From Finish to Start: Developing a TV Series

Author(s)

Sunny DavisFollow

Major

Film Media

Second Major

Writing and Rhetoric

Minor(s)

Anthropology; English

Advisor

Brown, Keith

Advisor Department

Film Media

Date

5-2019

Comments

The lookbook is a graphic document that describes the look and feel of the show through pictures and words.

Keywords

television; film; tv series; memory; family; loss

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Abstract

The film industry is notorious for being difficult to enter into, so as a writer and director entering the workforce, I want to have a screenplay that I can sell to a production company to give me an edge. Memory has always interested me, specifically, how our memory changes as we age. With each year, we lose the ability to retrieve and access memories. The word “transience” is used in psychology to describe this theory, and through further research, I was able to learn that most people cannot recall an event in their life before the age of seven. This is due to childhood amnesia and transience. Childhood amnesia is a phenomenon found in animals as well as humans, and that could possibly be caused by the precipitous growth of new cells in the hippocampus during infancy, known as neurogenesis. When brains are busy growing lots of new cells, they don’t store memories that would otherwise be long-term. While neurogenesis hinders memory in early life, transience, the decreasing ability to retrieve and access memories over time, comes with age.

As a writer, I am constantly coming up with new ideas for films. An idea that began as something small morphed into the television series I have written today with the help of my newfound knowledge of memory. The show deals with the impact of a traumatic event on a person, how they change from the event, and how their memory can change if the event is traumatic enough. Fresh out of foster care, Serafina struggles to remember the truth about her parents’ murder and fights her own inner demons while trying to build her future. Serafina’s transience is in part due to the trauma caused by witnessing her parents’ death. The more she learns about herself, the more she is able to remember until she can completely recall that night. Too bad her memory is not what she thought it would be.