The Making of a Murder Mystery and a New Works Festival

Filming an interview with Corpse Bride’s director, Dennis Cheeks.

Why this project?

Furman student and playwright Alysha Matthews channeled her experience with grief, acceptance, and healing into her play The Unfortunate Case of the Corpse Bride. Her play was performed for the first time at the New Works Festival put on by Furman’s Theatre Arts department.

Having heard about the casting difficulties for this show, I was interested in creating some sort of short-form documentary style story about the development process. When I first began to flesh out the idea, I was facing casting difficulties in a project of mine, so I attribute some of the inspiration to that struggle.

On the other hand, Alysha is a young, Black creative, like me, and it’s not often that our stories and journeys are told, so I wanted to do just that with this video.

What I learned

Being concise and working within time limits again was a bit of a challenge for me. The rough cut of my video was around 12 minutes, while the max duration for this assignment was only five.

Being concise in the script and cutting out redundancy during the edit were necessary in order to meet the time limit.

I experienced the same issue working on my podcast episode (the original cut was around 45 minutes), but this time with the video project, it was (emotionally) more difficult to cut out content.

Now What?

This is the final video project that I am completing before my time at Furman is up, and it really was a synthesis of all of the concepts and skills I have learned in Digital Storytelling.

Learning to make those challenging decisions about what should stay and what should go in the final cut is one of the many things that I have practiced and will bring to future projects.

Watch the video here