Multimedia Adaption Class

Reflections on Adapting The Gift of the Magi

https://spark.adobe.com/video/3rn74gStiU2Yh

Creating an adaption of the short story The Gift of the Magi was a great learning experience. I ascertained the importance of respecting the story as you extract the elements of the narrative to produce the adaption. I found adapting a story to film to be challenging due to the break down of what to use from the original story and what not to use, the dos and don’ts, and decreasing the details from the story to fit action lines and dialogue, just to name a few.

The title of my adaption is The Gift of Sacrifice. It differs from The Gift of the Magi, by character’s age, character’s relationship, character inclusion, timespan, story elements, format, characteristics, and location. In The Gift of the Magi is a short story, the account has two main characters who are husband and wife. They are impoverished adults, living in the 1950s with little to no money, there are two locations mentioned in the story, both characters sacrifice something dear to them to buy a gift for the other. In The Gift of Sacrifice the characters are sister and brother, teenagers who are impoverished, orphaned by the death of their parents, living in present time, with little to no money, there are two additional characters in the adaption, the narrative has three locations, both sacrifice something dear to them to buy the other a gift, and the format is a script.

Adapting stories to script meshes well with my goals as a writer. I started my career in writing as an author. I published two novels and my goal is to adapt them into a script. Learning how to adapt The Gift of the Magi aligned with my goals to do so for my project. This experience was different from other writing projects I had because of the processes involved in script writing is quite different from novel writing. In adaption, the four-hundred-page novel has to be dissected to find what matters in the story, then the process of formatting elements of the narrative has to be scripted to fit a ninety minute or one hundred and twenty minute feature.  

I would like to adapt the bible story of Joseph the dreamer, Samson and Delilah, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and Their Eyes Where Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.