Freestyle Academy proudly presents
2016 Innovator Project by WillemG

The purpose of the Senior Innovator Project is use your own passion to innovate, create, and develop your own project.

Project Proposal

To create a half hour time slot in an SNL format; to create a TV show pilot with an arranged series of comedy sketches with a central host to the show. Jessica Makower, David Niehaus and I are making a TV show episode from scratch.

Project Productions

Read my research paper

Project Reflection

When Mr. Taylor explained that the innovator project would be a goal that we would make for ourselves, I first thought of combing all that I have learned about narrative filmmaking, documentary work, and visual and dialogue storytelling. Because of the passion for movie making that Freestyle has helped me foster, I knew that I wanted to have my final project be a film. I started out with many ideas, such as filming Mr. Taylor’s personal screenplay, writing a screenplay, making a mockumentary, a TV pilot, and doing a simple short film. I really wanted my last project at Freestyle to be something ambitious and a film. The other thing that I strived for was to collaborate with my friends on the project. The ideas that stuck out the most were filming Mr. T’s narrative and producing a half hour TV show. I talked about it a lot with Savannah Carroll-Munoz, Katie Dillon, Eric Dyer, David Niehaus, and Jess Makower. Eric and Katie wanted to write screenplays while Savannah wanted to do her own project. David and Jess were willing to do a TV show and we all wanted to collaborate so we went with that idea. When picking the kind of TV show that we all wanted to we thought of many different sketches combined together to get a combined thirty minute TV show.

My research did not really apply too much to the innovator group project. The paper related to the short films in that it was about film, but it was more specifically about politics in children’s movies. However, when I did write the paper, I learned a lot about the agendas that movies can very sneakily incorporate. It did lend some insight to how influential film can be when not only setting the agenda, but also pushing ideas and challenging certain dogmas. This gave extra gravity to our project, which lead us to make some social and political commentary in our skits.

Our group was built on collaboration. From the very beginning the three of us made it a goal to work together to produce something great. Especially when producing 30 minutes of material in one semester, we needed to be a well oiled machine. Teamwork was critical and we even collaborated with other groups, specifically the chindogu group which was producing an infomercial. We wanted to feature their product in a commercial for our project. We fairly successfully collaborated when planning, filming, and editing. It was not the best collaboration, but that was predictable considering our schedules did not line up perfectly, we are busy seniors in high school. The group did start to get heated between David and Jess but that was more or less drama between the two of them so I tried to stay out of it and not rock an already unstable boat.

Looking back at it all, I would have rather done a feature length mockumentary expanding on the one that I created for the SNL TV show. I just am really amused by the idea of making fun of seniors who have not taken health class yet. Jess also said that is what she would have rather done instead as well.

I improved the most on civic and social responsibility because of the social commentary we tried to create through satire. Risk taking would probably contend for the category too since a full half hour of content is incredibly ambitious. However, I probably lacked in growth of self direction because I have for the past two projects worked alone, and this project diffused the responsibility between the three of us.

I would love to do more politically driven sketches and mockumentaries mostly because they can be extremely entertaining to produce.

I innovated my education by more or less creating a project that really illustrated the kind of brevity of work that goes into producing a full half hour of content.

I value this project a little less than my profile documentary and narrative, however that is mostly due to the fact that I worked on those other projects alone so they meant a lot more to me. This project still means so much to me, but that meaning is diffused between the three of us. It is among my top three favorite projects at Freestyle.