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.

This week definitely was not the most productive in the beginning as we are finding it quite difficult to be able to direct the kids through the screen. The kids are definitely really hard to manage and I respect the teachers in the room a lot, however, the one teacher that we have is not very effective in getting the kids to listen which makes it really difficult to tell them what to do. We had a different teacher a couple of weeks ago and she was really helpful so it is difficult because we know that when they are attentive they are able to get stuff done. At the end of the class we were able to start to take some pictures of the action figures in front of the backgrounds that they drew, so we are hoping that we will be able to continue to do this next class. We are also hoping to have them record “and then he said” and little things like that, but we are going to need the help of the teacher so we are thinking that we are going to need to email her a very detailed agenda each session in order to be productive.

This week was especially difficult because we had a very hard time getting the kids engaged. Especially over Zoom, it’s really hard to get them to do things they very clearly did not want to do. We tried to ask them what they did for Halloween, and tried to segue that into working, but they were not responding. It’s tough because we are on such a tight timeline (because we have 5 scenes total and only 5 sessions to work with them) our goal was to have one scene a week done.

I also think that it’s especially hard because two out of the three students there are not involved in the drawing process. One student is extremely talented and it’s awesome to see what he comes up with, but it’s hard to get the other two involved if they aren’t confident in their artistic abilities but also don’t feel comfortable recording the lines to put over the art. I think that if we were meeting in person, it would be easier to motivate them and help them contribute, but over Zoom it’s hard to really see what’s happening and come up with solutions online.

Hopefully this week they are a little more excited to work and we can try and get back on track (because their contributions so far have been amazing, it makes me hopeful for the next few weeks)!!

This past week was particularly difficult in my opinion when it came to working with the students. Not only were there different students present (because I think not all of them come every week and we always have at least one new face), but there was also no teacher in the room for the entirety of the session so it was challenging to get–and maintain–their attention. That being said, when we did get their attention, we realized that they didn’t seem too excited about drawing the pictures. We are still considering other options (like their robots or the legos), but we had another idea we are going to see if we can try.

So the plan is as follows: If we get permission, we want their teachers to take pictures of them (maybe 10 or so) “posing” in different scenes and then we covered their faces afterward. For example, if we have a photo of the “Homecoming Scene” and it’s just them posing as if they are dancing or something. Then, when we go to edit the video, we put emojis over their faces! This way, they could be actively involved in acting out the scenes (which we think they really liked when we played the improv game last week), but we wouldn’t be able to identify who they were. We will keep everyone posted when we find out if something like this is possible.

It kind of feels like things are coming together! Our group is now working on a basic script that we will then show to the students to get their input. They’ve drawn sets and picked out action figures for characters. I feel like they have a better grasp of the storyline than they did in weeks past.

My favorite part has definitely been the students’ personal touches they add, such as Benedick challenging Claudio to a one-on-one basketball game rather than a duel. It show how they are finding ways to adapt the story as well, not just us.

I also feel like our group has adjusted well to some of the difficulties we have faced. I think we’ve done a great job building a rapport with the students, which keeps them engaged. I also think that our flexibility during our weekly meetings has allowed us to maximize productivity. We make sure that the students are interested in what we are doing, and change our plans accordingly to keep their interest up. We’ve also dealt with some technological difficulties, as well as some issues with keeping the students attentive. Mostly, the remedy for that has been patience; the teacher steps in and gets us back on track.

My group’s fourth meeting with our community partners marked a shift in how we typically structure our meeting time. Instead of starting with a review of which kids previously expressed interest in speaking or “tech” roles, we started by thinking conceptually about how we actually intend to present our adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing in its final form. This involved the unveiling the draft of our act 1 script to the students. We assigned speaking parts based on who had expressed interest in voice acting in the past and then spent the rest of the meeting reading through the script (which the kids, fortunately, seemed to love). We made the difficult decision of splitting Bea’s lines into 3 different speaking parts, primarily because Bea has the most lines and because we wanted to give as many students as possible the chance to participate.

After reading through our adapted act 1 scene 1, I was happily shocked by how clearly and deliberately the kids delivered their lines. They seemed to make the characters their own just by how they chose to speak. In this moment, I felt the project finally coming into fruition. At the end of each scene, we paused to discuss how we wanted to portray it from a technical standpoint. We did this in order to include the kids who did not necessarily want a speaking role but who instead preferred the technical aspects of theatre. For our intro scene, we decided to include quick “freeze frames” after Bea introduces each main character. We also decided on the location of our third scene when Claudia professes her love for Hero to her football friends (we decided the stadium bleachers would be the most fun to draw). Having the script in front of me definitely helped me to better understand the work that still needs to be finished, and I look forward to our next meeting. Hopefully we will begin to record some of the audio for the speaking roles and begin to draw some of the characters, though I’m a bit worried about how that will go from a logistical perspective.