Oscar, Artistic Director of now>press>play recently journeyed to Mayflower School in Poplar for an exciting workshop where they created a now>press>play experience in a day! We asked Oscar to tell us a little more about their day and how they created their experience...(please note student names have been changed)The gestation of a new now>press>play Experience is as close to giving birth as I’ll ever get. It takes 9 months, it’s painful and my love for the baby fluctuates wildly depending on the day. It’s the good, modern sort of childbirth with multiple parents and surrogates: a scriptwriter, sound designer, a couple of actors (one male, one female…see, this is working), Head of Sound and myself. All these paid-up professionals pass the baby round gingerly, on a precision timeline.But instead of making it in nine months with six experts, what if we did it –conception to delivery – in a day? With ten children. We asked Mayflower School in Poplar and Year 5 teacher, Fiona McGain, gamely accepted. Our process began like any other: a Planning and Research Meeting (9am – 10.45am).Enter my ten scriptwriters. One difference between these chaps and my normal writers (I notice it almost immediately) is their size: they’re much, much smaller. I’m flustered but not rattled. A real plus is that no one’s asking me for tea – they’re literally raring to go. We open our Research with games and some “pretending to be other stuff”. Unorthodox but I’m having a great time.It turns out they haven’t done much prep on World War 2. Not quite sure what I’m paying them for but I bite my tongue and shove on a Powerpoint. Unlike adults, they have a firm grasp of it all in minutes. By this time, I need my coffee and Hassan’s crawling under a table: it’s break. They pop to Costa for their flat whites (I guess) and we reconvene at 11am.Storyboarding. This is exactly like all the meetings I attend: half chatter interminably and half listen and assess (except here it’s not down the gender split). Together we devise a seriously exciting WW2 story: evacuation, Digging for Victory, bombs, sheltering in the Underground. Weirdly, this is everything that’s in our real now>press>play WW2 Experience (I draft an iPhone email: “Alice, let’s use these guys every time? Cheaper?”).In small groups, the writers scribble (actually) a mini scene each. I’m genuinely impressed by everything from their spelling to their dialogue tension. But I’m most apprehensive about the next stage: recording. We’re tired but firm friends by this stage, and a democratic decision is taken (executively, by me) to have multiple people playing the same role. Bored, 10 year olds in a small room is not the vibe.The actors I work with tend towards “massive show-offs”, but some of these folk are refreshingly reserved. Salma has to virtually stand on top of my laptop to be heard. While the rush means not all the performances are Peter O’Toole, there are golden moments, such as when Bilal croaks “It’s me, Dad” to his estranged children, with a genuine crack in his voice.We finish with Sound Effects and Foley. This is where my planning runs out. We stomp around, bang the furniture, make bomb sounds – and then feed it all through the laptop, whacking in various delays and reverbs. These guys don’t work later than 3.15pm (they have lives, you know), so that’s a wrap. I spend the evening editing and there we have it: a now>press>play baby, conceived and delivered in a day. It only confirms my long-held suspicion that I’ll take working with children over adults any day of the week.You can listen to Mayflower Primary School's WW2 experience here![playlist ids="3173"]