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- All Subjects: creative writing
- All Subjects: art
- Creators: Department of English
- Creators: School of Life Sciences
The aim of this creative project was to explore the ideas of impermanence and transience through the lens of different, largely non-western cultural backgrounds, and to incorporate what I learned into my own work as a painter. As part of this, I focused on the materials, techniques, visual strategies, and philosophies that guided the creation of these works. The project consisted of a discrete research phase, during which time I gathered information and materials related to my topic, and a creation phase, when I focused largely on the production of oil paintings and ink paintings whose technique and/or subject matter pertained to impermanence. Research for the most part was conducted by utilizing online and physical collections of work to analyze the formal elements of the work along with the cultural context in which it was created. Ultimately the creative project resulted in a product of three oil paintings and five ink paintings.
This thesis includes three separate documents: a) a comprehensive document detailing the methods and analysis of the creative factors tied to series success, b) an hour long pilot script based on this data, and c) an industry-standard pitch deck for a TV show created with data insights. In a larger sense, the aim of this study is to take the first steps in remedying information asymmetry between streaming services and content creators. If streaming services were more transparent with their data and communicated to their creators what has been proven to work in the past, showrunners and staff writers could have a new tool to increase the competitiveness of their series and aid in show renewal each year.
In “Playing the Changes,” we meet two men stranded in a small desert town in 1972, a time when their attraction to each other is still dangerous. Nile Walker is a jazz musician, running from a spurned lover and the law. Benji Garza is a once-devout Catholic, fixing cars and caring for his orphaned nephew, Hector. Walker and Garza’s affair will spin both lives and their heredity into sweeping tragedies that characters battle with lust and melody. Walker has a son he never meets, a drifter who finds connection with another lost soul at an airport in “La Petite Mort.” Hector is forced into early adulthood in “The Words,” when his ailing uncle’s health fails due to a mysterious disease not yet called AIDS. Later Tre—a young man struggling with the weight of his own lineage—meets him in “PHX.” These stories examine questions of death’s causes and its myriad effects, and offer this solution: Knowing that we cannot know everything, and living, loving, and singing anyway.