This week was more productive than last week, because the kids had a bit of foundation in the play, and they had all week to figure out what they wanted to do. I really loved seeing their creativity, because they all are really interested in how we can film the play, and edit things together. Personally, I am not talented in editing or anything like that, but the kids were so excited about the idea of filming legos in stop motion for our video. Even outside of that though, they were very focused on not just playing into common tropes as we developed the characters. At one point someone divided that maybe Hero should be a cheerleader, because she didn’t have a lot of personality. But then another kids spoke up and insisted that cheerleaders can still have a personality. It was so sweet to see them wanting to create interesting and multivalent characters. 

In our first meeting on Thursday, we got to meet the group of students we were working with. It was a handful of them on the call with their teacher. We got to introduce ourselves and give them an overall idea of the play. We also explained how Act 2 plays out and they showed some interest in some of the plot lines and characters. They are a great group of students and have a lot of energy, so we’re gonna try and find a way to make things a bit more controlled next time. We want to put them in a position next time where they are the ones actively making decisions about how they want things to get done so we can have some more structure in the meeting.

We met a few new faces this week! We began this week by reviewing the project details and major plot points. We learned that they want to do this is stop motion using Legos. They seemed to know of a few different apps to use to do this stop motion. Last week we got a lot of feedback from the students in regards to our adaptations around the plot points. We took all the thoughts and made some compromises to make sure all voices were heard. The bulk of our conversation consisted around the characters, their names and who they were at high school. Once again we had a lot of feedback, many of which conflicted with one another so our group has some final decisions to make! Once again I was pleased with the engagement of the students and they are respectful of one another and we don’t have too many moments when they are talking over one another. I think we have a great start and have a lot of information going into next week when we will dive into filming and creating the images.