Murder Mystery Project
For the Murder Mystery project, students worked in groups of 4-5 to create an interactive murder game to play with an audience. For the humanities portion of the project, The murder mystery had to be based in a specific historic time period and students had to create detailed character maps as well as write the script for the entire skit. To integrate chemistry into the project the murder weapon had to be a chemical and there had to be a detailed chemical test.
Our time period(1930) is right at the beginning of the great depression, so I think I learned a ton about the great depression because I really wanted to be able to understand our time period. The great depression was a terrible nationwide economic crisis that lasted from 1929-1939. It was sparked from the crash of wall street, and homeless rates were at an all-time high. Unemployed men, hobos, traveled the railways to different locations desperately searching for work, and the food was much more scarce than usual. Massachusetts was no outlier in the depression, and they were hit just as hard as the rest of the country was, unemployment in Massachusetts was up to around 25%, and many factories closed killing jobs and industries.
Our Murder Mystery was about a mental hospital/prison where there was a murderer on the loose. Every character besides the staff at the facility was crazy in some way. This made every character seem like a serious suspect, even though in the end it was the doctor at the facility. The setting for our story is based on a real mental hospital called Mclean Mental hospital in Massachusetts. Reading about the rich history of this facility gave us a ton of inspiration and in the end, it made making crazy characters really fun. After we knew our setting, we made characters that could have been really in this environment. Even though, we all put our own spin on them.
For our story, I decided it would be great for us to have a script so that we could stay organized as well as get consistency in the show. So, I made a script for our group that did exactly that. Our rehearsal process we treated them like it was an actual run through, and we took them pretty seriously. As a group, we would wait until after our run-throughs to give each other feedback, we felt this was the quickest way to improve. Overall, I think that this process was one of the key reasons we were able to succeed and made our story better and better with each run through,
Both of our two runs went very well. Our group was well prepared, the story is engaging, and it seemed like the audience had great times. However, the more we ran through our story after our first run, the smoother the show got. It went from fast/crazy pace to a calm and cool pace with us performing our lines with ease. In the final, we even went 40 minutes earlier than we originally expected, and it was still great.
I feel very proud of myself and my group members for how well our final runs went. On our last critique run with another group, it was terrible and the free-flowing room format wasn’t working for us. My entire group(including me) was freaking out a little bit, we didn’t have a real test, our story wasn’t great, and we weren’t doing too well. But I knew exactly how to fix that, and that’s where the script and play format came into play. I thought that if we made it more like a play, not only would it seem more professional, but it would make the format of the room less confusing, Also, Andrea and I came up with a test that was interactive and pretty fun. This test involved the chloroform rag and included the audience member in getting and testing the liquid from the rag. These changes made the show so much better, and in the end, I can say I think we really succeed.
I learned a ton about writing and performing a murder mystery in this project. This is especially because I wrote the script for my group and had one of the leading roles in the show. Some things that are really important in the process of the murder mystery is to stay incredibly persistent and make sure the details are consistent, the story has red hearings to make sure it’s not too easy and the audience is engaged in the story. These things allow the mystery to be challenging, fun, and engaging for the audience.
Our time period(1930) is right at the beginning of the great depression, so I think I learned a ton about the great depression because I really wanted to be able to understand our time period. The great depression was a terrible nationwide economic crisis that lasted from 1929-1939. It was sparked from the crash of wall street, and homeless rates were at an all-time high. Unemployed men, hobos, traveled the railways to different locations desperately searching for work, and the food was much more scarce than usual. Massachusetts was no outlier in the depression, and they were hit just as hard as the rest of the country was, unemployment in Massachusetts was up to around 25%, and many factories closed killing jobs and industries.
Our Murder Mystery was about a mental hospital/prison where there was a murderer on the loose. Every character besides the staff at the facility was crazy in some way. This made every character seem like a serious suspect, even though in the end it was the doctor at the facility. The setting for our story is based on a real mental hospital called Mclean Mental hospital in Massachusetts. Reading about the rich history of this facility gave us a ton of inspiration and in the end, it made making crazy characters really fun. After we knew our setting, we made characters that could have been really in this environment. Even though, we all put our own spin on them.
For our story, I decided it would be great for us to have a script so that we could stay organized as well as get consistency in the show. So, I made a script for our group that did exactly that. Our rehearsal process we treated them like it was an actual run through, and we took them pretty seriously. As a group, we would wait until after our run-throughs to give each other feedback, we felt this was the quickest way to improve. Overall, I think that this process was one of the key reasons we were able to succeed and made our story better and better with each run through,
Both of our two runs went very well. Our group was well prepared, the story is engaging, and it seemed like the audience had great times. However, the more we ran through our story after our first run, the smoother the show got. It went from fast/crazy pace to a calm and cool pace with us performing our lines with ease. In the final, we even went 40 minutes earlier than we originally expected, and it was still great.
I feel very proud of myself and my group members for how well our final runs went. On our last critique run with another group, it was terrible and the free-flowing room format wasn’t working for us. My entire group(including me) was freaking out a little bit, we didn’t have a real test, our story wasn’t great, and we weren’t doing too well. But I knew exactly how to fix that, and that’s where the script and play format came into play. I thought that if we made it more like a play, not only would it seem more professional, but it would make the format of the room less confusing, Also, Andrea and I came up with a test that was interactive and pretty fun. This test involved the chloroform rag and included the audience member in getting and testing the liquid from the rag. These changes made the show so much better, and in the end, I can say I think we really succeed.
I learned a ton about writing and performing a murder mystery in this project. This is especially because I wrote the script for my group and had one of the leading roles in the show. Some things that are really important in the process of the murder mystery is to stay incredibly persistent and make sure the details are consistent, the story has red hearings to make sure it’s not too easy and the audience is engaged in the story. These things allow the mystery to be challenging, fun, and engaging for the audience.