This week, after sharing our idea about taking pictures of the students in different scenes, the teacher of the class told us that she wanted to take that time to work with the students and take their pictures right then and there! We shared with her the main points that we wanted to see generally within these pictures such as the Homecoming Dance,  Hero getting on the Homecoming Court, rumors being told, Hero leaving in tears, etc. That took about 5 minutes and the rest of the time the teacher worked with them on the pictures! I can’t wait to see what they send us. On our end, we need to clean up the script this week so that we can send it to them, review it this upcoming Monday, and have them record it in the near future. It’s very exciting to see a clear future for our group now. I am most excited about the students watching their own work and hopefully enjoying what they see!

We had a very productive meeting this week. We have had two different teachers that have rotated through the classroom throughout our meetings. While both are very nice, there is one teacher in particular who has shown that she is much better at controlling the kids and is much more productive. Luckily, we had that teacher this week and she was able to motivate the kids to finish almost all the photos we need for our project. Having someone in the room who takes control and can really keep the kids focused is a huge help to us and just our overall productivity. We were also able to get started on our script. While this is just going to be a loose base, it has helped us to figure out which pictures we need to take to set the scenes up and should help us when we go to do the voice-over work in the next couple of weeks. Next week we hope to get some more input from the kids on what they want to be included in the script so that we can hopefully have their own touch on the final product outside of just the pictures. Overall, we feel really good about our progress so far. We are hopeful that we can finish the script throughout next week and after our next meeting with the kids and go into the Thanksgiving break ready to record and put together the final product.

This week’s meeting was great because we finally started recording! Prior to meeting with them we prepared a script that their teacher was able to print out for them to read. We ended up starting with Scene 2 since there were only 3 students there today and we only have 3 characters in this scene (Benedick, Beatrice, and Ursula) so they were each able to voice over an action figure. They took a few minutes to read over the lines together then their teacher began recording on their iPad. We had them hang their drawing of the football field background (where the promposal between Benedick and Beatrice takes place) and act out the scene with the action figures. We also decided to have them speak the lines in the background rather than do a separate voice over. It was definitely a little difficult to navigate the details of the script and direct them over Zoom and made me wish we could be in person to help them more. However, the teacher did a good job at keeping them engaged and on task with the scene and we were able to get through Scene 2. The nice part about doing it over video is that we can edit out the long pauses or mess ups after.

This week we focused our efforts on the visuals we need to create for Act 1 which included drawings of the characters and the scenery. The kids continued to seem really excited about the play and gave us lots of feedback. Although I was surprised that not as many kids wanted to do drawings, one kid ended up volunteering for a lot of them. I think the next step is to do the recordings of the audio for each scene, the script is finished. Microsoft teams continues to kind of confuse me and I am not sure exactly how we plan to get the recordings and whether we are able to do it directly through teams and do a recording or if we will need to use some other software.

We had a late start to our meeting on Monday because there was a sub in class. The sub was super helpfully and interested in our project with the students. We were running a little behind our plan before this week because they kids have been a little unmotivated and not wanting to do work while we met with them, but the sub made sure none of that happened. She immediately wanted to learn what the project was and got the kids right to work! They were so productive! So by next week we just need two more drawings for the last two scenes.

Week 4 was a very productive meeting for us. We were missing some of our regular students, but the 3 boys that were there were very active. It took a little while to get them under control and attentive but once we did, we began to make a lot of progress. They had all the action figures and we were able to assign each character to a corresponding action figure. They also had finished a lot of the background images for the scenes, which was very promising! We started figuring out the positioning for the action figures and they started taking pictures of the characters in front of the backgrounds! For the next meeting, we want to compile a list of the pictures that we want, so we could get all of that done on Thursday, and focus on the script!

Our 3rd meeting was marred by technological issues. We weren’t on the call for a very long time because they kept cutting out, and eventually didn’t join again. However, they did tell us that they were planning on getting their action figures for the next meeting so we could start taking pictures for the backgrounds of our scenes. Jack was able to get in touch with our point person to tell the students to keep working on their drawings. We wish we could have had a more productive meeting but we feel that given the circumstances and how far along we were, that we were not as concerned about the meeting. We think as long as the kids can finish the scene drawings by the next meeting we’ll be in a very good place and will have made up for lost time.

Yesterday we met with our students again and they were as unmotivated as ever. Luckily the teacher we had was a sub, but she also was a girl boss who got sh*t done and was pretty tough with the kids, helping us stray from distractions and funny business. She had them finish drawings so we are now at a point where 3/5 scenes have drawings. We still need her to send them though. We are HOPING that by the end of next session, we have all the pictures we will need to put the scene together.