Janelle Haegert
Peace Only (thesis)
Primary FTVM faculty advisor: Jim Burnstein
Janelle's script follows Kat Watson, a recent high school grad and soccer star, who follows her ornithologist father to the tiny west-African country of The Gambia for the summer before college. Kat surprises everyone, including herself, by falling in love with the place and its people. Her story explores themes of loss, culture, and what it means to be home.
Vincent Longo
Going Around the World with Orson Welles: A Multimedia Auteur (thesis)
Primary FTVM Faculty Advisor: Matthew Solomon
Vincent’s thesis stresses that Orson Welles’s oeuvre cannot be viewed in the single lens of his work as a film director, but rather that his work is dependent on the confluence of theatre, radio, and film. After conducting archival research at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, The New York Library for the Performing Arts, and The University of Michigan Special Collections Library, Vincent is exploring the aesthetic interaction of film and theatre in Welles’s Too Much Johnson, The Green Goddess, and Around the World, which utilized film sequences along with legitimate stage and vaudeville components. Vincent is also conducting one of the first in-depth analyses on Around the World and on its influence on Welles’s subsequent films: The Lady from Shanghai and Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report).
Michael Toner
Mise-en-scene in Three Dimensions: The Narrative Properties of Space in Video Games (thesis)
Primary FTVM Faculty Advisor: Sheila Murphy
Michael Toner’s Thesis explores the impact and use of space in video games as a narrative tool for conveying emotion, themes, and ideas. Through a close-working case study of Red Dead Redemption (2008), the paper explores how video game developers are already using the construction of space to tell a story, breaks down different techniques and common industry occurrences, and applies a modified theory of mise-en-scene to an emerging narrative form.
