For my fully realized project, I decided to develop my third experiment, the script excerpt. I had never written a script before, so it was an interesting and unique challenge for me. I really enjoyed the creative freedom I had, but I also struggled with a lack of familiarity with the genre. I don’t think of myself as a particularly creative person, at least not in the visual arts sense of the term. But writing this script challenged me to think creatively in a different way. I had to think about the message I wanted to get across and how I wanted potential viewers to feel, and then I had to think of the ways I wanted to accomplish those goals. My goal in making this changed a few times, but my final project would be a short TV show, about 15 minutes in length following the loose rule that one page of a script equates to one minute of runtime. While this wasn’t filmed, I’d like to hope that if a script like this was turned into a disseminable video, it might be impactful.

There are a few things that I think are important to note before reading the script. Most importantly, the script says that California has abolished mandatory minimums for drug offenses. That is an oversimplification, although California has ended mandatory minimums for certain nonviolent drug offenses, but it was a necessary oversimplification for the concept to work. However, there are federal mandatory minimums for drug-related offenses, meaning despite state laws, everywhere in the United States is still subject to drug-related mandatory minimums at a certain level. Additionally, to explain the concept for the TV show (since my project is a written script and not a video) there are two parallel, nearly identical, scenarios going on in the show, switching off. The audience would not sit through any of the scenes twice.