Jepson Shakespeare Project Production Blog

The Group is full of hilarious ideas. The kids have so much energy and love to perform. However, that being said, it is like pulling teeth just trying to get the kids to focus and participate. The kids have so much energy and i feel like if we were in person then we could get a lot of that energy out. I think that we have tried to strategize ways to combat that through games. I think that has helped to a certain extent but I wish that the teacher present could step in and regain the attention from time to time.

Main plot points of the Homecoming Scene: 

• Everyone is at the homecoming dance, Bea and Ben go together, Hero and Claudio meet each other there
  • Take 1
    • People dancing, balloons everywhere, green screen in corner with pictures, fruit punch, dancing with cup in hand, slow jams 
    • Ben: “What’s up, Bea? Glad to see you here.” “Hey, you wanna go out?” “You look MAD good, you heard?” 
    • Bea: “Friendzone…”
    • That’s a green 
  • Take 2
    • Oh, is that Kevin? **Screams in excitement about seeing crush**
    • “I’m gonna go up to him”

This week we came to the group with a rough draft script we wrote from scratch. We focused on making it very modern and bringing out Beatrice’s attitude. We have many kids who want speaking roles so we rotated running through lines. In addition, we focused more specifically on what the kids wanted to see in each scene and how we intend to display the visuals. They are all on board with doing stop- motion with pictures. I am a little curious how all the visuals will be completed since each student is online from their home rather  than in a classroom all together. Another solid week with the kids and next week we hope to start producing the visuals and recording!

Othello is set in a world where women are subject to the power of men. Women don’t have agency in the world of Othello. Women are simply subject to either their fathers or their husbands. Women’s agency exists in the world that is created for them by their male counterparts. Desdemona, a young girl (fourteen) is married to the powerful general, Othello. First, the marriage is strange (at best), even in a marriage of this time. Desdemona shouldn’t be able to be making choices such as pursuing an older man like Othello or marrying him. It is evident that Othello has some sort of power over Desdemona, even from the start  of the play. As the play progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that Othello is easily influenced by the men around him. Othello lets Iago play into his ear. Iago whispers of stories (all untrue) of Desdemona’s affairs. Othello begins to believe him…

Why focus on this? The important thing to look at is the way that women are claimed as victims in the lust for power. Ironically, the women of this play are the sacrifices for power even though they can never claim it. Desdemona is a victim of Iago’s want for power, and so in order to claim that power Iago blames her and Michela Caspio of an affair.

Our meeting this week was centered around planning out the specific visuals we wanted to use for the production. Since we had a script mostly worked out for today, we had the students read through the lines, and specifically ask them what they wanted to see. Going forward I think it will be important to work on making the visuals for the play, and recording the voices of the students. Since we only have a few weeks of meeting left, I am hoping that our future meetings are very productive and focused going forward. 

This week, it was especially hard to get the students engaged. Usually, they are pretty attentive and interested in what we have set out for the day, but yesterday they seemed uninterested and quite bored. We tried to talk about what they did over the weekend or even tried to sketch out what they wanted to draw, but nothing seemed to work. This would have been much easier to troubleshoot if we were there in person but obviously that’s just not possible. Even though we struggled to get them engaged this week, the results of last weeks drawings were incredible. This gives me hope that this was just a bad/hard day and they actually are interested in producing work and seeing a final product soon! We are going to send an email to the director of our group to request pictures of their drawings to add to an iMovie so we can start our portion of putting the act together.

Today we had more students than last time but a lot less focus. We really did not get much done except for assigning a few pictures for the kids to get started on. I do not think they had a teacher present which is why the kids were pretty unfocused for the most part. I think the fact that we didn’t have a concrete plan for the meeting today also contributed to things. We gave the kids homework to get started on the pictures throughout the week, and then we will go from there.

This week was definitely hard getting the kids motivated to work. We all collectively read scene II, Act III and discussed what had happened, answering their questions, and ways the can draw the main ideas. However after all of that, it was tough getting them to actually work and start drawing. They promised they will have them done by next class. We hope next class they will be more motivated and into the project because we plan to do both scene III and IV.

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,

Our group went into this week with more of an agenda than we had in previous weeks. With only a few meetings left, we decided to devote each meeting to tackling one scene in our act. There were only two students this week, which we are used to, but I think it was harder to engage with them this week. The students decided to take on more of an artistic role and dedicate our meeting time to drawing out scene one cartoon-style. They had expressed interest in drawing out each scene since day one so I think they were definitely excited to start drawing. One student even brought his own materials from home which gave us the impression he had been thinking about this for a while and was actually excited about the project. Sometimes it is hard to gage our student’s attitudes toward this project, but seeing him drawing and focus on how to depict scene one was good feedback for us that they are actually excited and look forward to our meetings. Next week we hope to see what they have for scene one and work on scene two.