Finally, Complete. Almost.
I think maybe I don't believe in finished products.
Here’s what the last two weeks was, for me:
I’ve posted a few updates on this at different points along the way. This revision adds the end titles, so people can get credited, as they ought.
The motivation to create this video started off quite simply: to hire a dancer in the Apsara tradition, who would perform a short piece for the camera, that would be used to capture that motion. In turn, that motion would be one of, certainly an important element, in the suite of resources that we’d assemble for the curriculum for the Game-Dev program that I’m building for KAPE, aka Kampuchea Action for Progress in Education.
Of course, it didn’t stay that simple; but that’s a good thing. For a four hour shoot, we had a crazy ambitious list of things to cover, not all of which are in the video. To start with, there’s a couple of interviews with Belle (the dancer), and her assistant, Kakou, who you see with Belle when she first appears, and then at other points in the prep action.
Those things let me do the storytelling in the video. And that storytelling will adapt and expand over time. What is shown in the YouTube above is like a foundation to tell other stories, our origin point.
I have quite a free hand to build this course as I see fit. I benefit from this freedom in many ways, but my ethics require that that translate tangibly into benefits to the students that will follow the course. So this freedom comes with some anxiety.
One thing about making choices of the kind that led to the video’s making, is that you find yourself committed. Sometimes I have to make choices before I really know how they’ll work out. Telling KAPE that I wanted to build the course around Apsara, treating it as a kind of metric for ability to animate figures, meant I had to come through.
I’ve been uncharacteristically lucky in this project: both KAPE and Cambodia Living Arts, who have helped me, have been perfectly connected to what’s needed to make this work. CLA, the dominant arts NGO in the country of course knew just the dancer to connect me with. How long might I have floundered around if that hadn’t happened?
This past week, I was at the school in Phnom Penh where the program will be piloted, starting alarmingly soon from now. Here’s the door being opened for me, to the classroom that they’re providing for the program.
Really, it’s pretty much perfect, in size, in location; we designed a classroom layout, and it being Cambodia, there’s now some custom furniture being built for it. Wonderful.
All of these elements coming together makes it all seem like it’s really going to happen. I’m adjusting to that, after some bitter disappointments thanks to the pandemic.
I’ve always been very independent, sometimes too ready to make sacrifices to preserve my own vision of things. To be blunt, a country like Canada, as aware as I am of how incredibly privileged that way of life is, and as happy as I am to carry its passport (in many ways), is in short supply of something that seems to run like a river here: a readiness to listen to ideas, judge them on their own merit, and decide to do things, even if they haven’t been done before. Maybe it’s that I’m lucky in these partners.
This program, for instance. It’s impossible to imagine anyone in Canada committing what’s already been committed to this by the people and institutions I’ve been so lucky to have connected with. And we’ll be on the ground with a pilot program in a month or two, at cost that wouldn’t cover the expense of just deciding on the consultant in Canada.
Between start of April, and late May, we’ll be doing a curriculum design round in our little classroom, in what will be the empty school. School holidays have been moved around and now begin April 1. So we’re using that time to work with an instructor who usually teaches coding, and 6 handpicked students to try out what I’ll dream up in the interim.
I’m all too aware of the failures I’ll confront ahead. I’ll certainly be the one doing the most learning as I try to navigate styles of learning, the established relationship that students are taught to have with their teachers, and the sometimes oblique nature of the software it all depends on.
And then, there’s the Apsara. I wonder if they’ll rebel against it. It’s not what high school students care most about, though they get (in a polite and correctly-phrased way) why it matters to Cambodian identity.
Spending hours and hours watching the fine details of the dance, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to think through how to organize the process of getting our guinea pig students to solve the challenges it presents to an animator or game designer. It won’t be easy. The chances for invention and innovation are there, that may torpedo my carefully worked out ideas.
I think they too will come to see that embedded deep in these movements that have been trained into the bodies and minds of 50 generations of their forebears, are secrets and observations that will disclose themselves. I hope so. Wish me luck.