Jepson Shakespeare Project Production Blog

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.

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)!!