By Timothy Simmons

When making Gorgias Revisited, I initially wanted to make a word for word remediation of Plato’s Gorgias. I wanted to use two separate characters of Will Ferrell. After looking at the project timeline, however, I decided that this task was not feasible. I decided on trying to convey the message as best I could. One of my original criteria was to make a video that could stand alone without the background knowledge of the Gorgias’ historical context or dialogue. Instead, I projected my own feelings about the Gorgias onto my work. And what become of it was an overbearing Socrates and a confused yet resilient Gorgias.

I gave myself the obstruction of using only John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell clips. I chose those two because I wanted a comedic element to the story for entertainment purposes, but more importantly I knew that they would have multiple scenes in which they would engage each other directly. Next was digging through nearly nine hours of footage to get the right scenes and still stay within the project guidelines. It wasn’t easy especially seeing as most of the heavy lifting was done within forty-eight hours before the deadline.

This was my first project in which I used iMovie. Before this I was strictly a Windows Movie Maker person, but seeing as it was archaic and wasn’t included on my latest windows computer I was stuck using it to create and edit this work. This finished product has small changes from the original. Some scenes have been added since and others have been cut. I am proud of the finished product even though it isn’t exactly the project I originally envisioned.