This week we worked on recording the play. We did not get a final recording, but the kids were able to get into character, and add their own flair to the script. As we read through the script I began to notice where the dialogue was more natural, and when it was more stilted, which was good to know. Hearing the dialogue out loud has made me really appreciate the “Drunk History” style of narration. It makes it more intuitive to include important plot points, rather than including it in the lines of individual characters. We made the discovery that we had not included any lines for Hero, which was wholly unintentional. But it was so ironic that we did not make lines for the character that is the least developed in the play. That gave us the chance to add lines back in, and the kids had a lot of input about the lines. It was really cool to include them in the process, and see what they wanted Hero to be like. 

Although the students did not come online this week for some reason, as a group we were able to assess what needed to happen next. The week after Thanksgiving, we will have the students audio-record their lines and then we will put it together with the pictures they send us. Until then, we have to create the script! That will be a job for the next week. I’m looking forward to seeing the kids again the week after next!

I unfortunately was not able to meet with the group this week due to some wifi issues from home, but my team members were able to bring me up to speed with how it went this week. Originally we were going to start recording, but then it was decided that they would finalize the drawings for the play and do a few practice runs of the script. One of the kids noticed that Hero did not have any lines in the first act, so they added in a few lines for her. Still, we did not want her to have too many lines as we wanted to keep true to her original reserved character from the play. Overall, it appears it was a successful week! I was sad that I was not able to join but I am looking forward to recording the play after Thanksgiving!

This week’s JSP meeting did not necessarily go according to our plan but was nonetheless crucial for our act. We Jepson students had planned to record the audio of our community partners reading through our abridged script. We were a bit unsure about how to record via Microsoft Teams (we had suggested using Zoom this week but that did not end up happening); however, it ended up not even being an issue, since we ultimately decided not to record yet. Instead, we focused on finalizing the drawings of our “stock images,” and we also did a few practice runs of the script. During our first script run-through, a student brought up an extremely important point: we UR students had unintentionally cut all of Hero’s speaking lines from the first act! Keeping true to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, we wanted our Hero to be more reserved and less talkative than our Beatrice character. However, we all agreed that Hero needs to use her own voice in these first few scenes instead of letting other characters talk for her. We brainstormed ways of incorporating Hero’s lines into our script in order to create more speaking opportunities for the students and to give Hero more agency as her own character independent from others. We also had a brief discussion of what pronouns Claudia uses, which I was happily surprised by. I mentioned that Claudia could definitely use they/them pronouns, however, at the moment we wrote her character with she/her pronouns in mind. I think it would be worthwhile to switch the pronouns to they/them (or maybe Claudia uses she/them pronouns?) to incorporate a gender non-conforming character into the play, especially if our students want that perspective. Overall, I look forward to finally recording the audio of our script after Thanksgiving Break!