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!

We were not able to meet with our group today, because the community partner could not sign into the Google Meet link. Our group members stayed on the call while our point person worked with the adult to figure out the issue. In the end, we sent along instructions to continue filming the remaining scenes with the script(s) we had sent them last week.

Once they send us these videos, we can work to edit them or have them reshoot specific parts of scenes, if necessary. They have a good understanding of the plot, assigned figurines for each character, and have all of the scene backdrops drawn. Next meeting will be dedicated to wrapping up filming and then we’ll be done!

Todays meeting was my favorite by far. I shared my screen with the class to show the script we wrote with the students. One of the students, Dion was thrilled to read it out loud. In fact he read every single line all the way through for every character! His reading was very theatrical and enthusiastic he made up different voices for each character. I honestly was cracking up he was getting so in to it. This was such a great moment to observe with the students because we have had a difficult time connecting with them in previous meetings.

After Dion read the first scene his classmates begged him to keep reading. He did so without persuasion. The students liked the script but asked that we work to rhyme it a little bit more. I like this suggestion they gave us. Our next steps are to finalize the script and create the video. Once the teacher sends us the photos they are working on we can add the audio to it. As of now we are going to use our own voices, however, after today we are wanting to include Dion! I look forward to bringing this project together and each week its becoming more real!

I thought this week went well. Some kids were missing last week and a little confused this week but we were able to bring them all up to speed. We continued to focus our efforts on the illustrations for the act. It was so funny to hear them make decisions on what the characters look like, especially hair color! Once we made sure all the illustrations had been assigned and accounted for, we ran through the script another time and got some final feedback from the kids. Next time we will be doing all of the recordings!

This week we unfortunately didn’t get to meet with our group because they couldn’t get the Google Meet link to work. However, I was able to email back and forth with them as the point person to give them directions and guidance about what we had planned to do with them. They already had all of the resources to continue filming the remaining scenes from when we began filming last week, so they communicated to me that they would share the videos with me from today once they were done on their own. Disappointing we couldn’t meet with them this week but I’m glad it wasn’t a total loss of time on their end!

This was one of our most successful meetings yet! We were able to get good communication going with the teacher, and she was able to organize the students to finish the remaining pictures we had for our scenes. Unfortunately, they were doing this off-camera so we didn’t get to interact much with the kids. However, while they were doing that we got to work on the script and split up what each of us is going to do. We worked through a good outline of what the script is going to be, and we’re looking forward to getting some input from the students next time. We are going to ask them what they like, and what they want to change about the script so we can make sure they’re fully engaged in each step!

This week was a definite improvement from the past few weeks. The kids were still very disinterested in drawing – the scenes from last week still weren’t finished and we were having a hard time getting them to focus. One really nice part of last week was that there was a new teacher supervising for that period, and she was so helpful facilitating the conversation and making sure the kids were somewhat engaged. She made sure to ask us what we were doing to make sure she understood what the students were supposed to be doing, and worked mainly with the two students who haven’t really contributed as much. It was so nice to have her there purely because I’ve mentioned in my posts over the past few weeks that the disconnect between working with the students in-person versus online makes it really difficult to be productive. By the end of the session, the students finished scene 2 and are working on scene 3. Having someone on their end actively helping us get stuff done was awesome, and made me much more optimistic about the final product!

We did not have a meeting with the kids this week because for some reason we were not able to connect. Last meeting we gave them some photos to start working on so hopefully they were able to get those done. For the next two weeks we are going to be writing the script so that by our next meeting we will be able to give the kids all of the photos they need to recreate.