play into seven minutes. It is really teaching me how to sort through the text and find exactly where the most important and needed parts are.