Freestyle Academy proudly presents
2016 Innovator Project by JessicaM

The purpose of the Senior Innovator Project is use your own passion to innovate, create, and develop your own project.

Project Proposal

To create a half hour time slot in an SNL format; to create a TV show pilot with an arranged series of comedy sketches with a central host to the show. Willem Geier, David Niehaus and I are making a TV show episode from scratch.

Project Productions

Read my research paper

Project Reflection

Choosing my project was not difficult at all. I knew i wanted to do some type of comedy film but was not sure what exactly. I began to talk to Willem and we decided we would work together to make a SNL type comedy sketch show. I knew it was really difficult to be funny so i wanted to challenge myself and try to do that. I also am really interested in sketch comedy and sketch comedy writing so i wanted to work on that skill. I watched a lot of Inside Amy Schumer and Key and Peel to get inspiration and help me understand how to write and film sketch comedy.

I learned so much from my research. I researched how Saturday Night Live effected American television. One of the main things that I learned is how Saturday Night Live has a big effect on political polls. If a politician goes on a lot of people see it and if they make fun of the person it can be a good thing or a bad thing. It can show that they can take a joke and they can make fun of themselves of it make fun of them and just makes them look bad. For example, Sarah Palin: Tina fey did an amazing impression of her and some people think that the actual things that tina fey said sarah palin said. Tina Fey when she was acting as Sarah Palin said that she can see russia from her backyard and people actually that she said that.

I think in the beginning we knew that because we had three people it would be difficult to split everything up evenly and we were going to try to do everything together but that didn't really work out. In the beginning it seemed to work where we were brainstorming ideas to write and assigned the ones we were each going to write. It ended with willem and I writing all of the sketches and david not writing any of the one that we wanted to him to write. So for writing there was a struggle. For filming it was pretty even we all worked together to film the projects. For editing personally I like editing right after we film so it is fresh in our minds. But my group didn't agree so we just waited until after. Which is ok but now we are behind on all of the editing. I think overall it was kind of a struggle with the collaboration but we got most of it done by our deadline so i think it still worked.

If I had to do it over I would probably do something with a less people and with people who i know would do an even amount of work. I think this project was a good learning experience but I also thought it was a little too ambitious and would make a smaller project like do 5 sketches instead of like 9 or something. I think that we were very ambitious and not really realistic to write, cast, film and edit. I am proud of what we have done so far and i think we will have a good finished product but i still think having less to do would have been better.

I think I improved the most on risk taking. I think this project was one of the most ambitious projects I have done. I think that taking this risk was something that i was not super comfortable with but even though we did not completely finish it by our original deadline we were able to get a lot done. The thing that i improved the least in would probably be high productivity just because even though we worked really hard i think if we followed our plan better we would have completed more and we might have been able to finish the 30 min time slot. But I think we did good work.

I think I learned a lot about teamwork and collaborating. I also learned that it is very difficult to work with some people and communicating with others is a good thing to do. I think i innovated my own education this semester. I really wanted to learn more about sketch comedy and snl type shows so i think i did what i wanted. Overall i think i value this project. I really think the project is going well.