About spearean interactive
About us
Spearean interactive are a small company of people who are passionate about the story of Macbeth written by William Shakespeare. We have various projects in various stages of development including a videogame version of Macbeth, a feature film and a TV series.
Writer/director Jasmin Tempest
Long committed to bringing the stories of William Shakespeare to life, Jasmin wanted to take one of his most globally know stories, Macbeth, and bring it not just to the known suspects, the Shakespeare aficionados, but also to a new generation – the digital generation.
All this started with a question.
How do you get the digital kids to love Shakespeare as we do?
The digital kids are the young people, who text rather than talk, who type online rather than write, who read social networking sites rather than books and who play interactive games rather than watch TV or as well as watching TV. And, if they go to the theatre, it’s at Christmas – unless they are lucky enough to have a pro-active school or interested parents.
Jasmin’s son was the example and the inspiration behind this question. “As he got older he wanted to play endless video games, and because he’s an only child, he wanted me to play with him”, says Jasmin. To her surprise, she found not only that videogames were a lot of fun, but also she realised just how much information her son retained from this digital input.
But with so much fun interactive entertainment, Jasmin wondered how she would ever get her son to enjoy the stories of the world’s greatest storyteller, William Shakespeare. “It would have been so easy to do nothing and hope that when he got to 40 he would morph into somebody interested in our cultural icon.” One can always live in hope... Instead Jasmin decided to make a film.
MACBETH’S DISCIPLE was conceived to open young people’s imagination through exploration of the plays’ text and through the creation of invented characters alongside Shakespeare's original cast. The invented cast comprises; the hero CORMAC, his wife LILEAS, daughter ANNA and son DOUGLAS. This family together with their Viking servant, THOROLD, live and work for MACBETH at his hill fort in eleventh century Scotland.”
The result is a piece of action, whose real time is a number of days but takes place between just two lines of Shakespeare’s play near the end of Act three- scene four. What did happen to Fleance? We follow his story.
“We hope, this story of MACBETH’S DISCIPLE will show young people how to better understand, themes, imagery and text on the page and in performance and hopefully they will be inspired to explore all this more deeply by applying their own imagination to Shakespeare's text in similar ways”.
So, magic, mystery and mayhem!
Shot on HD, MACBETH’S DISCIPLE is twenty two minutes long. It combines the story of a real King of Scotland who lived a thousand years ago with state of the art CGI animation. The combination of great live acting, excellent CGI and thrilling combat sequences drew considerable applause when an excerpt was shown by the Director of Photography, Paul Wheeler, in his lecture at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
What is “authentic”?
In our film, we have tried to re-create an authentic eleventh century setting. Shakespeare may well have known a great deal of Dark Age history and has alluded to those mythological beliefs of the time. He tells us during the Malcolm/Macduff scene (4.2) that the English king Edward was on the throne so he clearly knew that at the time of his Macbeth, lived Edward the Confessor, king of England.
Shakespeare, and many actors, directors, producers and audiences since, possibly visualised Macbeth in some kind of romanticised early English setting, almost like a Hollywood swashbuckler.
For four centuries, Macbeth has more often been portrayed in contemporary dress than period dress: Shakespeare’s troupe probably wore doublet and hose, while two hundred years later, Garrick wore a dress coat and knee breeches, and nowadays, Macbeth is likely to wear a suit, a leather jacket or army camouflages.
Macbeth's Disciple is set in a world more like what we now know of Scotland a thousand years ago. Visually and aurally, we consciously strive to emphasise the things that make Scotland unique and different; audiences who expect to see a standard romanticised mediaeval costume drama will be surprised by the unusual architecture, the décor, the clothing, the hairstyles, the colours, and even the landscape.
This setting makes Macbeth's Disciple unique and exciting.
The location
In the eleventh century, pre the Norman invasion, the world was built of wooden buildings.
We were lucky to find a reconstructed village of a similar time period to crannogs of Scotland. And it came with a re-enactment society who supplied us with many extras, props and lots of help.
www.regia.org
The beautiful scenic shots of Scotland were filmed for us by Mont Films who are based in the Highlands of Scotland. www.montfilms.com
Contact us
Tell us if you want to know something else about our film or if you have any other comments and we will try to answer you or post it on our blog.
info@spearean.co.uk