about
Created & directed by award-winning actor/director, Sally McLean (Shakespeare Republic), produced by Incognita Enterprises, Executive Produced by the Howard Fine Acting Studio Australia and featuring their full time acting program graduates, Walking Shadows is part of the educational outreach program from Incognita Enterprises.
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together …”
– William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
the genesis of the series
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Creator/Director, Sally McLean worked as an Industry Guest Teacher with the 2021 Full Time Howard Fine Acting Studio Australia students for three classes face-to-face in late July and early August 2021, beginning their work with Shakespeare as actors, before the second major Melbourne lockdown due to the pandemic forced the school to return to online learning. The students then worked with Sally once a week in Zoom classes, working on their monologues and their comprehension of Shakespeare, hoping that they would be able to do their normal live presentation of the work in a final open class with a live in-person audience at the end of the year.
Sadly, that was not to be, as Melbourne remained locked down for 116 days until late October 2021 in our second longest lockdown of the pandemic. But, if nothing else, COVID-19 has taught us all to be adaptable and so McLean quickly pivoted to find another way to present the work. She approached the school with the idea to take the work the students had been doing with her online and create a web series to showcase their work instead.
The result is Walking Shadows – a new Shakespeare series created as part of the educational outreach of Shakespeare Republic and Incognita Enterprises, commissioned by Howard Fine Acting Studio Australia – featuring a new generation of actors freshly graduated and eager to leap onto the world stage.
Season One consisted of 22 episodes, filmed by the students on their smartphones while being directed by McLean in real time via Zoom calls, featuring monologues set in the post-lockdown world, which went onto great success on the international film festival circuit. Season Two was filmed on set in person the traditional way, bringing in crew to work with the students at the Studio and has taken the work in a new direction, including scenes and the one setting. The second season consists of 8 episodes and was released in May 2023.
Season Three is currently in development, scheduled to begin filming in November 2023.