Adventure of the Speckled Band – Conan Doyle

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Create a visual Adaptation of any literary story or chapter we have read in this course.

The goal of this assignment is to capture the atmosphere of the original verbal text in your Adaptation that is primarily visual with some verbal text/dialogue.

  • Use at least 15 – 20 images for the PowerPoint (or other medium).
  • Write a 500 word Reflective Essay after your adaptation.
  • Select a chapter from any of the novels or an extended sequence from a short story we have read in this course.

Pretend you are a director who is adapting the literature into a film. Your first step is to find images that convey the portion of the plot, tone, atmosphere of your literary piece. Your task is to capture the meaning of the original passage—you can include or eliminate the words/dialogue from the text as well; you can change them or reduce their number. You may use images from the web or original photographs, images and words in sequence.

**An adaptation is always a director’s/screenwriter’s, and/or producer’s IDEA and INTERPRETATION of the original text…..No two adaptations are alike – they are as different as the individuals/groups who create them. Some adaptations are “faithful” (like the Lord of the Rings series) or “loose.” A loose adaptation can completely change the setting and situation, but maintain the themes. For example, the Joseph Conrad novel,Heart of Darkness, is about the European colonization of Africa. Its adaptation, Apocalypse Now, is about the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. The film adaptation, Apocalypse Now, has radically different setting and context, but it has equivalent characters and themes critiquing imperialism.

For this assignment, you are the creative force, the director. You can create a “faithful” or a “loose” adaptation of your passage, but you must maintain the overall meaning, tone and spirit of the original passage while transforming it into visuals with your “ vision.”

  • Transform the story of your verbal passage into a series of images that represent that action of that story or chapter – minimum of 15-20 images with words. You can minimize the words or even eliminate them. It is possible to convey a lot of meaning and feeling with images alone.
    • Select images that correspond to certain words and ideas in your passage.
    • Select either contemporary or a previous era’s actors that you would cast in the part (you should be able to easily find images of them on the web) so your audience can imagine them in the part.


**If you are doing a Conan Doyle story, do not select Robert Downey Jr. or Jude Law, etc. or any of the previous actors who have portrayed Holmes. They were their director’s choices. You need to make your own choices. Images of the actors alone are not enough to tell the story; you need other kinds of images that capture the plot and atmosphere/tone

  • When you are finished with your Adaptation, Write a short reflective essay of about 500 words (two pages double spaced) to accompany your Adaptation, following the instructions below. Your reflective essay should explain what you did in your adaptation and how you think it came out. Discuss your thought process, your actual process, why you selected the each image that you did, why you selected the actors that you did, why you selected that particular passage. What does that passage mean to you? Does your adaptation change or shift the meaning in any way? If so, how? Which part of your adaptation do you think is the most successful and why?

Before your Reflective Essay, please tell me what chapter and page numbers your adaptation spans – what edition you have. Write out the first sentence of the first paragraph . . . (an ellipsis) and the last sentence of the passage.

Grading Criteria:

  • You will be graded on how well your adaptation transfers the ideas, meaning, tone, and feeling of the original text.
  • Your adaptation should be well developed– at least 20 images in length with match text if you believe it is necessary.
  • Your reflective paragraph should explain all the questions in detail.
  • Worth a total of 100 points.