General Instructions:
Your final exam consists of a 5-page paper and a blog post. Please send your final paper to me at [email protected] as an email attachment. In order to receive credit, you must send your paper by email and make the blog post on or before July 7, 2010 (before midnight). You are most welcome to submit either part of the assignment early. I will send a confirmation email when I receive your paper. If you don’t receive a confirmation email from me within 24 hours of sending your paper, please follow up with me.
Instructions for Paper:
Imagine you are writing a screenplay (script) for a movie portraying turning points in American history between 1865 and 1945. Write a (roughly) 5-page paper pitching the movie to a studio. I recommend formatting this as a letter or memo with the movie studio as your main audience. You have the freedom to choose particular themes and events during this period that you argue are most important.
Your screenplay proposal should include (but is not limited to) the following:
1) A plot summary, including a description of the events you plan to portray in the movie. You may wish to give a particularly detailed description of one or more scenes if they are critical to the plot development.
2) At least one mention of the main points about history that you wish to communicate to your audience.
3) Names, locations, and relevant dates of people, places, and events that are important to the development of the movie.
4) The locations that will be featured and the type of sets you will use to create the settings for major scenes.
5) A description of actors you will choose to portray the main players (either specific names of current day actors or descriptions of what you would include in a casting call)
6) A description of the primary source evidence you will use to ensure historical accuracy in your movie (this may either be a general description of the sources, or references to particular sources, such as those from Foner’s Voices of Freedom).
7) A description of the music, sound, or video special effects you plan to feature in the film.
Your operating budget for the movie is $100 million dollars, so you have a large amount of room to pay for travel, set-design, acting, music rights, etc.
A strong paper will be well organized, well written, and most importantly demonstrate the ability to argue for the importance of particular historical turning points between 1865 and 1945. It should demonstrate an understand of important themes in American history during the period. While I encourage you to write a creative, clearly-argued proposal, it is the quality of your historical argument that I will factor most while grading.
Instructions for Blog Post:
Write a post that includes at least one image or video/song that you envision appearing in the movie you have imagined in the screenplay proposal. Include a few sentences explaining what part of your movie this music or image would occupy and the message you wish to communicate to the audience.
