It was really interesting to note that the level of community engagement was associated with the amount of creativity put into the scene. I loved the kid’s voices and felt that it made the scene much more receptive and fulfilling. It really has me thinking about the bigger meaning of this class and how the things we choose to watch, listen, and pay attention to end up being the ideas we manifest.

I loved everyone’s scenes put together to analyze as an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. It gave me a lot of perspective into stage and screen, and life itself. The kids were all able to play a part in some way (of course, not really my group and I’m sad about it, but everyone was awesome). I hope that the kids remember ideas that we have creatively shared and taught them. I feel that the new scripts were a very enriching way of learning about the social issues we now must face in society. Whatever issues you face, just know that everyone else faces them as well. The connection comes from being impacted.

I feel as though I have never felt more civically engaged, between this class and the other Jepson classes I am apart of this semester. Having acknowledged that Jepson doesn’t necessarily teach us what to think, but rather how to think. Engaging with the City of Richmond, the once Capital of the Confederacy, during the Black Lives Matter movement, is incredibly fulfilling. I registered to vote in Richmond, and got to feel — in person (with a mask) — what it was like to be a civically engaged human being in these soon-to-be historical times.

I will be 3 hours into an appointment at the dentist while my group meets this week, but I am making up for it by being responsible for all voice recordings for the final project, as I will be with a group that can do all of the necessary voices.

As for my pre-show entry, I am very excited for our final product, as we are going to have more active audio than visual. However, our visuals are provided all by the kids, which makes them special. We plan on basically having a slideshow of their drawings (that go with what is happening/encapsulate each scene), and then have a voiceover of the actual scene’s dialogue set to it. Maybe we will need to add music to make it more lively, but so far we are excited for how it will turn out!

We did not meet last week because our group never showed. We are not meeting again today as we are not in Richmond. We will finish next week!

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.

We have moved on to having the kids draw pictures that correlate to each scene that we can then put to voiceovers for our final product. Last week we got great drawings done for the first scene, but this week when we tried to get them going on scene 2 they were very distracted. We reminded them that anything they don’t do now they have to do later, so they sketched a bit in the end but did not finish. We are hoping to catch up/do a scene a week for the rest of our time together so we have drawings for the entire act by the end of our time working with the kids,

I could not find this link last week, so I will be combining my journal entries for the first 2 weeks. We essentially performed the same tasks both weeks, simply getting to know the students we are working with and making them familiar with the context of the play. They were a bit more misbehaved in week 2, taking a while to calm and quiet down, but they have agreed to doing artwork that they will read over with a voice memo as our group’s contribution to the overall film. We will likely need to practice reading most of anything else we do, as the kids seemed excited to do art, but are not as strong of readers. We have gotten up to scene 3 in our act, so perhaps over the next 2 weeks we can finish reading through, so that the kids know the entire act well, and are able to finally decide which characters they want to be!