Hello, my name is Gigi Butkewitsch and I am doing the Breckenridge Fellowship this summer! I am an upcoming senior here at Pitt! I am a double degree student earning a Business Degree in Marketing and an English Literature degree.

My degrees converge in a great passion for film and filmmaking, a hobby I picked up in college. My fellowship project takes a creative route in the form of a short narrative film that I have written, am producing, directing, and starring in. It is a coming-of-age romance ghost story about a young musician who falls in love with a ghost, and through that experience, realizes some truths about performing and following your dreams.

I was really inspired to create my own ghost stories, specifically ones that focused on female characters after taking classes with Dr. Brenda Whitney, who, in addition to being a wonderful professor, has continued to mentor me throughout this fellowship. My project may not seem closely tied to research, purely based on its creative nature but after being a TA and doing research to teach a class about female monsters for Dr. Whitney, I learned how to interlace research from literary texts into another larger story.

In the case of my film, I am using four specific classic operas and looking closely at their plot lines, female characters, romantic trajectories between characters, and parallels between the concept of life and the concept of death, as they can be seen in a libretto, on stage, and in the singing of the opera itself.

Throughout this process, Dr. Whitney has been kind enough to serve as my go-to second opinion on my creative ideas. She has helped me discuss and work through how each scene can play off the ideas from the original opera, and serve to create something new, as well as assisting me to detail any discrepancies in the script and my efforts to tell a large story in the most concise way possible.

After shooting a few scenes this past week, I feel very confident that this project is turning into something beautiful and important, not just for me but for everyone who has had a hand in it. In the near future, I am looking forward to continuing to shoot the movie and eventually sitting down and calmly going through all the footage to edit it into a concise story and be able to share that with my fellowship colleagues, and the cast and crew who worked so hard on it.

I am grateful for the independence this summer fellowship has allowed me as I am learning the ins and outs of the administrative side of filmmaking through tangible practice. I hope to take this experience forward to more professional creative writing and filmmaking projects I do in the future!