The cardboard boat gave them a result in four days. The Lip Dub gives them nothing for three weeks - and that's the point of this week. Sustained focus, delayed payoff, and work that only makes sense once it's finished. To keep the studio from burning out on one long project, every day pairs Lip Dub progress with something that finishes in a single afternoon and ends up on the Exhibition wall.
| Week 4 | Preparation, in full, as the sole Quest focus. Song chosen, song mapped, route walked, moments assigned, crew roles claimed, and as many rehearsal reps as the week will hold. Nothing is filmed for real this week. |
| Week 5 | The recording week. Blocking Tuesday, dress rehearsal Wednesday, the shoot Thursday, choose the take Friday. |
| Target | Fully recorded by Thursday of Week 5. |
| Week 6 | Slack, deliberately. A reshoot window if the studio wants one; otherwise review and refine. |
The buffer is the point. The film must not be a last-minute thing done the day before Exhibition. Shooting on Thursday of Week 5 leaves a full week of margin for a sick camera operator, a corrupted file, a take nobody likes, or a locked door on the route. Anything that erodes that margin is a regression, not a scheduling tweak.
Say the shape of it to the studio on Monday so it's public from day one: "This week we build all of it. Next week we film it - Thursday. We film early on purpose, because if something goes wrong we want a week to fix it, not a night."
The timeline stated out loud, references watched twice, the five-step board goes up, and nominations open - with the song criteria given first.
// day 02 · tuesdayScout and walk the physical route before the song exists. Song advocacy: every nominator gets sixty seconds to make a case.
// day 03 · wednesdayVoted at Town Hall and final once voted. First full listen, first sections marked, and the banner built as a working prop.
// day 04 · thursdayThe camera can't teleport. Lyrics mapped, storyboard drawn, and the route walked end to end with the song playing.
// day 05 · fridayAssignments made and crew roles claimed, then the second full walk with the song. The week ends with the shape of it visible.
There is no separate Challenge this week, and no side builds inside Quest either - every Quest block this week is fifty minutes of Lip Dub work. The studio needs the reps more than it needs variety, and four extra afternoons of walking the route is what makes Thursday of Week 5 a comfortable shoot date rather than a hopeful one.
Two of the original one-afternoon builds stayed, because they turned out to be Lip Dub production work rather than side projects: the Banner is a prop that has to be legible on camera and survive a corridor, and the Storyboard is the route itself. Both are still in the week, on Wednesday and Thursday.
The other two are below, in full and unchanged. They are backup, not cut. Reach for them when the studio needs a change of gear from the same song, when a block finishes early, or when a wet Tuesday needs rescuing - and be honest that both of them earn their place at Exhibition if you run them.
Every learner photographed doing their special ability - the one they wrote on their Week 2 Trading Card. Not posed headshots: the kid who explains fractions is explaining fractions, the kid who finds lost things is under a table.
Exhibition: printed large, hung as a grid with the trading cards beside them. Reuses: Trading Cards.
A studio-wide Rube Goldberg machine where each team owns one section and every section must hand off to the next team's. Pure engineering, and the handoff points are where all the negotiation happens - the same problem as the boat seams, with different materials.
Exhibition: filmed on a phone; the successful run plays on a loop. Reuses: Week 3 team skills.
A large studio banner built as a physical prop for the Lip Dub - which means it has to be legible on camera, carried by several people at once, and survive being run down a corridor.
Exhibition: hangs behind the screen at the premiere. Reuses: Standard of Excellence language.
The Lip Dub route drawn as a physical storyboard the studio can walk along, and the behind-the-camera roles claimed - camera, sound, continuity, floor manager. Not everyone wants to be on film, and this is where that becomes an asset rather than a problem.
Exhibition: storyboard displayed beside the screen. Reuses: Roles board.
Both of these are written out to be run as-is. Nothing has been cut - they moved out of Quest, not out of the guide.
What it is: a photographic portrait of every learner, shot properly, printed large, and hung as a single grid at Exhibition next to the Trading Cards they made in Week 2.
Why it's a good one to reach for: it's fast, it finishes inside the block, and it gets the camera into learners' hands - which matters when they're operating it for the real take on Thursday of Week 5.
Carry forward: portraits get printed and hung alongside the Week 2 Trading Cards. The pairing is the point - a face and, next to it, what that person said they were good at and what they needed.
A whole-studio machine where every team's section must hand off to the next. It is a Lip Dub in miniature - individually easy, collectively brutal, and it fails at the joins.
Be clear-eyed about this. Teams of learners this age building a chain-reaction section from scratch, from shared materials, in twenty-five minutes, will not produce something that reliably triggers the next section. Expect that most of the fifteen minutes of "runs" will be learners tipping dominoes over by hand and calling it a handoff. That is what this activity actually looks like.
That's fine if the goal is the lesson - it fails at the joins - and the debrief carries the day rather than the machine. It is not fine if you've told the studio you're building a working machine, because then twenty-five minutes of chaos reads as failure.
Two ways to make it land:
Either way, say out loud before they start that hand-triggering is allowed. Otherwise the run degenerates into an argument about cheating instead of a conversation about joins.
The brief (5 min):
Build (25 min):
The runs (15 min) - and film every one:
Close (5 min): one question - "Which join was hardest, and what did the two teams have to do to fix it?" Then connect it forward: "That's what we're doing with the Lip Dub, except the marble is a song and the join is a person."
Carry forward: the successful run - or the best failed one - goes in the Exhibition reel. Keep the written instructions too; they're better writing evidence than most things that end up in a folder.
The failure mode of a project like this isn't difficulty, it's fog - days in a row of work that doesn't look like anything yet. The answer isn't a side build; it's that every Quest block ends by running whatever exists so far, however partial. Thirty seconds of the opening with four people in the right place is visible progress. A studio that walks the route on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday can feel the thing getting better, which is the whole problem solved.
On the Exhibition wall: the room fills with the v1-beside-v2 pairs (Personal Working Guides, Trading Cards, both Mirrors, Standard of Excellence), the boat build sequence, the Spark journals and every learner's station. It does not depend on these two builds - but it's better with them, so run them if the week allows.
If the studio is flagging on the same song three days running, that's the signal to reach for a backup - not to abandon the rehearsal, but to spend one block differently and come back. Just don't spend two.
We name the menu: take a breath, use the PWG, use Work It Out, ask a guide. We rehearse the menu before we need it.
Where: Day 1 Morning Launch
Some discomfort is growth. Some discomfort is harm. The studio learns to tell the difference and respond accordingly.
Where: Day 2 Morning Launch
The posters get refined based on real lived experience. What did we learn that we didn't know in Week 1?
Where: Day 3 Town Hall + Day 5
Rescuing too early. The point of a three-week build is the three weeks. If a guide steps in at the first sign of struggle, the muscle doesn't build.
Making it punitive. The challenge should be intrinsically hard, not externally imposed as punishment. Frame it as a gift, not a hurdle.
Letting real conflict get personal. When the inevitable conflict emerges, name the dynamic, not the person. "We're seeing X pattern" not "learner Y is doing Z."