Jepson Shakespeare Project Production Blog

This week was more productive than last week, because the kids had a bit of foundation in the play, and they had all week to figure out what they wanted to do. I really loved seeing their creativity, because they all are really interested in how we can film the play, and edit things together. Personally, I am not talented in editing or anything like that, but the kids were so excited about the idea of filming legos in stop motion for our video. Even outside of that though, they were very focused on not just playing into common tropes as we developed the characters. At one point someone divided that maybe Hero should be a cheerleader, because she didn’t have a lot of personality. But then another kids spoke up and insisted that cheerleaders can still have a personality. It was so sweet to see them wanting to create interesting and multivalent characters. 

In our first meeting on Thursday, we got to meet the group of students we were working with. It was a handful of them on the call with their teacher. We got to introduce ourselves and give them an overall idea of the play. We also explained how Act 2 plays out and they showed some interest in some of the plot lines and characters. They are a great group of students and have a lot of energy, so we’re gonna try and find a way to make things a bit more controlled next time. We want to put them in a position next time where they are the ones actively making decisions about how they want things to get done so we can have some more structure in the meeting.

We met a few new faces this week! We began this week by reviewing the project details and major plot points. We learned that they want to do this is stop motion using Legos. They seemed to know of a few different apps to use to do this stop motion. Last week we got a lot of feedback from the students in regards to our adaptations around the plot points. We took all the thoughts and made some compromises to make sure all voices were heard. The bulk of our conversation consisted around the characters, their names and who they were at high school. Once again we had a lot of feedback, many of which conflicted with one another so our group has some final decisions to make! Once again I was pleased with the engagement of the students and they are respectful of one another and we don’t have too many moments when they are talking over one another. I think we have a great start and have a lot of information going into next week when we will dive into filming and creating the images.

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!

Week two with the kids ran more efficiently because of the extensive game plan that India came up with (that was so helpful). The game plan helped us create a warm up (roses and thorns), activity (creating the script) and a cool down (briefly covering expectations for the next week). The kids had so much energy and enthusiasm about the project. The energy wasn’t contained most of the time and often led derailments. The interruptions and derailments led to a lot of time spent trying to get everyone to focus back on writing the script that the script is only a quarter way done.   However, I can’t complain becaud\se the kids seem so happy and excited that its hard to be frustrated. 

This week we got a little further in the kids’ understanding of the new plot. Only two of the kids really participated, but they were pretty engaged in what we were doing. One of them read out the summary of the new plot and the bullet points that outlined a play-by-play of the act. Both kids then went through the bulleted list and attempted to put them into their own words and set the scene. They were able to relate to the characters in the sense that they were familiar with the concept of ‘playing hard to get’ and spreading rumors. We did not get very far with actually re-formulating each plot point and they had to leave pretty abruptly. Overall it seems that at least a couple of the kids are excited about the project, and we gave them the outline to look over throughout this next week. We are hoping to start drawing within the next couple of meetings. There was a lot of distraction, but we always had at least one kid completely engaged in the task at hand.

Going into our first meeting with the kids, I was a little nervous. I knew it was going to be an adjustment doing the whole thing online, but feel like there’s a degree of separation online that makes it harder for you to connect with others. Despite my initial worry, I was pleasantly surprised by how the whole thing went – the kids were excited and engaged, and seeing them get excited about the play got me more excited to watch it come to life. Despite some small technical difficulties (and the fact that only 2/8 kids actually showed up), it was a good first day. Super excited to see how the rest of the semester plays out!

Week One:

I have been looking forward to meeting the kids ever since we have begun the project earlier on in the semester. I have worked in the theater since I was ten years old and I have been mentoring kids just as long, so this project feels like the perfect combination of both!! The kids are absolutely wonderful. They have so much energy and enthusiasm about learning about the project and play. We asked the kid if they ever heard of William Shakespeare. All of them immediately started rambling about he was probably some old smart dead dude and that they had heard of him but never read him. There answers were genuine and hilarious. We were able to explain the basic project and talk about the scene are group was given. They loved the idea about the prom! I’m looking forward to our meeting this Monday and can’t wait to hear what they have to say.