Campus Carry Film

Abstract

How can film be used to explore political polarization surrounding the issue of Campus Carry? I explored this polarization by fictionalizing a shooting on the Texas A&M campus committed by a schizophrenic student. The shooter has a mental illness to absolve him of blame for the incident. The audience will empathize with him and understand why he commits the shooting. This way he is not an antagonist. Instead he sets off a chain of events that uncovers the underlying polarization on our campus. The main point of the film is to depict how people on both sides of the issue react to Campus Carry laws both before and after the shooting. My goal was to cause viewers on both sides of Campus Carry to view this issue in a different light, and hopefully to understand why the other side believes what they believe. I also wrote this paper about the film following its completion. Here I discuss the writing process and the filmmaking process. It includes the pre-writing I did before the actual writing of the screenplay in the character list, plot synopsis, and scene-by-scene treatment sections. I also explain how I incorporated secondary research into the script in the annotated bibliography.