Activities
Zombie Jigsaw and Life-Size Drawings
In this activity, students will be divided into pairs and will read individually and then work together using the information learned to create life-size drawings of zombies using captions from the textual evidence they have gathered. The readings will come from a variety of texts to include the biology, psychology, and philosophy behind zombies. I will provide a few life-size zombie outlines enough for multiple pairs to work together to add what they have learned to the same outline to create an artistic representation of a zombie and label the major features pulled from the texts. There will be ample opportunity to discuss what fascinating facts they have learned.
Comic Illustrations
Since a lot of my students watch The Walking Dead on television but have yet to read the comics, I want to use this to my advantage. The first thing that I will do is play for them the introductory scene from the television show premiere in which Rick is wandering around a deserted gas station. Afterwards, I will have them choose between working individually or in pairs to create their own comic strip of what they have seen. We will come back to these later, after we learn comic terminology and how to read comics. After we do this, we will later return to this exercise and complete it again with another section from one of the episodes. Then, we will look at the original comics and compare ours to Kirkman’s – seeing the differences including what might have been omitted.
Comics and Film (Television Episodes) Adaptations/Comparisons of The Walking Dead Comics to Television Series
Until now we have not really analyzed either text – comics or television. We will take specific scenes from both medias, reviewing them in-depth. First, students will determine the big picture when it comes to the two medias – what is the overarching theme (the main idea), who are the characters one is introduced to, what stories are they telling, who is narrating the episode (the point of view), and what is the plot (the events in order) and the setting. Second, we will analyze both the comics and the television episodes using the vocabulary that we have learned including shots, angles, panels, and symbols, amongst others. Third, we will compare the two looking what is compelling about each of the medias. The Teach With Movies website has excellent discussion questions and assignments that I will be incorporating into this unit to assist my students in examining the adaptation. For this analysis, I will have them focus on scenes altered between the two medias – depictions of both – and the reasoning behind this, as well as the tone, evaluating the “changes in terms of how well the intention of the scene is made manifest in either media.”38
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