Project Proposal

For my project, I am planning on writing a full length screenplay. I want my screenplay to be comedic because I really enjoyed the comedy unit in English and I’d like to continue to explore comedy during the innovator project. For my research paper, I want to further study the art of comedy and explore how society and culture impacts what we perceive as being funny. For the graphical element of my project, I want to create a graphic movie poster for my story idea.

This project is a challenge because it is entirely focused on writing for film rather than film production. We have only written one screenplay in class, so I don’t have as much prior experience with this project as I would if I were to make a film. It is also a challenge because it is lengthy and in class, we’ve only worked with short stories.

Project Productions

Read my research paper

Project Reflection

My idea for the Innovator Project was to write a feature length romantic comedy screenplay. I wanted to write a screenplay because I had thoroughly enjoyed writing the script for the narrative project and writing a dialogue scene as part of my application to USC. Additionally, I have found through my time at freestyle that I enjoy creating a story, implementing aspects of the hero’s journey, and defining genre much more than actual production. Because of this, I wanted to explore writing more and see what it would be like to put together a fully developed story and write it out from start to finish.

For the visual aspect of my project, I wanted to make a graphic movie poster for the story I was creating. I had been inspired by some very simple graphic posters I had seen online and generally, I love simple, sleek graphic design so I wanted to find a way to incorporate this into my work.

My research paper started out as a paper about the history of comedy and how it related to the times we live in. However, at some point it developed into a passionate piece about the humor gap, exploring why women have consistently been thought of as unfunny when compared to men. Altogether, my project consisted of a 91 page screenplay, a simple graphic poster, and a research paper about women and comedy.

My research paper was supposed to relate to the humor aspect of my project. I was studying the use of humor, what makes things funny, and the role of women in comedy. Although in the end, my paper wasn’t centered around the question “what makes jokes funny”, I did a lot of research on that question before changing my direction. What I found is that writing comedy is much more than just being a funny person.

When I say something funny in conversation, it almost always has to do with my tone of voice and the listener’s prior knowledge about me and our relationship with each other. Jokes that I make with friends usually involve bringing up a few funny prior experiences that we’ve had together and laughing at the memories of what happened, not actually anything funny that we just said. With writing comedy, it’s so much different. I found through my research that in order to make written comedy funny to everyone, it has to involve a large amount of wit and comedic devices, something that I was not at all familiar with in everyday life. We did study this a little bit during the comedy unit, but in order to make my screenplay funny, I had to think a lot about adding in the comedic devices.

I collaborated a lot with my family and friends to edit and revise my screenplay as I wrote. I had three table reads during the project where I would sit down with family and friends and we would read through my screenplay so that I could envision how it sounded and my family and friends could give me feedback. The feedback that they gave me was extremely helpful. When I got about 50 pages into my screenplay, I realized that I had to write faster and I couldn’t do table reads and revisions as often as I had in the first half of writing. The pace at which I was going wouldn’t allow me to finish on time and I wanted to have a completed story by the project’s due date. Because of this, the first half of my screenplay is much more polished, slightly more funny, and doesn’t contain confusing bits and plot holes. The collaboration was a very essential element to the success of my project because my family’s and friends’ advice brought out imperfections in my story that I never would have noticed otherwise.

One main thing that I would do over is the research paper. By writing my screenplay, I realized that I should have done my research paper on how state government and state elections work. Although I was extremely passionate about the topic that I chose, it would have been more helpful to my project to research state politics.

The main character in my screenplay is a candidate for governor of Illinois. As I started writing, a lot of questions came up about the politics of Illinois, how state elections work, how long state elections take, qualifications to be governor, etc. It ended up that I did a lot of research for my paper and also a lot of research about politics in order for my screenplay to be believable. If I had done my research on state politics instead of comedy, I would have had the prior knowledge needed to write my screenplay, spent less filling in plot holes, had more time to do table reads, and ultimately produced a more polished screenplay.

Although the research paper could have done more to prepare me for writing my screenplay, I did learn a lot through this project that I will use in the future.

A little more than half way through the project, I realized that I was falling behind and it would be very hard for me to finish my completed story by the due date. I spend too much time planning and researching the Illinois state government and I had written much less than I had hoped by the project’s midpoint. I felt very stressed and a little hopeless about completing my project. I had worked very hard up until that point and I couldn’t imagine being able to write the number of pages that I had to write in the amount of time I had left. However, at a point, I realized that I just had to finish the story, not just to make my deadline, but also for myself. I didn’t want to end my senior year feeling incomplete and I didn’t want to let myself down by having a half-finished story. So, I got to work with no other option but to finish. I averaged about 6 pages a day (which felt like a lot to me with other homework and sports) and I miraculously got it done! This was a learning experience because even though I’ve heard the saying that you can “get anything done if you put your mind to it”, I didn’t really believe it until now where I felt like I’ve completed the impossible. There will definitely be other times in life that are similar to this where I have to complete an impossible-seeming amount of work, but now I know that if I fully commit, I can do it.

I think I improved most on collaboration during this project. Although I know collaboration is important in essentially all creative activities, it wasn’t until now that I really started to understand the importance of having other people’s input. Before, my creative projects have always been good enough to succeed without that much help from other people. However, collaboration was extremely important to the success of this project. I was focusing mainly on moving the story along and making it funny. My collaborators and table-readers were the ones who caught plot holes and made it more believable. They also helped me with some of the humor.

Overall, I think this project was great because I was able to pursue writing and creating a developed story from start to finish. It was really fun for me to brainstorm and develop the ideas that would make up my story. I also learned a lot about collaboration from this project because I was able to improve myself much more than I’ve ever been able to before. One major challenge was that I found out how hard it is to write comedy. Trying to be funny really slowed down my progress, but I have a much greater appreciation for comedy writers.