Week 3

Adaptations

We were back to online lessons this week. We started the week learning about Adaptations with Nargess. I hadn’t really though before just how prevalent adaptations are in the Film/TV Industry. Nargess put up slides for us to guess/work out if they were adaptations or not. Most were, and I hadn’t realised. I knew that films like the Harry Potter films were adapted from the Harry Potter books, but I didn’t know that The Lion King was adapted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I also didn’t know there was a Forrest Gump book. It does tie in with something that Tom (tutor) said to me in Year 1, which is that there are no totally new stories, it’s just how you rearrange them and make them fresh that makes them seem new, and that is a real skill. I’m thinking that even for the films that don’t appear to be an adaptation, and that are a new screenplay, the ideas were probably put together from bits of other stories.

I didn’t know that over two-thirds of the academy awards for best picture have gone to films that have been adapted from books.