Yesterday was our first day on the film with a great  group on the Inclusion Connect special needs Project in Washwood Heath, and for me it was my first full workshop as a newly self employed workshop faciliator. After a good deal of planning, i’m very pleased to say that it turned out real well and was a great and very positive experience for me as much as the participants.

Apologies if the images are coming up as unavailable. They’re only viewable by participants due to the privacy laws for safeguarding identity of participants in the workshops.

Although it’s my first special needs workshop, it’s my 3rd workshop working with Pyn from Dramask (who’s also behind the interactive performance, and community workshop side of our Mr Elephant events). In our last two workshops i’ve been bringing my music technology side in to provide the soundtrack in partnership with the Pyn’s drama side, and its been a great combination so far.

This however, was a new exploration for both of us and despite a good deal of planning and creative meetings, we weren’t sure how the two would work in this environment. Suffice to say though all thoughts were put to rest as soon as the session started, with all participants seeming fully engaged til the end, and not only delivering the objectives we hoped, but also furthering social skills in ways we didnt expect.

We began with a couple pf icebreakers, first a drama game led by Pyn, and then a music game led by me. The music game also doubled up as a way to introduce the music equipment,  and to get people comfortable with using it and speaking on the microphone.

I also recently bought a novation launchpad in order to make using ableton lite a lot easier for the group. I’m thinking of investing in another one as it would be nice to have multiple users so they can work together, as opposed to taking it in turns. I’d love to upgrade ableton too as its a great bit of software for production, performance, and there’s a host of ways i could further integrate the features in workshops, but its going to be a good while before i have enough money i think.

Next up we began to look at creating the 1st of 3 scenes which would provide the starting point to our film (which is going to be shot by another elephant resident Mr Jack Brabant) and which also gave us the opportunity to look at ways we can use sound and drama to bring the scenes to life.

The 2nd scene was where the plots started to get really interesting, with some strong performances and great improvisation.

What we found was not only did the group each bring their own thing to the scenes in ways we didnt imagine, but also that their personal responses to the scenarios we set, provided more storyline for the plot of the short film.

It was also great to see the dynamic of the group and how they knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses and backed each other up where they could.

On that note, big shouts must also go out to the support workers who both did a superb job of keeping the group moving forward. It seems a large part of workshops in community settings is not just delivering a great workshop, but also having great support staff. This is best pic we have largely because both support workers were also capturing most of the footage.

Whilst Pyn was expertly leading the drama side, i was leading the music side with participants taking it in turns to trigger and play various sounds. These ranged from using incidental music and sound efx through to playing actual instruments and rhythms to express the parts, all triggered via the launchpad, remote sl, and ableton lite. The learning curve throughout the 2 hour session seemed well within each participant’s ability and paved the way nicely for some music creation next time.

At the end of the session we finished with an evaluation. It’s a great technique, whereby you draw a bullseye with 2 surrounding circles and invite all participants to put an x on the board. The more they enjoyed the session the closer to the bulls eye they put their cross.

Thankfully everyone seemed to really enjoy the session, and participants also gave some useful feedback for our next session.

It’s going to be a couple of months before we recommence as there are a couple of meetings and religious holidays, then its xmas, so we will have to wait a while before our next session, but both of us are well excited and looking forward to where we can take it.

A great group of people and i for one am feeling pretty lucky to be working in such good company.