Palaces Out Of Paragraphs

English 1102: Hamilton and Writing

Remix & Adaptation: From Beginning to End

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by: Emily Moseley

My idea for this remix and adaptation project started as a sort of play off Ham4Pamphlet. I am a visual thinker and every time I listened to Hamilton’s songs I had to stop what I was doing to really picture what was happening in the song and most times I was able to create a mood, font, and graphic in my head. So my original idea was to do something similar, but for a few of the people of Hamilton. This was a great idea; however, I quickly realized that I’m a typography and structured artist, not much of a people-drawing artist. So in my revisions and feedback, I was able to reshape this idea into what it is currently. I stuck to having two of my graphics being people-based (off Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton) and the third was meant to be something more my style, a graphic of the Ten Duel Commandments.

The student who reviewed my proposal gave great, critical feedback that helped shaped my project. I came to him with the Hamilton/Jefferson/Ten Duel Commandments plan (pictured below), and he hinted at small tweaks I could make as well as small additions that would help tie this to Hamilton and make it even more historically accurate.

On the left you can see Alexander Hamilton, fairly similar to how he looks in his final form. I used oil pastels to create his rough, aged face and was unsure what I wanted to put in his eyeglasses so I drew some sketches around the page. Ultimately, I relied on the description I had come up with for each eyeglass for the final painting; however, starting the conversation early helped a lot.

In the middle, I have a much rougher draft of my Thomas Jefferson piece. This started when I found a sassy drawing of Jefferson portrayed as Daveed Diggs (right) and it gave me an idea for this graphic using one of his lines from Cabinet Battle #1. His personality in the show was so strong and I felt that it was a perfect candidate to show how two-sided politicians can be, especially back then with issues such as slavery on the table. It wasn’t until my feedback from the peer-review that I added the farmscape with his slaves in, giving his snapping fingers more of a purpose and an opportunity to show his home life.

Lastly, you can see an early version of the Ten Duel Commandments graphic. This idea did not change much under peer-review, though I did try to emphasize the “secret” nature of dueling in it’s final state because dueling was illegal in New York at the time. This was an unofficial, unlawful document that signifies the rules that we learned in the show Hamilton. Each bullet point is a line taken directly out of the show, or tweaked slightly for context purposes. Essentially, this piece was made to represent that song, and be a document that looks like it could have been created at the time that this show’s events happened.

Below you can see each of my pieces in their final state, after all the revisions, additions, and tweaks.

Alexander Hamilton

All in all, this piece on Alexander Hamilton is supposed to capture the trials and tribulations he went through to shape this country. From his early childhood, he suffered many loses including his mother (who’s lying in bed in his left eyeglass) and his home (because of the hurricane that destroyed everything he knew). Despite everything, he made a name for himself, worked hard, and became a Founding Father. His greatest contribution was the Federal Banking System and he is pictured presenting it to other congressmen in the right eyeglass. Zooming back out, Alexander Hamilton himself is wearing his famous reading glasses that hold these two images and he is clearly aged, worn, tired, and bleeding. The bloody nose represents the blood he shed to get to and shape this country. This is to honor his time spend fighting in the Revolutionary War and his early death in the duel between him and Aaron Burr in 1804.

 

Thomas Jefferson

The goal of this piece is to show Jefferson’s strong personality, two-faced politics, and influence on this country. The quote on the right is from the show Hamilton, Cabinet Battle #1, and his crazy hair is also a reference to the show and Daveed Diggs. By putting the French flag in the background, I’m showing his history with France and his time spent overseas. His stance and snapping fingers are a tribute to his cocky character and the slaves and farmland on the left are showing how partial he is to Virginia and his old way of life. This shows what most people don’t know about Thomas Jefferson: he was far from perfect and very selfish.

 

The Ten Duel Commandments

Even though dueling was illegal in New York at the time, the show Hamilton had such a structured way of talking about dueling that I felt it required a somewhat official documentation of the illegal act. The song The Ten Duel Commandments in the show was a large turning point, and is what ultimately killed Hamilton. The reverberations of Hamilton’s death were felt by just about everyone at the time, which is represented by the fire that consumes the page. The page is meant to be an old document from the 1800s which is why it is so worn, from being hidden from the law and passed around between many people. Finally, the two handguns at the top of the page represent the weapons one would bring to a duel, as well as the ones that Hamilton and Burr used in their duel.

Reflective Blog Entry By JaQuez Jackson

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I chose to do the remix version of the Hamilton song “my shot”. This song is basically the life of Alexander Hamilton himself. Moreover, being that “my shot” was and overview of his life, I wanted to make my remix “My Skin” about an overview that not only goes into my life but goes into how it is as a minority in my life. I wanted to give off a message to an audience of everyone. In that message I wanted people to know that we should soon come together and raise awareness for not only our race, but all races. Being black in America has some positives but it’s overwhelmed with negatives as well. For several years the black community has received numerous amounts of injustice cases and hate crimes that are hidden within the souls of mankind. Being black in America comes with many hardships and with those hardships already taking place, it just makes no sense to keep adding fuel to the fire from the system of what we call America. Moreover, this does nothing but causes more racial tension throughout our country and adds reasons for the desire of division once again.

In conclusion, the sooner we all gain justice for or people as a whole the better step we’d take as a nation to become stronger. In my project i didn’t want to just mention the hardships of the color of my skin, but also the power that the color of my skin could have in making a change for us all come together. At first I was just going to make small changes to the original song, but I knew I could expand on it by using this song to voice my opinion on what I think needs to be changed in our country. GOD BLESS AMERICA

Image result for black justice

Reflective Blog Post

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By: Ian Byers

Compared to my original vision of what my Remix and Adaptation Project would be, I believe that the final version I submitted was quite faithful. However, I did make some changes, mostly based off of feedback that I received in my peer review. I also added an additional component to my project from when I turned in the draft to when I turned in the final version.

When I recieved my peer feedback, I was happy to see that in all, my partner understood the purpose behind my project and the audience that I intended it for. Some of the feedback from him that I used to improve my project was going into more detail and giving more context about historical events and legislation. I originally wanted to make this part of my project only a short summary, as I was worried about making something extremely dry and boring to the reader. However, I did decide that this ultimately would make readers potentially more engaged if they were more informed. Another suggestion was that I should include some figure of how many immigrants would have wanted to come to the United States during certain time periods. I agree that this would be interesting and would improve my project. However, I could find no way to accurately estimate this statistic, so I was unable to include it in the final version.

In terms of my own personal changes to the project in the final version, I added another document which was a compilation of statistics. I did not include this in my first draft as I had not yet put this data into a easily readable format, and I did not want to cause confusion. Instead, I waited and made a more nicely formatted document instead of just a spreadsheet with no context.

Overall, I think that I fully achieved what I was going for in making this project, although the initial draft that I submitted did not achieve this.

10 Dual Commandments Reflective Blog Entry

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By: Avery Showell

After articulating the feedback I have received there have been many changes to my draft. Just like Art, everything does not always look how you want it or how you want other people to perceive it the first time that you make up a piece. That is why you have drafts and people to look at those drafts and give opinions. These opinions end up making drastic changes, small changes, or no changes at all. But the purpose of them are for them to spark thought, and new ideas. Ideas that can bring masterpieces and steer you to reflect on the process you took and how you can use new techniques and viewpoints in the future.

It allows your peers in the class examining your work and raising questions about aspects of the work that you may need greater clarification in. They may also offer an unbiased view, highlighting when certain things catch an audience or make sense, given the particular situation and or class. 

At first, my view on my remix was simple and dry. What it was missing was an audience catcher or something someone would actually wanted to keep clicking through. The choice to turn my 10 Dual commandments into a slideshow and or power point came from wanting to impress myself with my work and see how I could work on visual and electronic communication. I now feel like my finished project will be outgoing to those interested. After the changes I have made, I now feel more confident in making slides and power points on different topics for different subjects. The process of learning from the different parts of submission on this remix and adaptation project influenced me to find new ways to get things done. Especially seeking the new avenue of plays and on stage performances.

Remix and Adaptation Reflection

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by Grace Griggs

My proposed project was to write a D&D one-shot adventure inspired by Hamilton stealing cannons from the British, which is briefly mentioned in “Right Hand Man” pretty much like this.

My finished project is very similar to what I proposed, a 18 page pdf containing the written adventure, a map of Fort George, custom enemy stat-blocks and Character sheets for Burr, Hamilton, Lafayette, Laurens and Mulligan.

One of my favorite parts of this project was getting to monkey around with the actual history in order to tell the story I wanted to tell. In reality, only Hamilton and Hercules Mulligan participated, but I wanted to include the whole gang so I did. The cannons at Fort George were completely abandoned, but I wanted to make it more interesting, so I added some British soldiers on guard there. It’s a very cool feeling to make a story how you want it to be.

I found the peer review process very helpful. My biggest worry going in was that the person reviewing me wouldn’t get what I was trying to do, since it’s a little bit out of left field. To try to avoid this I made my draft as close to the finished product as possible. I was glad to see my peer review partner got what I was going for both on purpose and intended audience.

The main change suggested by my peer reviewer was that I add some text explaining D&D because she felt that someone unfamiliar with the game would be unable to play it and fully understand it based on my work alone. This is very valid, but unfortunately I was not able to come up with a good solution. Explaining the game system to the level required would easily double my word count and would possibly be overstepping the boundaries of copyrighted material. The issue is that a module like this is only intended to be read by the person running the game, the GM, and a GM has to have much more knowledge of the game than I can provide for something like this. 

The main changes between my first and final drafts are the addition of custom enemy stat-blocks and substantial editing of the character sheets, along with changing the wording in a few places. In my first draft, rather than providing enemy stats, I simply cited stats from published sources. Adding custom stats allows this adventure to stand on its own more and allowed the combat encounters to fit the Revolutionary time period better. In addition characters were upped from level one to two and a sheet was added for Aaron Burr. These changes combined make the adventure much more playable. Running the combat encounters I describe in my draft without modification would leave almost no chance for the players to actually succeed. They have a pretty good shot now.

Overall I found the review and revision process helpful and am happy with my finished product.

 

Reflective Blog Entry By: Kelton Dawson

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Reflective Blog Entry

 

 

The project I used was from the song 10 duel commandments. I portrayed my life to the song because I felt my life was a great topic and how I go through each day and my beliefs I live by. In my rough draft we used peer review and the person told me that my project was very “plain” and that the person was going through adversity in a time in his life. I took each comment I received and used it has constructive criticism to have an effective project. The way I made the project not boring I added pictures and used a color way that seems to go with the mood of the commandments. The power point seemed to be a great program to use to just, because it has a pause between each commandments as you switch slides and this to me showed me how it resembles the song in a small way. I also used picture to show its resembles before each commandment the song says a number so before each commandment I have a picture of a number to show the resemblances of the song and after I have each commandment and a picture that shows a similarity of each commandment.  This project was very useful because it showed me how songs I hear on the radio I can remix and possibly make into a new song.  Also this project made me think that these are really the things I live by and I never noticed until I did this project and  how these are the most important things I live by each day of my life. I also learned that some of things I live by alexander also live by. By me seeing this it showed me that people all over the world live the same way so it showed I wasn’t alone

Reflective Blog Entry

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by Noah Hammond

For my Remix and Adaptation project I decided to use the two Cabinet Battle songs from the Hamilton soundtrack and turn them into the form of a Twitter argument. Hamilton and Jefferson have pretty heated debates about a couple of political topics and that just reminded me of the arguments that people have over Twitter these days.

Couples Arguing GIFs - Find & Share on GIPHY

I started off by going back to the genius annotations of the Cabinet Battle #1 and Cabinet Battle #2 to see their lyrics again. I went line by line, reading the annotations on the website and researching further into the subject of their disagreement. After I felt I had a pretty good grasp on what was going on during that time period, I started turning Jefferson’s initial arguments into tweets. This part was difficult since the original discussions were in an older form of English and the song lyrics were in rhyming verses. I tried to recreate language and habits that people on Twitter these days tend to favor. I also added gifs to most of the tweets to reinforce the message and add a multimodal aspect to the project. Since the technology is available to us, I see why people like to communicate using words and images online. I also had to create multiple new Twitter accounts which took some fiddling with due to Twitter’s privacy and safety policies.

ARUL GUNAWAN: CARA BUAT FOLOWER PD TOMBOL TWITTER

If I had to improve my project, I would like to incorporate tweets from other people, whether they be subtweets, replies, or just other people commenting on the debates. This would make the conversation fell more real since the way social media is today, anyone can come in and give their opinion. If I added a series of tweets from George Washington trying to moderate the two over Twitter, it could be very interesting. There are still a lot of things that Twitter offers that I haven’t explored yet, but I feel that I learned more about it as an online platform form this project.

My Shot Remix: Moses Sghayyer

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I dreaded this project if I am being honest. I tried my best to wait until the last minute to start working on it. This is not because I did not care about this assignment but because I am not artistic at all. At first, I started brainstorming a theme to base my project on. I decided to tackle the ever-worsening problem of student debt. I am very passionate about this topic, especially because I suffer from it as well. I also liked this topic because it will resonate with my classmates.

My next step was to find the appropriate media to use for this topic. With limited artistic abilities, I decided to focus on lyrics. I chose to change the lyrics for “My Shot”. I chose this song because of the defiance feel to it. In this song, Hamilton lays out his ambition and goals. He believes in himself and will do his best to forge his destiny. I was able to relate to this song because I am also ambitious in my education. Like Hamilton, my path has been filled with challenges. However, they will not stop me from achieving my goals and aspirations. I wanted to express a college student’s experience while maintaining the lyrical and rhyming flow of the song. The lyrics talk about how students have worked hard to earn their spots in competitive colleges only to be scared off with outrageous tuition fees. It is not uncommon for students to accumulate six figures of debt. The feedback I received from my peer was very helpful. He really liked the premise behind the project but thought my lyrics needed to flow better. To fix that, I spent several hours stringing different words together to create a nice flow to the song. Towards the end of my project, I was actually enjoying the process and was not fearful of my artistic abilities anymore.

 

A Reflection of Ben Franklin’s Song Remix

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By: Zac Frederick

(^not the Franklin adaptation I decided to go with unfortunately)

For my remix an adaptation project, my design was to rewrite “Ben Franklin’s Song” in order to portray a different side of the famous character. To me this was a fun way to look at and research more about Ben Franklin’s life, and I found out a lot that I wouldn’t have known prior to this project. With this goal, a good portion of the project was doing actual research into the life of Benjamin Franklin. While the original provides a basic idea and understanding of his most notable achievements, I wanted to take a look at some of the qualities and traits not typically related to the man.

I received excellent feedback from my peer reviewer. I was very happy with the lyrics that I had come up with following my research, and many of the suggestions were to look at the formatting and presentation of the project. I could not have agreed more that a more professional and functional look was needed, and my reviewer even suggested that I use a line numbering system, something I never thought to do! In addition, he suggested other things such as cleaning up the source list and fixing spacing issues where possible, each very useful in preparing the final form of the project.

One difficulty I faced when preparing the lyrical content of the presentation of the piece was being able to condense complex topics and ideas into simple words and phrases as required by song lyrics. I found Ben Franklin’s life to be incredibly fascinating, and so naturally there were so many aspects I wanted to put into a song about him. For me it really has been eye opening as to how skilled one has to be in order to be able to relate deep meaning in a few syllables, but I enjoyed making an effort to this notion.

Reflecting on My Adaptation

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By: Arfa Ul-Haque

For my Remix and Adaptation Project, I made a painting paralleling the musicals Hamilton and The Greatest Showman. When I began this project, I hoped to make its purpose clear to everyone, even those unfamiliar with the musicals. But as I worked on the project, I realized that it would be difficult for everyone to understand the symbolism and themes of the musicals. Consequently, my intended audience changed as I became closer to finishing the project.

I came across a few challenges while working on this project. I was conflicted on making decisions for a few parts on the project and asked my peer reviewer about his opinion, so that I could more clearly convey the similarities between the two musicals. My peer reviewer provided me with great feedback but did not respond to my questions, so I chose what I believed was best.

Another challenge I faced was that I drew my sketch on a rough sheet of paper, before deciding to create the final project on a vinyl record. I chose to make my final painting on a vinyl since both Hamilton and The Greatest Showman are musicals and vinyl records store music. In choosing to paint my project on a different sheet than my draft, I had to redraw my sketch onto the vinyl and then paint over it. Therefore, I indirectly made the project take much longer than I anticipated.

I appreciated the feedback my peer reviewer gave me and took it into consideration when creating my final piece. My peer reviewer suggested adding more detail to my final project by having an object on The Greatest Showman side to reflect the gun on the Hamilton side. Initially, I had the gun on the Hamilton side to represent one of the main songs, “My Shot”, and was planning to the reflect it on The Greatest Showman side by drawing clouds to represent one of the main songs, “A Million Dreams”. However, after the workshop, I realized that the connection would be hard to see by the audience and it would make more sense for me to compliment the gun with a baton on The Greatest Showman side, as P. T. Barnum (the protagonist of The Greatest Showman) was a ringmaster. I also painted both halves of the vinyl different colors in order to highlight the differences between the musicals, as suggested by my peer reviewer.

The only piece of feedback that I did not agree with was adding more characters from each musical to my painting. In my opinion, adding more characters would take away from the main focus of the painting and from the main characters. I want to draw attention to the protagonists, their wives, and their lovers when people see the painting rather than introducing other characters in order to highlight those relationships.

Overall, I enjoyed working on this project and analyzing two of my favorite musicals. It made me feel more confident in my artistic skills and allowed me to be creative.