Worldbuilding Project
A very recent Freestyle addition to the curriculum, the Worldbuilding projects lets you create and mold an entire universe, or find one between rocks and strange-made-up elements. It starts off with a RESEARCH ESSAY in the first semester, which leads to the WORLDBUILDING GROUP PROJECT in the second semester.
This Unit’s Library:
To introduce us to several different genres and worldbuilding techniques, we read Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”(a utopian short story), Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”(a magical realism short story), and Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (classic, an Afro-Futurist novel).
Research Essay
My research paper in English was an exploration of how the illusion of liberalism in affluent cities (which I define as the perception within a population that the majority of people are liberal/that the city is progressive/’not racist’) affects how women of color experience discrimination and isolation. I interviewed my friend Lara Fernando, Michelle Suarez Maeda, and my mother Ligia Verona Salcedo Gutierrez.
Click on the image to read the full paper below! (note: I did not make the art for this thumbnail)
Worldbuilding Group Project!
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I worked with RyeD and AditiB for this project. Through a series of brainstorms, questions list, short story analysis, and studying of various resources on how to construct plot, create characters, and, well, build a world, the goal of the project was to end up with a full Narrative Treatment (a full description of plot and characters, with a short “hook” (logline)), and to Pitch our story idea to our classmates at the end of the unit, as if they were studio executives or animators, or, in our case, publishers at a graphic novel studio. We even had to dress up in “business casual” attire to be more professional.
My group’s chosen media was a graphic novel series, so we included a lot of potential comic panels and other art that we drew that shows how this novel could potentially look like. While doing the project, my group explored a lot of different possible themes, plot, lore, but from the beginning we knew that we wanted to have the genre be fantasy, with magic elements. Then we created the main cast: Tala, Lazarus, Sol, and Wren, and through a week of long 3-hour meetings with each other we slowly turned out the plot. When we first turned in the Treatment, it was 16 pages long… and we were only allowed up to 6. But we edited it to 9 pages and Mr. Greco accepted it, so hooray!
Read our Narrative Treatment for the full story!
(note: I did not make the art for this thumbnail). For a more brief and dynamic experience, watch the Pitch Presentation below!
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Watch our amazing Pitch Presentation! (its so cool we actually worked really hard on it)
*insert video*