Promoting Student Involvement & Creativity

One of my biggest challenges in the classroom is to find innovative ways to keep my students' interest and help them develop fluency.  TPRS has been one of my favorite tools to accomplish that, but sometimes it is difficult to engage students in the creation of stories. 
During my commute home last night, I heard on the radio about the "scandal" caused by a video from a security camera inside of a hotel's elevator in NY, where Beyonce's husband was "attacked" by his sister-in-law.  It is a three minute video that you can watch here.  Since it is a video from a security camera, there is no audio and now the media is going crazy speculating reasons why this happened.  So, I decided to do the same in class... let's speculate and figure out what happened!

1) I printed out pictures of the three famous characters, placed them in plastic sheet protectors and tied yarn to them, so that student-actors could "wear them".

2) In Spanish, through Comprehensible Input I told students that we were going to be "investigators" and find out the reasons why this woman was so mad at her brother-in-law, and why Beyonce didn't do a thing to defend him.
3) We watched and described the video in Spanish, Movie-Talk style. 
4) We selected student-actors to recreate the scene, (including the bodyguard) and we added dialogues.  It was a blast!
5) After the story was finished, they did a timed-writing, and also retold the story orally using their own drawings.

I adjusted the same plan for all my levels, with Spanish I being simpler, and my Spanish 4/5 more complex.  With the higher level we talked about what they "had done" and ended up with something like:  They had danced a lot, had sung a lot, and had drunk a lot of milk.  All of them, except for Solange (Beyonce's sister) had eaten something, but she hadn't... that is why she was in a very bad mood, OBVIOUSLY! :)  In the elevator, she told Jay Z that his music was very bad, and he responded that he had hit her puppy.  Then she tried to hit him, while the bodyguard tried to stop her and JZ yelled "protect me!".  Students decided that Beyonce was sleeping in the elevator, and didn't notice a thing. 
I over-heard students as they walked out, saying that this had been the "must fun story this year!".  What made it so fun?  We do these kind of stories all the time!  It must be the so called "connection to the real-world"... they can discuss something that actually happened.