Yesterday, when the ten year-old began flashing several singles and getting other kids to chase him I put a soft hand on his arm and asked him to please not start acting like a hyena.  He laughed at this, naturally, and was for the most part unable to subdue his inner hyena.   I took him aside when we got upstairs and explained his importance, as the main editor of the animation, and how I needed him to focus and fix some badly cropped frames from the previous session.

He focused in spurts, while blasting the soundtrack over the tinny computer speakers.  I set him up with headphones, which momentarily decreased the ambient racket in the room.  Then, with the cans on, he got inspired and began screaming into the mic.   I was determined to record interviews with kids to use as part of a promo I am going to make today, come hell or high water.  

I took the first kid into an empty classroom across the hall where he answered some questions in a very clear and articulate manner.  The only improvement he could think of to the workshop would be less yelling.  He clarified that he meant the yelling of the children and, as if on cue, the loud barking of the hyena-boy, arguing with the other adult, in the hallway right outside the door.  “Case in point,” I said and the boy nodded.

I went into the hall and gestured for the angry kid to come in, to the relief of the adult who was trying to reason with him.  He came into the room howling about how much he hated her, how he was going to get her fired, etc.  I asked him to sit down and try to relax, I had other interviews to do and needed it to be quiet.  I began the interview with the next kid, his best friend.  As the interview progressed I saw it was hopeless, the interviewee insisted on answering in a series of funny/stupid voices and kept looking at his wild buddy to see if the funny voices were working.  The hyena rattled a box of pencils, muttering, trying not to be distracted from his misery. 

I asked him to stop, he couldn’t.   I moved the pencils away from him and told him I was going to interview him next, and he was fairly quiet for the remainder of the short, useless interview with his pal.

When the two of us were left in the room he was sulky.  “You said you would only interview me,” he insisted, out of the blue.   “Everybody says I’m not special,” he complained.  

“Nobody who knows you could say you’re not special,” I said.  “You’re one of a kind.  Don’t listen to anyone who says you’re not special.”

“My teacher told me again today that I’m not special,” he said.

“She probably meant not special in the sense of being treated differently from everyone else.  Special has different meanings, you know.  You’re quite special, and she knows it, but at the same time, she has to treat all her students the same way or people would start saying she was being unfair,” I said.

The interview didn’t go that well, but he was more subdued by the end.  “Did you crop those frames I asked you to fix?” I asked him as I took him back across the hall.

“Yes…” he said with annoyance.

I did another interview.  When I came back in he and his buddy, and another ten year old, were screaming with headphones on, some noise I later eliminated from the soundtrack.  I scrolled through the animation and found the second batch of frames I’d needed him to crop.

“Oh, I forgot those,” he admitted.

“When you’re done I want to show you that app I was telling you about,” I said and took a very articulate ten year-old across the hall to interview.  Her answers deserve a little promo film of their own.

By the time I got back I realized it was useless to try to interview anyone else.  I took the editor out in the hall, handed him his headphones and showed him an app on the iPad.  I spent no more than 40 seconds demonstrating how to create a drum track, bass part and melody line by moving a finger around the ingeniously designed screen.  The app is called Figure and it’s intuitive and a lot of fun.  I told him I was not 100% clear on how to use it with Audiobus, which I’d set up, and I left him to figure it out.  (He basically did, by the way.)

When it was time to go I went over to get him and said “nice program, huh?” and he seemed quite happy.  When I pulled the headphones out of the iPad, a full musical track was playing and I couldn’t easily shut it off.  It took me a moment to silence the orchestral chaos.

Then the usual struggle ensued to get the room cleaned up, and it eventually was, and the other adult left with half the group and I was putting the last few things away as first the editor and then his best friend asked for my help with their shoes.  The editor’s lace had come out of the eyelet, and there was no way to shove the frayed lace back through to tie his shoe.  Fortunately for him, he’d given this problem to a problem-solving adult who took a pair of tweezers out of his keychain Swiss Army Knife, managed to pull the lace through and tie it within a minute.  Then it was his friend, with knotted shoelaces on the boots he’d kicked off on entering the workshop.  Over my shoulder I asked the other stragglers to pick up this or that, tuck those chairs in, throw that in the garbage, please.

At 5:05 I put on my coat, my heavy pack, picked up my duffle bag and headed to the door.  I passed the candy wrapper I’d asked the editor to pick up.

“Why didn’t you pick up this wrapper like I asked you?”  I said, picking it up.

“I didn’t hear you, when did you ask me?” he said, distractedly.

“When you were ignoring me,” I said, to a round of bright smiles from the other three young stragglers.

And, of course, when I later heard the music track the kid had made, I was quite blown away.  Very restrained bit of playing, a lot of space between the drumbeats, the bass line and the odd, frenetic, poignant little melody.