Date: 2007 Posted by:justjill Cast: Not given Credits: Produced by Patrik Fleming and Jill Blum Duration: 6.63
An enjoyable skit from a Shakespeare class at the University of Baltimore, in which Gladys and Lorraine gossip about Ophelia and Gertude, the Macbeths’ marital disharmony and the three witches’ skin care problems, and King Lear, interspersed with advertisements for the King Lear Guide to Retirement Planning and Rid-a-Kin, the ideal poison for troublesome relatives. Some audio problems along the way, but bitchy fun.
Date: 2009 Posted by:deathpunkscum Credits: Giordano Travera (Script and treatment), Michele Socci (Photography), Gabriel Spada (Post-production) Cast: Not given Duration: 3.48
A stylish visualization of Macbeth, akin to pop video. A haunted male figure stares at himself in mirror then wanders down Italian railway stations, interccut with striking symbolic images (a hypodermic needle, a burning playing card, buildings in bright sunlight contrasted with dank passageways) overlaid by electronica and a whispered, threatening monologue paraphrasing Macbeth’s soliloquy from Act 1 Scene 7 (”If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly”). This is thinking in images, inspired by word-images, showing how well the soliloquies lend themselves to this sort of impressionistic treatment.
Date: 2007 Posted by:pulsetv.ir Credits: Created by Alireza Alborzi Cast: The Simpsons Duration: 1.46
One doesn’t expect to find Shakespeare parodies on an Iranian web TV channel, but that’s where this video resides (specifically on Pulsetv.ir, which is a channel on Blip.tv). It’s a mash-up of scenes from assorted episodes of The Simpsons to produce the world’s favourite American family’s interpretation of Othello. Homer is Othello, Marge is Desdemona, Sideshow Bob is Iago – it all just falls into place. The humour is doubled by the portentous trailer commentary, cheekily lifted from the trailer for Oliver Parker’s feature film Othello (as are the closing titles). Silly stuff, but done well.
Date: 2009 Posted by:John Carson McCarthy Credits: Created by John McCarthy Cast: None Duration: 0.54
A striking animated intepretation of Othello, without characters or any action from the play. Instead, and using the Maya and After Effects animation programmes, the filmmaker illustrates Othello’s turmoil and self-destruction through images of a house collapsing and turning into a prison. A few quotations appear as signposts. Brief and rudimentary as it is, this is a startlingly imaginative piece of work.
Date 2008 Posted by:withtheangels Credits: Series creator, director and producer Mary Feuer, writer/producer Jonathan Robert Kaplan, writer Werner Trieschmann, Associate producer Jenni Powell. Produced by Strike.tv Cast: Carly Jones (Ashley Davis) Duration: 2.16
With the Angels is a web video series produced by Strike.tv and created by Mary Feuer, author of the celebrated Lonelygirl15 web series which convinced many that its confessional tales were true life. With the Angels “tells the fish-out-of-water story of Taffy Simpson (played by Jamie Tisdale), a small-town Arkansas girl swimming in the freak-infested waters of Venice, California”. The plot line for episodes 1-8 is described thus:
Taffy’s roommate Ashley and her best friend Andy throw a party, but Taffy isn’t in a partying mood. Things look better in the morning, though, as Taffy tells us about her new life and her thwarted plan to attend the Sunshine Film Academy. New-agey neighbor Miranda pushes some of Taffy’s buttons, and another neighbor, TV writer Trey Alan Gordon, just might give Ashley’s career a jump start. We learn that sometimes there’s more to friendship than meets the eye as Andy’s feelings for Ashley come into focus.
In episode seven aspiring actress Ashley is seen performing an audition to camera. Her imaginative choice is Helena’s speech from All’s Well That Ends Well, “Then, I confess/Here on my knee, before high heaven and you/That before you, and next unto high heaven/I love your son”. The video follows With the Angels and Mary Feuer’s style in closely imitating web video conventions, so Ashley’s rendition looks a lot like a great many other online Shakespeare auditions, with its intimate playing to the camera (though strictly speaking she is addressing someone positioned just to the side of the camera, which introduces a note of falsity – she’s also kneeling down). At any rate, it’s a fine, heartfelt performance. But why?
With the Angels: Episode 8 – Behind the Scenes of Ashley’s Audition
Date 2008 Posted by:withtheangels Credits: Series creator, director and producer Mary Feuer, writer/producer Jonathan Robert Kaplan, writer Werner Trieschmann, Associate producer Jenni Powell. Produced by Strike.tv Cast: Jamie Tisdale (Taffy Simpson), Carly Jones (Ashley Davis), René Alvarado (Andy) Duration: 6.08
This being a web series, there is more to the tale. In the follow-up episode, Taffy (in characteristic mode confessing to the camera) shows us the full tape of the audition, which she had edited and posted for them. Now we see the soap opera, and why Ashley has chosen this particular monologue (”she loves someone who doesn’t love her back”). Her initially flat rendition is turned into something with feeling through Andy’s direction, and of course through her feelings for him. So now you’ll be watching to watch episode 9…
This is an example from the 116 Project, in which ‘Shakespeare Cowboy’ (possibly not his real name) films ordinary Americans and gets them to read Shakespeare 116th sonnet (”Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”). It’s a delightful idea, and the several videos on his YouTube channel each charm through the freshness of their (mostly) untutored readings and the everyday settings. Here the sweetness of Eleanor’s rendition is enriched by the homely setting, the dog and the cat. As the videos’ creator says, “Shakespeare shows us people and people show us Shakespeare”.
Date: 2008 Posted by:Connor Ratliff Credits: Conceived and produced by Connor Ratliff and Jeff Falzone Cast: Connor Ratliff (William Shakespeare) Duration: 6.21
BardBox has already Chris Rozzi and Billy Harper as comedians who post videos in the guise of William Shakespeare. Now we have Connor Ratliff exhibiting similar intimations of grandeur. Ratliff publishes videos on the comedy channel Funny or Die, in several of which he plays a William Shakespeare facing up to the modern world, while being smugly proud of his reputation. Here we are privileged to witness Shakespeare writing a new play. Act One sounds like the Bard has resorted to soap opera, but Act Four promises to be quite exciting. Then we get the off-screen interviewer asking Shakespeare if this change in his style isn’t going to upset his traditional fan base, to which Shakespeare sturdily replies that “Shakespeare is like a shark – he has to keep moving forward”. Those old plays, they took forever to write – now he produces seven a day. My hat is off to thou.
Date: 2004 Posted by:soonest2turn Credits: Not given Cast: Not given Duration: 2.58
School project Shakespeare raps are scattered all over YouTube, and most are lame and annoying. This Grade 12 English project video from Canada stands out from the crowd by some realistic venom amid the goofy performance, and its strong language (a broadminded English teacher was involved, clearly). The lyrics show a strong engagement with the play, more than vindicating the exercise:
Straight Outta Denmark a crazy m———r named Hamlet
I’m a bad ass hero that’s tragic
Thoughts are pending, time’s not mending
Tragic means I die in the ending.
The full text is given on the YouTube page. Just a shame about the half-hearted lip-synching.
Date: 2007 Posted by:christy gordon Credits: Created by Christy Gordon. Background song, ‘These Days’ by Nico Cast: Members of BYU Young Company Shakespeare Troupe, Christy Gordon (Sir Andrew Aguecheek) Duration: 3.01
This unusual video has its origins in a BYU (Brigham Young University) Young Company Shakespeare Troupe’s one-hour production of Twelfth Night, which was taken to elementary schools in the USA. A succession of young people (in present-day dress) are interviewed in the familiar TV style of short statements tightly edited together, about what they thought of the late Sir Andrew Aguecheek. It does have the air of an in-joke among the cast that no one else can quite share in (part of the joke is that the filmmaker herself played Aguecheek, seen only in a photo at the end). However, the video is well made and has real charm. As a Shakespeare video, it is one on its own.
Date: 2007 Posted by:Alex Itin Credits: Created by Alex Itin Cast: none Duration: 2.02
American painter and experimental filmmaker Alex Itin is a member of The Future of the Book, “a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens”. With his starting point the celebrated Wallace Shawn play (and Louis Malle film) My Dinner with André (1981), in which two men debate a wide range of cultural themes over a meal, Itin creates a sampled video by associations. He describes his film thus:
The video is my play on Wallace Shawn and Shakespeare along the way to Orson Welles doing Lear and Mobydick… The drawing of what seems to be Italy with Chinese is from Imagination in The Library. I think he hails from China. The kicked by Sexy Italian Boot Sicily is from my brush wiping page next to the moby ink pot. It’s random, but I thought sort of pretty. It is from the pages of an old book on chess strategy. The Chinese say, “Life is Chess (war); Living is strategy and tactics”.
Also buried within lies the witch from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (based on Macbeth), alongside Brando in Apocalypse Now, The Third Man, The Kinks, and who knows what else besides (the background pages come from Moby Dick via an earlier Itin video – he recycles his own material as well as that of others). It’s an absurdist delight, with a magnificent title (André the Giant was a wrestler and actor popular in America) and a sublime closing dissolve from camera in the hand to skull in the hand. Sometimes movies should only be like this.
Posted by bardbox 
Posted by bardbox 
Posted by bardbox 