Creating something every day for 365 days
Another workshop, another meeting of brilliant minds: Dale, Marc, Carol Lee, Melissa, Laura, and Mary Frances.
We shared some homework each of us had done re: winter/spring images for the MMH’s banners.
Marc had done some nice sketches of dead leaf/new leaf, snowflake/sun that were good. He had a fun pennant with a hibernating critter on it.
Melissa had a two sided banner, to wit:
Dale cheated, just photoshopping a winter tree:
Still, the image is compelling, and we thought that maybe this kind of image might be an interesting way to proceed.
Carol Lee went for texture:
Hard to tell in the photos, but the one on the left is brown, the one on the right is yellow. There would be lots of movement in it. Marc had the idea of putting an image like mine or his on the dangly bits. Dale remembered the image transfer sheets that all the artists are using these days: we could transfer a photo image like the winter tree directly to fabric, then cut it into shreds.
We talked about what to make the banners out of. Dale pointed out that if we made them out of muslin and painted them, it would be cheaper, we’d get the colors we wanted, and they’d be stiff as if starched (our other motif in MMH.)
Laura had run out of time to work on the hedgehog approximation. She left it at home, but will bring it next week.
Dale had brought in a Toast Head approximation:
The photo printout was sort of a cheesy stopgap, because he thought the sides needed to represent a stack of toast; otherwise we risked people thinking they were Bread Heads. But everyone liked the photorealistic approach. We will continue to explore that. Dale thinks the butter is too distracting; Mary Frances liked it. Mary Frances wants the chorus to be the Toast Heads, which is not an impossibility.
Mary Frances played with the Sunflower Carol Lee had re-approximated. She had some interesting new takes on things that could be done with them, including having just one sunflower per dancer/puppeteer.
We moved into discussion of the Inn: what will it look like? Marc had already posted some ideas previously on the Lacuna blog (here), and he had some sketches of Swiss Army knife-looking contraptions, which allowed various pieces of inn/set to fold out.
Dale whipped up a little model…
…based on ideas he had while daydreaming during last night’s Masterworks concert. The two square, two-leveled platforms could emerge from the wings, unfold, then walls could pop up and unfold, with perhaps a pediment flown in, etc.
Dale also talked about an idea he had based on Marc’s ideas, wherein we provide frameworks and then the walls are puppeteered in and out. He suggested that for the May 3 performance, we could have the MMH bustling “from room to room” by having the rooms move around the MMH.
Marc then built an elaborate periaktoi with all kinds of flaps and foldouts. Periaktoi…
…seen here in back view and front view (from hstech.org), are rotating triangular arrangements of flats. You paint a different scene on each face, then rotate them for changing scenery.
We thought this might be an easy way to do the Inn, at least for May 3. We’ll pursue it. Marc suggested doing the photorealism thing in a collage style, of architectural elements, not necessarily in a naturalistic manner, of course.
We have two more workshops until spring break, so we’re going to spend both of them creating the visuals for the projected version of Sun & Moon Circus. Bring your color, cut & paste supplies and play with us! You can download a PDF storyboard here.
What have I left out? Comments…
Did a lot more work at school on the 100 Book Club blog. Played around with a visual for the winter banners in Man in the Marmalade Hat. Pursued budgeting issues for William Blake’s Inn.
And of course tonight we have the Masterworks Chorale concert, so a performance will have to count as my creativity.
I decided to take a break from the sunflowers. That way, maybe I can revisit them with a fresh ear and learn where I can pare them down.
Instead, I did a great deal of playing with the 100 Book Club blog. I got the entire List (some 800 titles) exported from FileMaker Pro in batches (by AR™ reading level), sucked up into DreamWeaver and modified, and then copied to Drupal webpages. Tedius, but not difficult. So that’s done.
I’ve been working on examples of forums and comments, but that hasn’t turned out like I thought, and I don’t have time to play with at the moment: we have a dress rehearsal with Masterworks Chorale for tomorrow night’s concert.
I worked again today on the sunflower waltz (as well as continuing work on documents associated with the May 3 performance), and I’m stuck. It just sounds bloated.
Maybe I just need to scrape it all away and try again, and this time trust my instincts to make it smaller and lighter. It can still sound Straussian (J.) without sounding Straussian (R.).
Yesterday, I guess because I donated to the American Friends Service Committee, I received their Quaker Action magazine. Nice small publication, and in the middle of it was a pullout sign:
You can write some kind of ID on it, take a photo of you with it, and upload it to their website, www.friendsforpeace.org. Simple enough, and not nearly enough. Sort of the antiwar version of a “Support Our Troups” ribbon on your SUV.
Still, one does what one can.
Do what you can. I think I shall put mine in my van window.
Update: You can see it posted here.
No, never fear, I am not starting another blog. At least, not one for me, and not one that you will ever read. Today I worked on the Newnan Crossing 100 Book Club blog. We’ve been trying to get it up and running since October, and on Monday I decided that it was time to implement it whether it was exactly in the shape I wanted it or not. After all, it was ready for me to put students in as users, and they would each have their own blog.
I had originally wanted to use the multi-user version of WordPress, called WordPress MU, but apparently there were installation issues. (All the tech end of this is being handled by the school system’s IT people, specifically Mike. He’s been great.) So we switched to Drupal, with which I have been unfamiliar.
WordPress is a dedicated blogging software package. Drupal is a “content management system,” whatever that means. All I know is that it has a lot more buttons to push and boxes to check to make it do what you want it to do, and sometimes those boxes and buttons are distributed in non-intuitive ways.
Anyway, I got all the kids put in, with nifty passwords that look random but actually are rememberable for the kid. I got it to look like a nice place to be. And we’re ready to start training the 8-10 year-olds how to blog.
The idea is that they read a book from a preselected list of award-winners or starred reviews, then blog about their reading. I’ve trained them (although I have no doubt that training was shallow and noneffective in 80% of them) not to write about the book, but about their reading.
After they post, then I and the other Book Club members can comment on it. Lo, a conversation about reading occurs. Children, these are advanced readers, who otherwise would be zooming through “short books” and racking up AR™ points just to rack up AR™ points are now thinking about what they’re reading. They’re making predictions. They’re discussing an author’s use of language. They’re deciding what makes a book good. And they’re learning, most importantly, to write.
If this works, I shall be called blessed.
I had fun, fun, fun today: I began working with Sherry Lambert’s kindergarten class during their music block time, turning them into our adorable horde of hedgehogs.
First I explained that I was doing a play (that actually got some recognition and some excitement from two or three of them) and that I was going to invite their parents to let them be in it.
Then I showed them the book and read them The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives. They liked it, although I’m sure most of it went right over their heads, “incommodious load” indeed.
Then I showed them the hedgehog videos I had found on YouTube. We ooh’ed and aah’ed over the cuteness of the little critters. We discussed how they sniffed and waggled their pointy little noses, and we tried sniffing our neighbors. We observed how they walked, and finally we saw how they can curl up into the cutest little ball (and are even cuter when they uncurl.)
Then we went back to their mat and began to practice what we had seen. We sniffed, we waddled, we curled up and uncurled. Great fun was had by all.
I told them I knew Ms. McDonough (our wonderful music teacher) had taught them how to march, actually a good guess, and they all immediately showed me. I asked them to do it in slow march, and they did that.
Finally, we asked ourselves if it were possible, just possible, that we might be able to march like hedgehogs? Experimentation soon showed that it was, yes!, possible.
All in all, a fabulous day in Hedgehog Land.
Amazingly I was quite creative today.
At school, I finished the hearing impaired morning announcement video. Everyone thinks I’m just grand to have accomplished it, and I guess Final Cut Express looks impressive enough to dazzle most people. Actually, I did do a good job with it. It looks very nice.
I received confirmation that the Cultural Arts Commission is in agreement to help us out with William Blake, although I think their support at this point is still a little fuzzy. No matter, it’s enough to move forward with. I called and confirmed the dates of April 29-May 3 for rehearsals and performance at Wadsworth Auditorium. I am to write a letter to the mayor and city council referencing the Cultural Arts Commision and Global Achievers and our ties to Scotland, asking for a waiver of all fees for the space.
Bette Hickman, our intrepid producer, wants to make it open to the public, and I had come to the same conclusion. This could be a really big thing.
I got email done to all our participants, informing them of our new successive approximations.
I got a couple more measures of the Sunflower Waltz scored.
I worked on the official proposal for the Cultural Arts Commission.
I created Lacuna stationery.
I started a storyboard for Sun & Moon Circus.
That should be enough, don’t you think?
This from yesterday’s obituaries in the Times, quoting Henri Troyat on how he developed his writing style:
“I would read a paragraph of Flaubert out loud and rewrite it from memory. Then, by comparing my version with the original, I would try to understand why what I had written was an affront to what I had read.”
This is an interesting take on the writing process and on style. Very metacognitive, in that it’s clear that Troyat was not trying to emulate Flaubert. He simply looked at where his voice went wrong in transcribing a master, and in that way was consciously able to develop some inner voice of his own. I like it.
Lots going on today. First of all, I videotaped our hearing impaired students saying the Pledge of Allegiance for their announcements for Friday morning. It’s Exceptional Children’s Week, and all week students from different areas have been leading the pledge and also telling about famous people in the past who were or would have been in special needs classes. One of the hearing impaired students signed a couple of paragraphs about Helen Keller.
Their teachers originally wanted to narrate the video, but I dissuaded them. Well, OK, I forbade them. This is the kids’ moment, and I told the teachers I would close caption the video. What about the little kids who can’t read, they asked. Their teachers will read it to them, I pointed out.
Anyway, I spent a lot of the day editing the video in Final Cut Express, structuring it like the morning announcements, putting cheesy “news” music under the lead-ins, close captioning the Pledge and the Helen Keller bit. I even put photos of Helen Keller over the shoulder of the student, cross-fading between each one.
At Lacuna workshop (Dale, Marc, Laura, Melissa, and Carol Lee in attendance), we were productive as usual, although in a different way this week. I brought my worries about the calendar to the table, and we hashed that out. Part of my worries has to do with not knowing whether we have a place to perform this, and we talked about that. I know that our producing arm is working on it, but it makes me very anxious not to know.
To make a long evening short, we decided to keep working Tuesday nights (7:30 for those who would like to join us) for the rest of March, getting together our design concepts and choreographing the two staged pieces.
The first week of April is spring break, and many of us will be in New York City. And I don’t think I’ve mentioned that we will be having lunch with Nancy Willard! She’s coming down from Poughkeepsie, and we get to meet her! I’m still excited about that.
Then, starting April 10, we will meet Tuesdays and Wednesdays and begin dragging in the casts of Man in the Marmalade Hat and Two Sunflowers. Actually, on April 10, we’ll invite the members of the chorus to come and work on a little blocking/physicalization of their part of this thing.
Sometime in April, we’ll hold a weekend color-cut-and-paste session where we can build and paint stuff we need all at once.
We buckled down and got our What We Need and Who We Need done for Man in the Marmalade Hat. (Lurkers, there’s lots you can do. More than enough. Get to work.)
We realized that at some point we need to storyboard Sun & Moon Circus so we can deliberately produce visuals for the multimedia part of the concert. I also shared that I had envisaged staging “production photos” of that and other pieces for the multimedia, i.e., photo a kid tossing up a planet balloon and use that as a visual.
Carol Lee had done a different successive approximation of a sunflower, one using a glove. We’re still undecided between the glove and the crossbar on manipulating the sunflowers. She will work on those this week.
Laura wants to work on a prototype for the hedgehog costume. (Dale will start working with Laura’s mom’s kindergarten hedgehogs this week.)
Marc will work on design concepts for the Inn itself. We did decide that for May, we can get away with simple suggestions.
Dale will work on prototypes for the Toast Heads (the MMH’s marching band).
Melissa, were you working on something? I didn’t write it down.
Everyone is to work on visuals for the winter/spring motifs for the MMH’s banners.