Comedy and
Storytelling Workshop:
Using Film and
Music Tools to Explore Communication
Created by:
Tim Coleman,
Elementary Teacher in the Shawnee Mission School District,
Program
Outline, Goals, and Rationale
The Comedy and Storytelling
Workshop will provide students diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder the
opportunity to work in an intensive, small peer group (3-4 students total) on
several film and music projects as a multilayered means to learn and practice
social skills, express emotions and creative ideas, and strengthen
self-confidence. During two-hour block
sessions, students will meet with Workshop Facilitators to create several
Comedy and Storytelling projects that incorporate composing, performing,
editing, and evaluating the dynamics of fictional character social
interaction. The projects will stimulate
imagination, creativity, and will provide opportunities for all students to be
the writers, directors, and producers of original artistic material.
Mr.
Coleman developed The Comedy and Storytelling Workshop as the third component
within a larger spectrum of learning environments that ultimately have the goal
of providing students the social skills to engage with people of all ages in
any social situation. This larger
spectrum is a scaffolding approach wherein students learn and practice targeted
social skills in learning environments that are initially highly structured,
but which shift gradually to support the student in ever greater levels of
independent practice and success. This
allows for a cyclical revisiting of all learning environments in that once a
targeted social skill is mastered (to the standard agreed upon by parents and
facilitators) the student may be taught a new social skill or set of skills and
reenter the spectrum to reach mastery for the new social skill(s). Additionally, the student gains valuable life
and job skills in expressive communication, collaborative work, audio/video
technology, and long-term goal orientated organization. The learning environments used in this
program are as follows:
1)
The student is
taught a specific social skill or set of social skills by specialist (provided
by the school district, private practitioner, etc) in one-on-one settings and
occasionally utilizing peer models.
Classroom teacher and parents provide input for social skill(s) needing
to be taught based on home and regular education classroom observations. Classroom teacher monitors for progress in
the regular education classroom.
2)
After mastery of
social skill with specialist, social skill lessons are brought into the regular
education classroom with peer group and practiced in highly structured
classroom lessons. These lessons are
carried out in whole class and small group arrangements that are, on the
surface, teaching a regular curriculum objective not obviously related to
social skills. However, the student on
the Autism Spectrum is prepped for the social elements of the lesson and receives
both the regular objective instruction as well as the practice of social
skill(s).
3)
Student participates
in Comedy and Storytelling Workshop with a select group of peer models from the
regular education classroom. Each
workshop session is divided into two parts.
The first part of the session is called Workshop Process, in which
students learn, observe, and practice with each other the skills needed to
complete the project. The second part of
the session is called Workshop Project, in which students take the skills they
have learned and the ideas they have generated and they create the
project. The student learns and
practices social skills through the process and project of workshop (see
explanatory section below).
4)
The student participates
in regular social situations that do not involve the workshop facilitators
(including classroom teacher) but ideally have at least one of the peer models
from the workshop. Targeted social
skills are monitored by parents and ongoing communication with specialists,
classroom teacher, and workshop facilitators allows for intervention,
refinement, and/or introduction of new social skills at the appropriate learning
environment within the spectrum.
5)
Ideal mastery
provides the student increased use of the social skills to engage unfamiliar
peers in unstructured social situations.
Process
and Project – Layers of Learning
A significant strength to the
Comedy and Storytelling Workshop is that the identified social skills are
taught at multiple levels.
- Firstly, the student is working collaboratively
with peer models during workshop.
Targeted social skills are incorporated into the regular dialogue
of learning and creating the project.
To work within the peer group, students need to be practicing
crucial and common social skills such as: clearly expressing ideas and
desires with adequate amount of detail, listening to others speak without
interrupting, asking questions, staying on topic, making eye contact,
avoiding behavior and language that takes the group off-subject, and
seeing the viewpoints and interests of others. These social skills are presented as the
very tools needed by each member of the group to bring them together, work
as a group, and ultimately end up with a project that is a full
realization of their creativity and imagination.
- Secondly, every workshop provides a direct method
to approach the targeted social skill from a unique vantage point in that
the project itself actually involves fictionalized representations of the
targeted social skill. In this way,
the project (a skit, comedy routine, story, dramatized event, etc) has the
students viewing, understanding, and shaping the social skills of
characters and the audience.
8 Week
Session Outline (Pilot Group)
- Working in a Creative and Collaborative Way –
Evil Caricatures (1 session)
- Process:
i.
Students learned
that there are a number of behaviors that support a collaborative effort as
well as behaviors that will derail working together. They watched clips from a Pixar film tour of
Pixar studios to see how people work creatively together by supporting each
other. They brainstormed how and where
people would work collaboratively and created a list of characteristics that
would derail most group creative efforts.
They then exaggerated these characteristics into caricatures. They worked together to think of how to
visually represent these people and drew caricatures. The final list of caricatures included: 1) “Arguer,”
2) “Slacker,” 3) “Prankster,” 4) “Hogger,” 5) “Interrupter,” and 6) “Put
Downer.”
- Project:
i.
Students reviewed
how each of the caricatures would act and then took turns in an improvisational
skit where they pretended to be working on a movie idea but had to deal with a
member of their group who was an embodiment of one of the caricatures. Students took turns being different
caricatures and even felt what it was like to have all the caricatures going at
once (complete disaster). Each of these
caricatures disrupted the collaboration of the group in various ways that were
highlighted at the end by a frank discussion where students shared when they
had acted in similar ways in other situations.
- Proper Pacing – too much/little information and
going too fast/slow (1 session)
- Process:
i.
Students learned
the importance of proper pacing when telling a story. They saw great examples of pacing in a Bill
Cosby clip and an example of poor pacing in a Finding Nemo clip. The students learned that it is very easy to
add too much information or too little information to a story as well as the
value of not going too fast or too slow when speaking.
- Project:
i.
Students worked
on recreating the clip of Bill Cosby talking about taking a plane trip. They worked as a group to write new versions
of the script that had too much and too little information. They then scripted a story starter, again
based on the Bill Cosby clip, and took turns beginning with the story starter
and performing improvisations where they used too much or too little information
to tell the same story.
ii.
Students
discussed familiar fairy tales and chose Jack and the Beanstalk. They wrote a rough skit and performed the
play in a set amount of time (5 minutes).
They then had to perform the same play again but in half the time. This forced them to break the pacing they had
established by performing the play much quicker and with less information to
still include the beginning, middle and end of the play with all the major
story elements in the allotted time. The
students did this several times, until they had to tell the entire Jack and the
Beanstalk story in less than 30 seconds.
- Pacing & Facial Expression Mini-Project –
Voice Overdubbing (2 sessions)
- Process:
i.
Students focused
on the relationship between facial expressions, lines of dialogue, and story
pacing. They saw how both the images and
the audio of a story work together to tell a story. The students watched an X-Men cartoon and
selected a scene that they could use the images from but change the plot by
over-dubbing the voices of the people in the cartoon. Students watched the video several times and
took notes on scenes, plot, facial expressions, situations, and pacing. While watching the clip they wrote a new
script that introduced an entirely new plot through the new audio.
- Project:
i.
Students
performed the new script while watching the X-Men video and were recorded into
a Digital Audio Workstation. They
created character voices, sound effects, and constantly evaluated scenes for
facial expressions and story structure to judge how the characters acted and
reacted to each other and their environments.
Students experimented with over-dubbing scenes one scene at a time as
well as doing complete run-throughs from beginning to end and having everyone
contribute on the fly.
- Facial Expression Game (1 session)
- Process:
i.
Students learned how
people use facial expressions to convey what they are thinking and
feeling. This was explored using two
video segments that contained multiple actors interacting with each another
while experiencing various emotions and reactions to the situations at
hand. Scenes from Monsters Inc. and The
Lord of the Rings were used, the first both with and without audio and the
second with no audio. The scenes were
repeatedly paused and students used the character’s faces to determine what the
scene was about and how the people conveyed emotions and thoughts.
- Project:
i.
Students played
several versions of a facial expression game.
First, all three students took turns creating different situations and
planning out what facial expressions and gestures would convey the
situation. Then one of the students went
outside while the others filmed the situations.
The student returned and had to watch the video clips without sound and
closely watch the faces of the other two students to match the situations to
the video clips. Then the students were
split into two teams and they played another round of the game, creating new
situations and privately filming the situations to present them to the other
group to again try matching the situations to the muted sound clips.
- Storyboarding Final Project (1 session)
- Process:
i.
Students learned
about the storyboarding process, initially introduced in the first workshop session
in a Pixar clip. The storyboards were
shown to be a great way to visualize a long, more complex story while dealing
with each segment on its own. The
students then reviewed all prior workshop sessions and began brainstorming a
final project to be filmed that would incorporate each of the main topics
taught and practiced. The students
decided to do a mock documentary of the comedy and storytelling workshop.
- Project:
i.
The students
spread out blank paper across several folding tables and began creating a rough
flow of ideas that could be created for the documentary. They saw the value in being able to walk over
to a scene and focus solely on it, which also helped map out overall pacing
while highlighting scenes that needed more attention. Students walked up and down the storyboards
and discussed what each scene needed to do, how it could be interesting, and
how it would fit together with all the other scenes to tell a larger
story. This process reinforced the very
concepts they were trying to express in the final play.
- Filming Final Project (2 sessions)
- Process:
i.
Students began by
looking at each of the scenes that needed to be filmed and working individually
and in small groups to discuss, plan, and practice each scene. The students had to deal with multiple
instances of problem-solving as some scenes needed to be altered for a variety
of logistical reasons. They continued to
refine ideas and offer new details to reach the goal of each scene.
- Project:
i.
Students filmed
the mock documentary for the comedy and storytelling workshop. They took a variety of parts and performed
them several times to get the scene right.
Students would coach each other for better performances and dealt with a
number of challenges (such as Rotary Club usurpers, missing camera equipment,
late start times, and eventual movement of filming location to one of the
student’s residence). Students later met
with their families at an private party to watch the finished film, eat, and
celebrate weeks of hard work.
