I am really happy with our group’s progress this week! We have our scenes planned out with the adapted plot line and each character has been assigned an action figure. I feel like we were able to brainstorm more ideas with the students during this session, more so than previous sessions. Once they had a firmer grasp on the plot and characters, it seemed like they were more interested in coming up with plot points. They still needing some prompting, but I think that is just because they genuinely don’t know where they are supposed to be going with this. They also drew settings today, which allowed them to be a little more creative. Each student drew part of a setting for a scene, so that we can put the action figures in the setting and then ‘act’ out the play.

I am increasingly excited to see how the final result is. Once we got the students more excited about the project, they seemed to think of more ideas and have more fun. I’m hoping that they are excited to come up with dialogue for our next session, so we can begin recording!

Today was a little more challenging. We began with some technical difficulties over Google Meets and got started 15 minutes late. When we began the students were entheastic because they had gotten their action figures! They spent 10 minutes taking the action figures out of their packages and then we discussed which character would be which action figure. This was a little hectic, but the teacher with the group today was very helpful. She was familiar with Much Ado and was able to help the students decide on characters.

Last week we had asked the students to begin working on their drawings, but they were unable to do so before class. That was okay because they began working on their drawings during our call. We lost our connection with the class shortly after they began and were unable to re-connect. This meeting was very short because of technical difficulties but it is okay because we will be able to meet with them next week.

Our hope is to get lots of different background drawings and photos of the action figures in various poses in front of them. We do not have that much more work to do with the students besides helping them complete their artwork!

This week’s meeting with HEF was great and hopefully set us up to start recording the beginning of Act V next week! We started by getting more details about what the students wanted to happen in each of the scenes. In Scene 1 we decided to have the conflict between Leonato and Benedick with Claudio to be a challenge to a one-on-one basketball game between Benedick and Claudio. However, before they begin they will hear rumors of Hero’s innocence. We also decided to combine Scenes 2 and 3 into a combined promposal event with Benedick, Claudio, Beatrice, and Hero at a football game. Benedick will disguise himself as a marching band member and sneak into the crowd to surprise Beatrice with her promposal where she will excitedly accept. However, Claudio will ask Hero in front of everyone after he makes a touch down in the football gam, but Hero will not give Claudio a response. The last scene at the prom still has some details to figure out since the student assigned the last scene was not there today. In terms of the final product we decided to record it on an iPad that the teacher has in the classroom. The students will draw the backgrounds of the scenes on big sheets of white paper with the action figures (they decided on last meeting) acting out the scene in front of the background with voice overs. We ended the meeting with the students beginning to draw their backgrounds with one drawing the crowd at the football field, another drawing the stands on the football field, another drawing the end zone of the football field (for when Claudio makes the touch down), and the last student drawing a basketball court.