This was our last and final meeting which was very bittersweet. Before our meeting on Thursday our group got together during our normal class time on Wednesday to go over and record the script. We all experimented with different voices to showcase different characters and were in hysterics over some of them (all I have to say is be on the lookout for Jack’s Jon impression in Act 2 it is truly something else). I think that our group got along really well and had strong communication skills each week that allowed us to succeed in completing the project.

Just before our meeting on Thursday Aaron finally sent the pictures but we were missing a few so Kat got creative with some stick figures and cropping but she ended up completing it and we are all really proud of it. We had the students say their names and do an introduction in the beginning so that they could have credit for their hard work and also had them do a bit of narration for those who were eager to read or “rap” the script. We are super excited for the students and everyone else to see the final project!

This was definitely my favorite week by far. The kids completed all of the pictures and we had the majority of the script done so we thought that it would be a good idea to have some of the kids read the script and give us any feedback. One of the kids was SO excited to read the script and actually read the entire thing as a sort of rap. He had a smile on his face the whole time and kept saying how much he wanted to do it again which made us really happy and for the first time I actually felt like the kids wanted to be involved with it. I was also really impressed at his ability to read so quickly and coherently. I have volunteered at Youth Life in the past with similar age kids and many of them had trouble with their reading skills and don’t enjoy it so it was really inspiring to see this student share such a joy and passion for it.

I also really like the dynamic of my group as a whole. I believe that we make a really good team and have done a good job at managing the craziness of meeting virtually. I am excited but a bit sad for our last meeting with the students as I have enjoyed working with everyone. We are hoping to get them to record a bit more so that their voices can be included too.

This weeks meeting was definitely one of our most productive meetings. We were very excited because we had the teacher who is better at getting the kids to participate and able to maintain better control of them. We emailed Aaron a list of pictures that we needed them to take and the teacher was able to work with the students to get most of them done which was super helpful. It definitely was tricky though because we felt kind of useless on the meeting as we couldn’t really help virtually and were just kind of watching the kids do their thing. However, there wasn’t really much else we could do in a virtual setting and are hoping to get more of their feedback for the script next class so that we can finalize and record it. Overall, our group is feeling really good about the timeline and our progress so far.

We had our final meeting with the students yesterday. Our plan was to show the students the movie we had made with their photos, however we recieved the photos an hour before our meeting began. This proved was a nice coincidence because instead of doing that we were able to take some voice recordings of the students! Two of the students were eager to read the script so we asked them to do the narration at the beginning and ending of each scene. They were very excited to do this and it makes our movie much more exciting!

When piecing together the film last night I was glad that we were able to include the voices of the students. I was frustrated at first because I had already created the audio files on I-Movie. However, it did not take long to include the new recordings we took in our meetings, and it sounds much better with the students voices.

I am sad that this was our last meeting! I looked forward to seeing the kids each week and interacting with them as best we could. Although this project was frustrating at times I was enjoyed working with the students the most. I hope that they are pleased with the work they did and enjoy watching the movie!

This week’s meeting was pretty short because we had a myriad of technology issues. This meant we were not able to get our final recording, and will just have to use the practice recordings from last week. We will probably have to do a fair bit of editing to it, but at least we have something. We are coming up short on our images, so we will have to fill in those gaps quite a bit, but I am glad that we have a solid base, and we can use the images that we do have. I am really pleased with the images Sasha drew because they are better images than I ever could come up with, and I am so impressed with her artistic ability. I hope that we can use Maxwell’s images, but if we can’t that is not the end of the world. 

This last meeting was definitely hectic and long for the students, but they were able to finish filming the remaining scenes. They had a lot to film since we were put behind by not meeting with them before Thanksgiving, so they had to practice and film the remaining 3 out of 4 scenes in Act 5. The students were definitely a little distracted and not super engaged, but the teachers were helpful in getting them focused on the recordings and had them stay an extra 20 minutes to finish. Super thankful for them especially as we have been doing this all virtually! Now all we have left to do is put together the recordings once they share them with us.

This week did not go as expected. There was a miscommunication so we only got about 20 minutes with the kids. We were intending on trying to record again to make everything a little cleaner but did not have time. Thankfully we did get a recording the meeting before. We got some of the photos and are just waiting to get the others. I love the drawings we have gotten so far — these kids are talented. Now it is just time to put everything together!

This week was, for a lack of better words, complete chaos. On top of various technical issues, the kids were unmotivated, energetic and weren’t prepared to listen at all. The sub was unable to control them and spent more time trying (unsuccessfully) to quiet them down. They also could not hear us over the speaker, so we were trying to communicate with them via the chat. Overall, I have no idea if they are going to finish the scenes or not, which is really stressful to think about. I really appreciate that the teacher was trying to help, because if she wasn’t there we would have had no shot of getting through to the students. She helped assign scenes to three students, and said they would email us any questions, so hopefully they are able to get it done in some capacity. Fingers crossed at this point, what we have so far looks awesome but definitely excited to get the rest of the scenes done!!