Introduction
When I was about to end my sophomore year at Mountain View, I had to face a dilemma: picking classes for my junior year. It was pretty stressful, and while I was aware of Freestyle and it seemed interesting, I didn’t had the confidence or the motivation to even sign up for it. I actually can thank my dad for getting me into Freestyle and helping me officiate my major in film, and later screenwriting specifically. Why screenwriting? I consider myself quite a creative person. Creativity is what gets me to produce elaborate stories. In fact, along with creativity comes the other 21st Century Skills: visual literacy (create motivational films), technological literacy (world building that has many innovative fictional technologies), self direction (make plans to effectively achieve certain goals thought the week), high productivity (researching for films like documentaries), teaching and collaboration (experience with groups in small projects in film class), social and civic responsibility (my documentary film raising awareness of polio survivors), and risk taking (such as accepting my mistakes and trying to improve from them). Screenwriting helps me use these skills in countless ways as the screenwriting process takes a long time with edits (it is a written story that can be edited after all) and it helps the author express what they want to show to the public audience. For my Explorations project, I want to explain what makes up a screenplay, why we need screenwriters, and how screenwriting benefits others.
Process
As a final assignment, admittedly, I never felt very easy mentally. In short, I felt like this final unit plus my other final projects really are wearing out my mental health. But I push through, and this was fun. I loved the researching portion, that was easy. The rest, such as filming and the experimental song wasn’t so simple as I anticipated. Between them, filming wasn’t too bad, just the timing doing it was horrible. But it taught me to manage myself better so that I won’t stress too much. Same for my experimental song, though the drum portion was the only thing I really knew how to play.
Final production
(Due to unforeseen issues, I am unable to present just my video. I had to upload my entire Explorations slideshow, which is gladly as entertaining. There is also some small behind the scenes content in a second slideshow, so please enjoy. I apologize for the inconvenience.)
Explorations Reflection
Overall, I simply wanted to do a fast draw of screenwriting so that my Explorations film was quick in easy. Research was easy, the hard part was creating an outline for my research and editing it. I was inspired by Draw My Life videos to style my Explorations film to its current style. The reason for that is I needed to create a screenplay for my short film about screenwriting (funny isn’t it). I am happy to say I had a lot of fun with making this project.
Experimental Music
Experimental Music Reflection
I want to be honest, this was a nightmare. But mostly because of doing this last minute. But I did enjoy experimenting with different sounds, and I was soon inspired to create something gritty and dark, like Batman, or the original Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles in their comic book form (seriously, they killed the Shredder in the first issue, even Michelangelo was dark). I thought of the theme from the 2022 film, The Batman, with its single notes echoing. So I though of doing something similar to though, with some techno, trap, and hip hop remixes, a bit inspired from TMNT, Spider-Man, and, yes, the Lego Movie of all things.