Screenwriting Commons^™

Deepfake It Til You Make It: How To Make A Short Film, Adam G. Lee

ELAIA

A recent development in the realm of computer technology is the deepfake. Deepfakes, which train a computer model to digitally superimpose one person’s face onto another body in a separate video, has its uses for good and for ill, with the unfortunate tendency to the latter. The vast majority of deepfakes are used for pornography, most commonly depicting female celebrities as the subjects. At the less notable level, it is also often used for revenge pornography. These aspects of deepfake technology are rarely discussed in mainstream media, which tends to focus on the less harmful uses, such as those for …

The Art Of Animation: How Animation Is Creating A Better Film Industry, Judah Cooper

Senior Honors Theses

With the progression of streaming services in recent years, the art form of animation has gained traction, continuing to develop into exceedingly creative forms through the work of talented artists. Animation has developed alongside the film industry, achieving great success in the process. This thesis will define animation and its place within visual effects, critically analyze categories of character design, theme, and story while demonstrating their relationship with animation, and contrast animation with live action films to understand its strengths and differentiations. The research concludes that animation has great benefits to offer the film industry and should be continued to …

How Do Stories Affect Careers?, Victoria Read

Honors Projects

Determining viable professional careers is one of the most important parts of going to college. Artistic careers, including those in film, are both competitive and dependent on the responses of critics and audiences. People in film careers take different paths; one of them is writing screenplays. Researching screenwriting and the careers of two professional women screenwriters, Diablo Cody and Nancy Meyers, I sought to answer three central questions: how does writing create career paths, what are those careers, and what is it like writing a story?

Through the research on screenwriting, I became familiar with story structures such Joseph Campbell’s …

"Real Women Have Bodies": A Study In Adaptation, Madison Ephlin

Honors Projects

The art of adaptation is a difficult process, and is often hard to please general audiences that have a connection to the source material. As a student who studies both English Literature and Film Production, the question asked through this study is what does it take to write a “successful” adaptation? What qualifies as “successful”? How does an adaptation balance the themes, characterization, and plot of a piece of literature with the continuous momentum and visual complexity that the medium of film requires, all in 120 pages or less? This study engages with these questions by actively practicing adaptation, adapting …

Excuse Me, Everybody, Noah G. Battaglia

CMC Senior Theses

For my senior thesis I planned to write, produce, and direct a short-form, narrative film, entitled Excuse Me, Everybody. The original plot of the film is about a 19-year-old college student named Jacob who feels that his life is turned upside down after taking lewd photos of a fellow female student. While meeting with his psychotherapist, he refuses to reveal to him the true nature of his distress. He ultimately comes to terms with his crime by experiencing a hallucination where an imaginary being named Ego appears to him and forces Jacob to recollect the past events and explain …

With The Screenwriter's Pen: An Analysis Of The Representation Of Gifted Children In The Family Film, Sarah Williams

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Family films are something that have been enjoyed for many decades. They often create a fantastic world that will enchant audiences and eventually become beloved stories. A big aspect often seen in these films is a protagonist that possesses some kind of gift. Where does this gift come from? How does it grow? Most importantly, how do the screenwriters who are responsible for bringing these gifted heroes to life go about it?

Using the screenplays of Kubo and the Two Strings, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Encanto, and Coraline, I take a deep dive into the portrayal of …

The Yellow Qipao, Feibi Wang

Honors Projects

This is a creative project centered around the pre-production of a short film about queer Asian American Christianity and the research that went into it. The synopsis of the script written for the short film is a life in the day of Aspen. Aspen prepares for church and is indecisive of the clothes they want to wear, because they are gender non-conforming. They come out to their mom and there is conflict. My research going into this project consists of researching media representation of queerness, Asian American identity, and Christianity, and how the three identities intersect in Aspen’s life and …

Slacking, Dazed And Rocking: A Study Of Richard Linklater, Parker D. Otto

Honors Capstones

The purpose of this capstone is to examine a filmmaker’s work to better understand the artist as well as look at an underappreciated filmmaker. Richard Linklater is that filmmaker. Several of his films are popular, others less so. By exploring his filmography, it can be determined whether he’s a true artist deserving of more attention from the filmmaking community as well as general audiences. After examining Linklater’s films, not only were there recurring thematic elements that cemented his artistic dominance, but there’s a feeling of evolution as he ages. The research of this project was conducted through watching Linklater’s films …

Deepfake It Til You Make It: How Not To Make A Short Film, Adam Lee

Scholar Week 2016 - present

A very recent development in the realm of computer technology is the deepfake. Deepfakes, which train a computer model to digitally superimpose one person’s face onto another body in a separate video, has its uses for good and for ill, with the unfortunate tendency to the latter. The vast majority of deepfakes are used for pornography, most commonly depicting the subjects of female celebrities. At the less notable level, it is often used for revenge pornography. These aspects of deepfake technology are rarely discussed in mainstream media, which tends to focus on the less harmful uses, such as those for …

The Female Heroine Of Action Films: A History And Exploration Of The Genre And Application To The Short Film Lois, Daniel Brunner

Senior Honors Theses

The action genre is one of the oldest forms of filmmaking, beginning with some of the earliest short films with simple chases and heists. From then it has progressed into the genre we know today but still retains certain crucial aspects. One of sub-genres within these films can be seen in post-apocalyptic and dystopian films. All of these tend to follow the hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell. The representation of powerful female heroines within the action genre has increased since 1980s from its traditional male centric viewpoint. The screenplay for the short film Lois shows the convergence of …

Starless Nights, Deepak Rauniyar

Theses and Dissertations

A film about the filmmaking process and the life of a filmmaker. But it's also a story about immigration, home, and negotiation. We constantly negotiate in our lives to maintain our relationships, opportunities, and dreams.

This Must Be The Place: A Short Film, Reagan Shull

Honors Projects

This Must Be The Place is a short film categorized as a Coming of Age Mystery with strong narrative ties to Magical Realism set in the heart of small town America. The key thematic ideas are identity, female relationships, isolation, friendship, and loss. This story emphasizes each person’s struggle for identity, and the isolation that can be brought upon themselves when they do not know who they are. Further, the difficulties regarding the search for one’s dreams without a strong sense of identity are also discussed in this narrative. Ultimately, this story is about dealing with isolation as we grow …

A Vermont Romance Turns One Hundred: Vermont's Earliest Surviving Photoplay, Martin L. Johnson, Frederick Pond

University Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

In 2016, a hundred-year-old film spent the year touring the northern half of Vermont, drawing audiences to refurbished opera houses and picture palaces. But the picture being celebrated for its centenary year was not D. W. Griffith's Intolerance or Lois Weber's Shoes, two of the best-known films made in 1916. Instead, Vermonters were watching what they believed to be the first feature film made in their state, the fetchingly titled photoplay A Vermont Romance.

But A Vermont Romance is not a conventional feature picture. None of the people who appeared in the film had previous movie acting experience, …

Adapting To Adaptation: Turning Ya Literature Into Television, Adam Weinreb

English Honors Theses

I have always loved film and television, whether for casual consumption or academic pursuits. Throughout my time as an English and American Studies double major (and almost a Media and Film Studies minor), I have opted to study film and TV at every chance I could. In my junior year I began writing my own film, and I completed that film in the first half of senior year. When entering my final year of the English major and faced with making a decision surrounding my capstone, I was simultaneously deciding whether or not to pursue graduate studies in screenwriting. As …

Super Heroes V Scorsese: A Marxist Reading Of Alienation And The Political Unconscious In Blockbuster Superhero Film, David Eltz

Kutztown University Masters Theses

As superhero blockbusters continue to dominate the theatrical landscape, critical detractors of the genre have grown in number and authority. The most influential among them, Martin Scorsese, has been quoted as referring to Marvel films as “theme parks” rather than “cinema” (his own term for auteur film). Despite this, these films often possess considerably challenging views in regards to social justice, and continue to interface with the pervading theme of alienation in increasingly abstract and progressive ways.

This thesis considers four films (1978’s Superman, 2000’s X-Men, 2013’s Captain America: Winter Soldier, and 2018’s Black Panther) from a Marxist perspective, viewing …

The Portrayal Of Roman Gladiators And Slavery In Film, Megan Gingerich

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis project will endeavor to examine how prominent historical films set in the Roman Empire deal with slavery and gladiators, said research to inform a corresponding creative project. In studying and analyzing Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960) and Gladiator (2000), the three most prominent films that deal with the topics of slavery and gladiators in ancient Rome, I hope to uncover how films treat the topic, how the films are influenced by more modern values, and how accurate the films are. I will also identify commonalities between all three films, and supplement my discoveries with observations from two less successful …

Bernadette: A Screenplay, Dain Bedford-Pugh

Master of Arts in Humanities | Master's Theses 1936 - 2022

'Bernadette: A Screenplay' is the first half of a feature-length comedy-drama road movie that centers on the relationship between Bernadette - an introverted IT professional in her late twenties - and her elderly father. When Bernadette makes a big change in her life by quitting the job that she has come to hate, she decides to take the trip of a lifetime by traveling across America. She also decides to take her father, who is on the verge of moving into a care home, with her. What follows is an exploration of their relationship, their facing up to long-hidden grief …

Transcendental Style In Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (2nd Edition), Michael Gibson

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Paul Schrader's Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, 2nd edition (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018).

Escaping Suburbia: A Study In Film Auteur Pertaining To Tim Burton And The Coen Brothers, Morgan Bedard

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project will focus on the concept of “Auteur Theory” which is a particular film theory branch that emphasizes the filmmaker as the “author” of their work. “Auteur” is a French word meaning “author” in the sense of a person holding complete creative control. Studying Auteur Theory allows for viewers to better understand the filmmaker as a person by connecting visual patterns to the auteurs’ own life. The “filmmaker” in Auteur Theory is defined as the director and they must exercise almost or complete control of all aspects of a film. Distinct visual characteristics as well as repeated casting of …

Level Best: An Original Screenplay, Katherine M. Repholz

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

For my Capstone, I wrote Level Best, an original screenplay. Level Best is about Tony, who finds out that his ex-girlfriend, Kayla, has cloned him, and that clone, dubbed 2.0, is an extremely famous musician. Tony, a failed musician himself, struggles to adjust to his new reality as Kayla realizes that 2.0 is perhaps not all she dreamed up. As Tony, Kayla, and 2.0 yearn for authenticity and meaning, they are forced to confront their personal demons causing the three of them to ponder, “what makes you you?”

Here To Win, Not Here To Settle, Sarah Kaino

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Ethnic representation goes beyond color blind casting, the diversity of actors, or non-stereotypical casting choices. It is not just a matter of minorities being included in mainstream storylines, but minorities being able to tell their own stories as well. The relevance and relatability of storytelling in film and theatre transcends culture, which is in part the beauty of these mediums. But the impact of Asian Americans seeing stories from their own culture cannot be exchanged for anything less because there is no substitute for visibility. Movies are the source of inspiration for many. Movies can also reinforce a transparent ceiling …

Schizophrenia In Film: The Missing Narrative, Art Thomas

Media and Communication Studies Summer Fellows

Film characters with schizophrenia are most often depicted as (1) violent and threatening or (2) extraordinary and talented. As a result of these cinematic representations, audiences have false assumptions about the reality of schizophrenia. Films give the impression that people with schizophrenia should be separated from society in some way by being placed in a mental institution or on a pedestal to show that even a sick brain can be marvelous.

I studied films that portray schizophrenic characters in order to identify a story that is not being told by Hollywood. By looking at the romantic, platonic, and familial relationships …

It's Me, Sarah, Fabiola Y. Andrade Chinchilla

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes the making of It’s Me, Sarah, a University of New Orleans thesis film. It explores the process of creating the film in three parts. Part one will examine the pre-production, including the writing and preparation for the shoot. Part two will detail the production, including the shooting affairs. Part three will cover the post-production process, which will include the editing. The document will then reference these three segments regarding the film’s theme and will conclude by evaluating whether the final film achieves its intended conception.

Past The Darkness, Kathleen M. Vieira

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper will discuss the making of my thesis film, Past the Darkness. I will describe the entire process including story conception, film production, and post-production stages. I will also evaluate the merits, flaws, and outcome of this project.

Dinesh Sabu Interview, Mitch Buangsuwon

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Dinesh Sabu made his first feature documentary Unbroken Glass with Kartemquin Film. It played at numerous film festivals and was broadcast on America ReFramed’s 5th Season in May 2017. Dinesh was awarded “Best Director” at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival in 2017 for his debut feature. Before Unbroken Glass, Dinesh shot parts of American Arab and The Homestretch with Kartemquin filmmakers. He also shot and is co-producing the forthcoming How to Build a School in Haiti with director Jack C. Newell. He is currently attending Stanford University’s Documentary Film and Video MFA program.

A Mellow Night For Memories, Angelo Ilya Raphael Chammah

Senior Projects Fall 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

The Revolution Of Plastic, Marine Brun-Franzetti

Theses and Dissertations

The Revolution Of Plastic is a fiction film about the overconsumption of plastic in our everyday lives. Leo, a ten year-old girl who loves dolphins, rebels against her father Mister Risso, the Manager of Detergents at Willy Supermarket.

Stray Cats, Christian P. Chesnut

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper details the making of Stray Cats, a University of New Orleans thesis film. It examines the process of creating the film in three parts. Part one will detail the pre-production, including the conceptualization, writing, and preparation for the project. Part two will cover the production, including the directing, production design, cinematography, and on-set operations. Part three will describe the post-production process, including the editing, color correction, sound design, and musical score. These three components will then be referenced in regards to the theme of the film, and will conclude by analyzing whether or not the final film …

The Effect Of Post-Production On Storytelling In Narrative And Documentary Filmmaking, Natalie Pace

Senior Honors Theses

Documentaries and narrative films both tell stories in different ways. A common saying states that narrative filmmakers write one movie, shoot another, and edit a third. In postproduction, timelines are rearranged, montages are created, new dialog and voiceovers are written, and the score can alter the mood and meaning entirely. Documentaries can change even more over the course of their creation. Usually, the script of the documentary is not written until the edit, after most of the interviews and B roll have been shot. This paper examines whether documentary post-production makes more or less use of storytelling techniques than does …

A Reason To Daydream, Corinne Schipull

Honors Theses

Sexism in American culture comes as no surprise. In 2017, the film industry saw an increasing number of powerful men within its ranks exposed and exiled for allegations of sexually predatory behavior. Many see this purging as a sign of changing times, but this view is optimistic: the tides of change ebb in and out, and this problem far exceeds the movie industry. Well before the onslaught of articles on the likes of Harvey Weinstein, my classmates and I resolved to craft our senior thesis film with a crew made up entirely of women: we simply saw the pool of …