Introduction
In this unit, our class piloted the World Building Unit, where we were given the opportunity for total creative liberty in making a universe and story. This project involved writing a Narrative Treatment, completing a Research Project, and then doing a Pitch Presentation with our classmates acting as producers/executives looking to make our project a reality. This unit took us several months to complete and focused on our storytelling, collaboration, research, and presentation skills.
Narrative Treatment
The first part of this project was the Narrative Treatment. The treatment was supposed to replicate a real treatment as closely as possible. We included a logline, overview of our story, list of characters, and plot summary. This is where we did the majority of the leg work for the project: figuring out the world, characters, and plot. We bounced ideas off of other people in the class to refine our ideas, and we were given various things to think about.
My idea for this project was created back in August, when I first heard about this project. I had been spinning in on the backburner for a while, but I had a lot of fun when I actually got class time to work on it. It had been a while since I had allowed myself to get so fully involved in a project like this, especially a completely brand new one. I actually ended up over-creating (my brainstorming document had nearly 40 pages worth of content). When it came to creating the treatment, I had to decide what was crucial to the plot and what wasn’t. It felt nearly impossible for me to adequately explain my story in such a short space, but in the end, I think I made it work.
Research Essay
The research essay started close after we completed the narrative treatment. We were tasked with extending one of the themes in our story to a real world issue and developing an argumentative essay. One of the major themes of my world was accessibility and the use/development of runes in relation to it. There was a family near us with a daughter that had nonverbal autism and I remembered them talking to us about how there was this method of communication that their daughter was using and how there was some controversy about it. I reached out to them and began looking into it for my research.
This essay was one of the harder ones for me to complete because of the very niche nature of my topic. We had to use a certain amount of sources, but with the topic being so specialized, no major news sources were reporting on it and a lot of the academic sources that I could find were locked behind a paywall. Writing the essay also really opened my eyes to a lot of the challenges that families and the kids themselves were going through, especially in terms of being able to communicate. It was both inspiring and a little bit sad about what they constantly overcome.
Pitch Presentation
The pitch presentation was the final part of the world building unit. After the research essay, we were given the opportunity to edit our narrative treatment and world in relation to our topic and do any other adjustments that we felt were necessary. Then we created a slide deck, drew visuals for our world, and then pitched our story to the class.
This was one of the most stressful parts of the project for me, but also a lot of fun. I loved being able to draw the visuals, and I went for a fantasy science travel notebook vibe. The pitch was almost harder than the treatment, because I had to leave even more out, but thankfully a lot of my favorite things about the story were brought up in the Q&A Session.
Reflection
This was one of my favorite projects in Freestyle. I have always loved doing world building, and I even did it for my Explorations project. Having full creative liberty and being able to make it as large as I wanted was awesome. I am definitely continuing this project beyond this class, and maybe one day I will be able to see it become an actual TV show.