A whole-studio chain reaction where every team's section has to hand off to the next. Individually easy, collectively brutal, and it breaks exactly where the Lip Dub will break - at the handoffs. Also six seconds of very good Exhibition footage.
By 2:40 today the studio has felt, in about four seconds, that the handoff belongs to two teams and neither can fix it alone.
The first five minutes went to negotiating joins, not building middles. That order is the whole lesson.
Each team watched someone try to follow their writing. The failures were more useful than the successes.
When a join failed, the two teams who owned it fixed it - without the guide and without the room shouting.
Work It Out (Wk 2) gets named at launch as the tool for today's neighbor negotiations. Boat teams (Wk 3) are reused deliberately - they already know how to disagree with each other. The shared-materials rule is lifted straight from Week 2's tower challenge, and someone will notice.
Standard rhythm. Greet by name. Thinking Puzzle up by the cubbies.
Standard rhythm.
Talking points, not a script. Hit these in your own words - the studio can tell the difference, and the ones that land are the ones you actually mean.
The opener (3 min):
"Yesterday I said this only works if everyone hits their bit. Today we're going to build something where that's literally true, and where you can watch it fail in about four seconds."
The core (12 min):
Introduce the chain reaction: a machine made of sections, one per team, where each team's section has to hand off to the next team's. A marble, a domino, a rolling can - something has to leave your section and arrive in theirs.
Then the actual lesson, which is not about marbles:
Then reach back to Week 2 explicitly: "You have a tool for negotiating with people you disagree with. It's on that wall. I'd use it today."
The close (5 min):
"Nominations close at snack. Vote is tomorrow at Town Hall."
Standard rhythm.
Standard rhythm.
Standard rhythm.
Standard rhythm.
Genuinely hard, genuinely useful, and it gets tested this afternoon - teams swap instructions during the build and find out immediately whether they were clear. Writing with a real reader is the whole game.
Nominations close. Read every submitted song tonight - lyrics included - before tomorrow's vote.
Standard rhythm. Guide eats with the studio.
The song isn't chosen until tomorrow, which makes today look like a gap. It isn't - the route doesn't depend on the song. Walking it now buys the studio an extra rehearsal day it would otherwise never get, and the route is the thing W5D2's blocking rehearsal says the whole film breaks on. A studio that has walked it four times by Friday shoots better than one that meets it on the Tuesday.
1 - Song advocacy (15 min):
2 - Scout the route (20 min) - the real work of the day:
3 - First walk-through, no song (10 min):
Everyone spreads along the route in roughly the places they think they'll be. Walk it once, end to end, at half speed, in silence. It will be shapeless and that's fine - the point is that the whole studio has now physically been through it once.
4 - Close (5 min): one question - "Where is this going to go wrong?" Write the answers up. Every one of them is a thing Thursday and Friday get to fix.
Carry forward: the route map goes on the wall and gets marked up all week. Floor tape can wait until Week 5, but the map shouldn't.
The Portrait Wall and Chain Reaction are parked on the Week 4 overview as Backup Activities, written out in full. They are genuinely good and they're there when the studio needs a break from the same song - but they don't get to eat a Quest block that rehearsal needs.
Chain reaction materials go back to shared storage rather than to teams - it'll be rebuilt in some form later. Floor markings come up.
The callouts today are all at the joins: who went and talked to the neighboring team first, who fixed a join that wasn't their fault, who let go of a section design that didn't fit the machine.
One question: "Who did you have to work with today that you wouldn't have picked?"
Send-off by name.
Talking points for this week's email. Drop these into an AI assistant along with two or three live notes from your actual week - a name, a moment, something that surprised you - and it'll give you a draft in your own voice. The specifics are what make it land; the structure below is just the scaffolding.
The draft underneath is an example of the shape and the tone, not a template to send as-is. A parent who gets the same email as every other parent can tell.
Subject: Walking the route before we have a song
Hi families,
An odd-sounding afternoon: we walked the route for a music video we haven't chosen a song for yet. That's deliberate. The route doesn't depend on the song, and walking it now buys the studio an extra rehearsal day it would otherwise never get.
One learner walked the whole thing backwards at the speed a camera operator actually moves, while everyone else watched - because the route that works on paper and the route a human can walk backwards are two different routes. They marked every corner, every door that has to be open, and every place two people would collide. Then the whole studio walked it once in silence, which was shapeless and useful.
Earlier, everyone who nominated a song got sixty seconds to make a case for it - not "it's a good song," but why it's a good song for a studio in a corridor with one camera. The vote is tomorrow, and it's final once it's taken.
Worth knowing the shape of it: we film on Thursday of next week. Early on purpose - if something goes wrong we want a week to fix it, not a night.
- [your name]