Literary Analysis & Research Paper
In English, we first read Octavia Butler’s ‘The Parable of the Sower‘. Annotations and class discussions allowed us to dissect the book, with a driven focus on Butler’s world-building abilities and themes of social, political, economic, and environmental injustice. We also studied the context for the book, not only reading interviews with the author but studying Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic that explores the African-American experience in Sci-Fi.
We applied our observation of world-building and literary analysis skills to writing our own research papers, on topics that are “central conflicts” in real stories. We read examples such as Kids on the Night Shift, and All Words Matter, persuasive essays about modern and important topics. For my essay, I chose to write about the influx of Cryptocurrency Investors moving to Puerto Rico who take advantage of semi-recently implemented tax loopholes, and how this contributes to gentrification.
World-Building Presentation
Much of our time throughout this unit was dedicated to our world building presentations. In small groups, we spent almost 3 months create a world and characters from scratch, then writing a pitch, and finally, presenting our pitch to our classmates as if they were executives or producers–an opportunity for collaborative feedback.
My group and I chose to pitch a sci-fi movie with a coming-of-age theme. Because sci-fi, especially in the film industry, is a male-dominated genre, we wanted our movie to have an essential message about the value of female friendships, while still exploring the creative world-building you can explore with sci-fi.
Our inital brainstorm was inspired by what we wrote about in our research papers. We were told to include elements of our research papers in our sci-fi world–we included a connection to technology/taking advantage of technology in relation to my paper, government control of weapons through Kylie’s paper on gun control, and mental health, through Lemo’s paper on bias in psychiatric diagnosis tests. We researched the difference between micro and macro world building, wether to write a story from the ground up (ecosystem, environment, planets), or societies/culture/characters. We added all our research into a brainstorming document that later became our treatment for our film. See our treatment below!
Logline: When a small-town scientist accidentally uncovers the secret to time travel, she must use her newfound powers to uncover her boyfriend’s past before the government finds them outside of their correct timeline.
After finalizing our treatment, we created a slideshow and presented it to our class! For our visuals, decided to use AI art, especially considering how fitting it was to our sci-fi theme. We had a heavy emphasis placed on moodboards/visual elements of this presentation as we were pitching a movie. Click on the PDF file below to scroll through our final presentation!