Amethyst Band's Monster Arc Exploration
Amethyst Band is home to 11 year old students and is led by Sam.
First Three Weeks of School…
The first three weeks of school were dedicated to exploring our identities, learning about our new home in the Presidio, and constructing habits and physical structures in our bandspace. We learned about the artist Favianna Rodriguez and her art installation honoring the Ramaytush Ohlone people. With the rest of the middle school, we visited the Presidio Tunnel Tops park to check out the Rodriguez mural and new playground development. We also attended Flower Piano, an outdoor concert festival in the San Francisco Botanical Gardens, and created book recommendation posters for our upper school library. As a band, we shared items from home that evoked our heritage, wrote poems based on George Ella Lyon’s classic “Where I’m From,” and established a morning workout routine. With Rob, we learned exquisite corpse drawing games and learned some shop tools, including drills and chop saw. As a group, we helped rebuild projects from our old building, including a wooden fort structure and a geodesic dome made from PVC pipes and zip ties.
Middle School Camping Trip…
The beginning of school culminated in an overnight camping trip at China Camp State Park. We helped each other pitch our tents at our campsite and split chore responsibilities for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. During the day, Amethyst Band could be found playing card games together and at night produced a talent show, including comedy skits and sing-a-longs. For our second day at camp, we hiked to China Camp Village to explore the beachfront and early Chinese settlement.
Brainstorming Monster Arc Projects…
As we transitioned officially into the Exploration phase of Monster Arc, we discussed what makes a great Brightworks group project, pitched different ideas, created a rubric for assessing the best option, and used a ranked-choice voting system to pick a project collectively.
Making a Monster Movie…
The majority of the group wanted to make a monster movie together so we spent Exploration moving through the production stages of the filmmaking process. During pre-production, we learned a little film history, screening films like A Trip to the Moon and Man with a Movie Camera from the early 20th century to glean techniques about camerawork, editing, and special effects. We split into groups and recorded short films that utilized a variety of camera angles to tell the story. We also learned about tropes related to “creature features” as we generated different loglines for our own film. Once we voted on a logline, we used Pixar’s “story spine” to create an outline for our plot. We then split into different pre-production work groups to turn our idea into a screenplay, draw storyboards for our film shoot, and plan out our props and special effects. When our screenplay was finished, we claimed different production roles including director, producer, cinematographer, sound recorder, boom pole operator, actor, editor, and propmasters. Each day, the group would create a shot list and film the scenes on location in the Wayburn Redwood Grove. Some would work on capturing B-roll footage, editing sequences together, or working on our giant props. At the end of each day, we would screen the dailies and make a plan to adjust for the next day.
This Book is Antiracist and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Sergio Suarez…
We met weekly with Sergio, Brightworks’s DEI Coordinator, to read and discuss This Book is Antiracist by Tiffany Jewell. In addition to reading the book together, we’ve also drawn maps exploring the facets of our personal identity, practiced our note-taking skills, and participated in a LatinX Cultural Heritage Celebration, which included poetry, dance, and tamale-making workshops.
Band Buddies with Lapis Lazuli…
We’ve also had a series of special meet-ups with our lower school band buddies to share what we’ve been working on. We’ve played some random monster drawing games, visited the Presidio Pet Cemetery, and written short illustrated stories based on one of the pets buried there.
Guest Experts…
We’ve also been joined by a number of guest experts, including…
Joel Pomerantz, founder of Thinkwalks, guided us throughout the Presidio and taught us about some of the secret history related to the area’s waterways, plant life, and military buildings.
Josiah Luis Alderete, poet and owner of Medicine for Nightmares bookstore guided us in a poetry workshop that prompted us to write about our own cultural heritage and answer the question, “who is the monster in America?”
Aubrielle Hvolboll, artist and filmmaker shared insights into making large-scale paper-mache puppets and asked us to help her in building a giant witch’s hand for a musical performance at Golden Gate Park.
Dr. Ana Lyons, tardigradologist and neuroscientist presented her research on tardigrades and asked us to consider monsters at different scales.