Introduction
My name is Max and I probably go to film school. While on a hiatus, I decided to reconnect with one of the people I used to know in high school, Connor Pilot. I'd always go watch him play with the band he'd fire every night before rehiring them the next day because he wanted to play again. I've seen him play everywhere, ranging from a small community center to a slightly larger community center. Watching him grow as an artist and seeing his confidence increase is why I've chosen to document his life. Connor Pilot is, in my professional opinion, the most influential artist of our generation. Although he hasn't influenced anyone, his unique views and his affinity for playing the guitar are matched by almost no one in his general vicinity.
Early Life
I spoke to him about his early life and the tough time that he had growing up. I truly believe that his resilience is inspiring and his music reflects the hardship he has endured. He also talks about his strained relationship with his family and how it has shaped who he is today. He also talks about mentors and friends who have helped him along the way.
In the studio
I was given the opportunity to observe and speak with Connor as he took me through his routine in the studio. I got to see the true genius in his work and the amount of mastery he has over the studio. I have never seen a more efficient or creative recording artist at work.
Goals
Every artist has goals, so I sat down with Connor to discuss his outlook on the future. His optimism is electrifying and his knowledge of trends in his industry is vast. He discusses how his work compares to others. I personally assure you that the world will wake up to his genius, so I've already gone ahead and created the cover for the Rolling Stone magazine issue that he will grace.
Innovator

The purpose of the innovator project was to do exactly as the name suggests: innovate. Our task was to choose a field the interested us and to create our own project using the freestyle guidelines. As you can see on this website, Max and I created a mocumentary based around a character that we created.

The innovator project was great fun we had an amazing time exploring and writing comedy wth Mr. Greco, filming the sequences, and editing the clips. The primary purpose of our project was to explore the stereotype of the typical rockstar and to take someone who wouldn't be so out of place back in the 1980s and put him in 2016. We can't ensure that everyone will find any of this funny, but we are very proud of our work. We also learned a lot about comedic devices from Mr. Greco and applied them to our script. Neither of us are very skilled at video production, but that worked out in our favor given that we wanted to paint Max's character as inexperienced. Attached below, you can find the pdf copies of our research papers. Karna chose to write his about the falsehood of the rock and roll stereotype and max chose to write his about... Thank you for exploring our fake website about a documentary that doesn't exist about a character that isn't real! Maxie and I chose the idea for this project because I have always been incredibly interested in comedy as a genre and I’ve always been fascinated by rock and roll. What saddens me is that after Spinal Tap was released, nobody tried making another “rockumentary” that combined both of these things. Max and I set out to fill this with our own take on the comedic side of rock and roll. Researching comedy and stereotypes in rock and roll were pivotal to our final product. Learning about comedy helped us structure jokes that would be funny to an audience and researching rock and roll gave us material to write comedy about. We took two things that usually wouldn’t be considered as complements and put them together. In my mind, at least, that is pretty innovative. The research added meaning because it gave us material on which to base Connor, the main character. Max and I collaborated brilliantly throughout the entire process. Neither of us had any issues communicating with the other about things that we wanted to change or modify. We perfectly build off of each other’s ideas and that’s why this innovator project is so special to us. Although Max isn’t as much of a rock and roller as I am, he still managed to come out of his comfort zone in order to make a great piece. That, to me, is what good collaboration is and if I was grading him, I’d really take that into consideration. We did get carried away at times, but I feel like it was just part of the creative process. Some of our best jokes came out of us just joking around and then writing down what we were talking about. If I could do the project over, I’d probably focus more on the quality of the cinematography. Max and I are both web students, so filming isn’t exactly our forte. As you can tell by the quality of the sound at times, there are better ways we could have filmed all of this. We probably should have asked Mr. T for a film camera and recording equipment, but we didn’t because we felt that the point of the mockumentary was the content and not the movie itself. This is why we spent the majority of our time writing jokes in Mr. Grecito’s room. In hindsight though, we probably could have sacrificed some of the time it took for us to explore comedy and write jokes in order to make it seem like we were better filmmakers. However, there are points where we want the film to seem like it was made by an amateur so there is potential to write that off as a stylistic approach to filming. Max and I improved on all of our 21st century skills, but the two we probably improved most on were teaming and collaboration and creativity. I say this because the level at which Max and I collaborated was incredibly impressive compared to other group projects I’ve been a part of and I learned how to feel comfortable with myself working in a group with someone I don’t want to offend because I’m friends with him. We were also pretty creative in our project and we felt that some of the jokes were incredibly funny. That being said however, I think that we could have worked more on becoming more technologically literate. As much as we did hard work on the script writing and learned a lot there, we could have learned more about film while we were at it. We really should have learned how to use film equipment and also film editing software. I’ll definitely use the teaming and collaboration skills I learned during this process in college and beyond. I learned to work with Max to have fun, but also be highly productive simultaneously. Although the world of finance is based on individual decisions, I’ll have to work with groups in college and be able to be a productive member in the workplace after college. Max and I innovated our own project by stepping out of our comfort zone and proposing to make a comedy film about rock and roll when neither of us had any experience writing comedy or making a film. Although not innovative in general, this is certainly innovative to us given that we did something we’ve never done before. I value this project very highly because it is an exploration of two of my most favorite things: comedy and rock and roll. Being able to combine these two things in any way that I saw fit was really amazing because it gave me new perspective into each. I believe that the reason I did so well on my research paper is because of the new outlooks I had on rock music in general and how the Spinal Tap view of rockstars was so brilliantly skewed.

Click here to read my research report!