My experience in this Death of a Salesman Project was a memorable one. Working with two of my close friends, Carly and Nicole, we all really got to express ourselves with literature in different ways than usual. When we first thought of the idea to all write a song together of Willy Loman’s tragic death and the play’s major themes such as capitalism and the American Dream, we never thought our project would turn out as great as it did (trust me).
My role in our group was to get video clips of the different movies made of DoaS, and work with Nicole to merge them all together to make it our own in a way. Carly and I also were in charge of song writing, which I had never really done before, so it was fun challenge. Singing with Carly happened to be one of the funniest experiences of my life. Every time we would start recording on GarageBand, she would start doing opera tones or making funny faces. I can honestly say this project was not a burden, but a creative and even fun, undertaking. Carly was definitely our group’s MVP I would say. Carly has the ability to always be managing many tasks at once and making it look so easy. I would say she was the most experience with using GarageBand and iMovie so she really has the foist (vocab, check) task of having to teach Nicole and I the basics.
Our group worked extremely together overall, we all took on a major task that needed to be accomplished and there was no major procrastinating or problems in the end. Our inspiration for this video and song write we performed was really a group idea we came up with up, having the intentions of making a modern day music video of Willy Loman’s tragic death. In the end, it was more technical than we thought it would be so we stuck to songwriting and video editing.
The major ideas conveyed in our project were Willy’s delusion of the American Dream and his pernicious ways and habits. We thought it was really interesting how Willy all his life had really been nothing but a cheater, always lying to himself and the people around him. In our song, we sing how Willy finally comes to terms with the cheating man, and dishonorable role model (he once was a real role model to Biff) he is. “I found the truth, When I realized my true income, Suicide is my only way out”. We wrote this line because it really portrays Willy’s desperateness at the end of the play. We wanted to show everyone how sad and hopeless Willy was at the end of his life. He had to end it.
Like I said before, working with GarageBand and iMovie was really the biggest challenge for us I think. We had to work outside our comfort zones and play around with it a little to really understand the program and see how much you could do with it. I really learned so much (seriously, I had never opened GarageBand before) with voice editing and effects you could use with such simple dialogue or sounds. I really enjoyed using this programs and will definitely be more open to using them in the future. Another fear, you could say, I overcame for this project was singing in front of the class. I mean, I already get florid every time a teacher called on me, how was I supposed to sing in front of my class? Talk about, stage fright. Anticipating the reactions of our fellow classmates and Mr. D of course, was one of the scariest aspects of our project. Lets face it, we don’t have a career in singing and it was quite embarrassing hearing our tone-deaf voices screeching for everyone to hear. I really had to learn to be comfortable and just laugh at it. (I hope it wasn’t too painful in the end).
This was a really enjoyable and educational way to reflect on one of the greatest pieces of history in American history. I am glad our class got the chance to read Death of a Salesman and really try to perceive life through Willy Loman’s eyes. I had a great time.
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