Well, we did it! Great job and congratulations to everyone in the class that worked hard to get this project together.

Viewing the final product was interesting, to say the least. Each group approached the project in a different way, which clearly showed across all five acts. Of course, this was partly due to inconsistencies with each group’s ability to get their act recorded with the students. Our act ended up going a more traditional route by recording the script with action figures as the characters, which worked best for our group. Other groups got very creative, combining drawings with pictures and having a combination of voices from the students in our class and the students with whom we worked.

One of the most obvious takeaways is simple how hard this is to do over Zoom. Beyond the communication issues in getting the actual recordings, it was very difficult to offer any direction over Zoom during the recording process. Our group, for example, could not really see where the characters were set up in the background. It turned out to be manageable due to the circumstances, but with all of the extra time and effort we put into just facilitating the project over Zoom, I felt like we did not get a chance to get into many technical details of the production, nor were we able to explore the meaning and intention of Shakespeare’s work and our adaptation. Admittedly, after writing that, I see that it probably would have been difficult to accomplish either of those goals under normal circumstances, but I felt like we struggled to even complete the project at all. The students with whom we worked largely had to take us at our word when explaining things, rather than breaking them down.

All-in-all, the full production was about what I expected, especially given the updates last week about recording our own voices if necessary. I think it is an accomplishment to even get all of the acts together in one coherent story, regardless if we missed some details the class decided on. For example, our group found it difficult to tell the story from a specific character’s (Hero, I think) perspective when working with the children. For whatever reason, the concept just did not click with them, and we had to prioritize making actual progress over incorporating that part of the story. But, by the end, it did not seem to affect the overall production because of the varied approaches. Each act had its unique eccentricities that set it apart from others, which made for an interesting overall watch.