Creative Process

One integral part of the creative process that developed over the course of this project was iteration. This concept was introduced during the “Kill Your Darlings” portion of the Project Management Challenges (Bremenstuhl). The original plan for this capstone project was to write the pilot episode of Indexing, as well as three additional scenes from later in the season, and present all of them as a virtual reading available to watch online. However, as the timeline of the semester became more clear, the need to streamline the project emerged. The resulting end product was the written pilot, a short clip from one of the workshops, and the addition of a pitch for the show. This allowed the project to become much more focused and coherent in its goal. This new format had the added benefit of allowing for more time to develop a better script for the pilot.

The drafting process had its own iterations; many small moments were changed, added (including an entirely new ending), or removed. One change that I had considered over the course of almost the entire process was cutting the second scene of the episode, as suggested by a few of my editors for the sake of the script’s flow. It was an incredibly hard decision to make. The compromise that was made was to wait until the first workshop and see how it felt once everything was being read out loud. The group ended up loving the scene, and it stayed in the final script. Experimenting and taking risks throughout this process paid off, even if a few darlings had to be sacrificed along the way.

References

Bremenstuhl, Heather. Kill Your Darlings. Arts Research Practicum, 7 Feb. 2023, 

University of Maryland. Lecture.