The coronavirus has finally mutated and has started turning Piedmont residents into zombies roaming the streets. Flesh eaters are around each corner and down each alley. The apocalypse has arrived. This is the plot of junior Liam Gordon’s group film in the advanced acting class.
This year, the acting class has had to experiment with previously untapped potentials for learning by dividing the class into four large projects, said junior and advanced acting student Molly McWeeny.
“We meet up in the main room with [acting teacher Kim Taylor], and [then we go] into our breakout rooms,” McWeeny said. “You can do whatever you want for the rest of the period so long as it’s working in our group somehow.”
McWeeny said that her group has gotten the chance to work with the Piedmont Recreation Department (PRD) to help create a Halloween scavenger hunt for the PRD kids to enjoy during a socially distanced night of what would normally be trick-or-treating.
In addition to McWeeny’s group working on the halloween project and Gordon’s apocalypse project, junior Nathan Sturdivant and senior Payton Morell are working on an SNL-style weekly newscast and a radio show featuring various seniors, Gordon said. 
Gordon said, this year has allowed for each group to have a more personalized take on their projects in which they get to find their own ideas, produce their scripts and scenes, record their scenes, and eventually present to a platform.
“We filmed [the apocalypse movie], wore masks, were six feet apart, and now we’re editing,” Gordon said.
While no in-person acting and viewing will be occurring at the same time, they will be posting their projects to YouTube or the class will have a viewing night to watch everything that the class has made thus far, Gordon said.
“I think [this year is] just more of a different kind of acting, because you’re still trying to call someone’s attention, you’re still portraying that same emotion and same character as you would normally,” junior Holden Temple said. “It’s just the way you’re doing it that changes.”
Temple also said that during the start of the semester the class was focused on a more academic style learning plan in which, during their first project, they researched what people in the music and film industry are doing during the coronavirus, how lockdown has affected them, and how it has affected different areas of media in general.
In a regular year, however, students would focus mainly on plays, and they would each have a personal project on the side which they would produce with other students and eventually would present to the class or school come the end of the semester or year, Temple said.
Still, the acting class might do a Shakespeare play later in the year, Gordon said.
“It’s tricky to get rights [to perform certain plays], and now with COVID, it’s even harder to get [these] rights. [Meanwhile], Shakespeare plays are out for the public,” Gordon said. “So that’s why we are probably going to do a Shakespearean play.”
Actors will either do a ‘shoot and stream’ play, meaning they will film their plays in person with the potential to edit sections out and post to a platform, like YouTube, for people to watch later, or record the play and livestream it, Gordon said.
But for now, Gordon said, the class is focusing on their individual projects.
