Four years from now, I can’t help but wonder, besides a diploma, what evidence will there be that I ever came to USF St. Petersburg? If anything were to happen to me, would it have any impact? Probably not, and that’s chill because I haven’t done much of anything worth remembering. That is something I would like to change.
I’ve been trying to figure out something I could leave behind here that people would remember, and I decided that thing would be a story.
Before I picked journalism as my major, I wanted to become a screenwriter. When I was 15 years old, I started writing a different script each week in hopes of getting a movie made and becoming the youngest person to ever win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Those scripts were awful. Despite being a terrible writer, I still wanted to tell stories, so I fell back on journalism. With this major, I could still tell stories; they would just have to be true. Even with the new goal, I never lost that desire to tell a good original story.
There’s been a story that I’ve been trying to tell for two years now. It has been through a number of changes, but the concept has remained the same. A guy writes a paper for someone in exchange for money, he starts to do it more and more for different people and it all snowballs from there.
I tried making it into a web series two years ago, I was way in over my head, and I never finished shooting the first episode. I apologize to my friends for wasting their Saturday morning. A semester later, I attempted to make it into a short story for a class. Since it was on paper, and I didn’t have to shoot it, I let my imagination get the better of me and placed my characters in unrealistic situations.
I’m going to try it again, this time as a short film. I’ve been making different videos since my freshman year, and I think I’ve learned a lot through each at least enough to properly tell this story. The biggest hurdle would be, can I actually shoot everything I have in mind? I think so.
Of course the whole thing wouldn’t be about my fictional story, it would also reflect my four years here. I have plenty of source material to incorporate, experiences with friends, professors, school policies and a number of inside jokes. It wouldn’t just be my story, but ours.
Matt Thomas is a senior majoring in mass communications and entertainment critic. He can be reached at matthew17@mail.usf.edu or on Twitter @handomestmatt.
