Sophomore

Short Film Script Capstone Project 

I am writing a thirty to fifty page short film script entitled Sophomore that tells the story of a young woman coming to terms with her bipolar disorder (BD) diagnosis as she enters her second year of college. Traditional media representations of bipolar disorder characterize those with it as violent and crazy. My script will hopefully attempt to subvert those stereotypes by including BD within the context of a dark comedy/coming-of-age story and representing the disorder more accurately. I will also update the tropes of a coming-of-age movie to represent college students, as they are not usually represented in this genre. This script’s intended audience is college students and those who know college students, as they will be able to relate to the mental health struggles portrayed in the script. The script will be backed by copious amounts of research on bipolar disorder as well as scriptwriting (which I am taking a class on). The coming-of-age tropes in the film will also be inspired by films that I watch and read the scripts of to research the genre. My hope is that this film script will develop a more accurate and positive representation of bipolar disorder in film without resorting to harmful stereotypes. I also hope this film will extend the coming-of-age genre beyond high school, and use that genre’s tropes to display the maturation into newfound adulthood that occurs in college.