This week we started working on the visuals for the play, which was harder to create interest for. A few of the students were very excited about ideas for how to depict things, but a majority of the students did not participate. I will admit that at this point I am a little stressed about how to get everything done by the end of the semester. Next week I am hoping that we can record at least some parts of Act 1, and get the images from them. My fear at this point is that the students who volunteered to draw images took on too much responsibility, and will be working too much during the week outside of our meetings.

We have our first scenes recorded! We wrote a script based on the students’ ideas so that we could record during the session on Thursday. Once the students had a script, characters, and backgrounds they drew on posters, I feel like they really understood what was going on in Act V. I could tell based on how they were reading the dialogue that they had an idea of how the characters would be talking.

It has been interesting using Act V for this project, because it is difficult to explain the somewhat illogical plot line to the kids. It took a while for them to understand why everything was happening, like Benedick challenging Claudio and Claudio apologizing to Hero. But once we worked with them to translate the story into terms that made more sense to them, they seemed much more excited and interested in the play.

I think that our group has done a good job planning deliverables for each meeting to keep us accountable. Because the meetings can sometimes get out of hand, between technology issues or keeping the students attentive, we always regroup with 15 minutes left to make sure we accomplish what we need to get done. With one scene filmed, I’m really looking forward to seeing the final product!

During this week’s meeting with our community partners, we finally got started on the technical side of our adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. Instead of reading through our abridged script with the students who volunteered to be our voice actors, we decided to focus our attention on identifying specific “stock images” that we believed would be necessary in illustrating our plot. For example, we UR students thought that it would be crucial to include a drawing of all of the main characters for when they are individually introduced by Bea. We also agreed to include illustrations of the inside and outside of the school (Messina High), and an illustration of its rival private school (Aragon Prep), where John finds himself at the end of our act.

When determining which students would draw these important “stock images,” there seemed to be a genuine sense of collaboration and encouragement among the kids, which was great to see. The kids also went into great detail when asked to describe the physical appearances of the characters, proving helpful when it came time to transfer those ideas to the page. We then got into a lengthy discussion of whether or not our students should wear uniforms, which ended with us agreeing that the characters should ultimately get to choose how or if they follow the school’s enforcement of uniforms. In a sense, we let the characters decide for themselves based on how their personalities have been constructed by the students. On a different note, I found the hardest part of this meeting to be dividing the work of creating the images equally amongst all of our students; however, some students were very eager and willing to draw multiple characters and settings.

At this stage in the project, I do find myself wondering if our adaptation will be too “bound” to its source play (which I found to be a fault of the high school-set O), or if it will be able to stand on its own as a compelling and coherent project. I ultimately think that, since our students haven’t necessarily even read the comedy itself, our adaptation of Much Ado has no option but to take on a new, independent form. I look forward to next week, when we hopefully will switch to Zoom and begin recording our script.

This week meeting with the kids was another successful one! We started by asking them if they have any new ideas they wanted to share about the play and of course many of them were really engaged and participated. We also had a few new kids this week which was really exciting because we got to run through the whole project with them!

We also ran through the script a second time to go over some edits and give more kids the chance to experience reading some lines. We also decided that our Beatrice (Bea in the play) would be voiced by multiple kids so that more of them would have the opportunity to be involved. I was really impressed with how animated these kids were and how good at acting they were! Also, in each scene, we asked the kids how they wanted the scene to be portrayed. Many of them offered various artistic skills they could contribute to portray each scene. It was a really successful meeting and I am excited for our next one on Monday!

This week was in a word: interesting. Once the meeting started (a few minutes late) we were greeted by a teacher who we had not met before. She was very task-oriented and asked us what our goals were and what we wanted the student to have done this week. We have had trouble the past few weeks really getting the student’s attention, but this teacher really took over and got the kids right to work. She muted their mic so it was a little odd just sitting there, but hopefully maybe we can find a balance between her physically being there and us virtually being there to interact with the kids for our last meeting!

This week was an interesting one, simply because we did not do much of the activity with the students. Instead, they took it upon themselves to ask for help from their teacher to plan out what their next step should be. We were there to answer any questions they may have had, but for the most part, they were planning how pictures would work for them, and how they should plan to take some of the scene pictures. By the end of the meeting, ti seemed that they had planned what needed to be done, and were ready to move forward with taking the pictures needed for their scenes. Reflecting on this, I think that this shows a lot of maturity on behalf of the students, who began just five weeks ago not really know what needed to be done, to now moving on their own without assistance from us. Maybe that is a positive sign of our leadership taking place?

Last week was extremely unproductive. Between starting the call 10 min late and having technology issues for about 15 min, we weren’t able to get much done. The final scene we were missing (the outdoor prom) was drawn, but all of the student’s attention spans were very short and there was not much guidance on the community partner’s end to help them stay focused.

This week was better. We had already decided it would be easier to film and make progress with the project if we wrote a script for each scene. Holly, our point person, sent them the script the morning of our meeting and then we finally started filming! I was hoping we could focus a little more on the kids editing the script the way they want it to be, but I’m still happy we were able to be productive. I’m anxious to see how the recording came out, but overall love that we were able to have any opportunity at all to work on the JSP.

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.