2/11/2022 Maddie Yang
Written by Maddie Yang
Michaela Hartigan, a mechanical engineering junior with a minor in critical film production, has a passion for cinema.
During the summer of 2020, Hartigan went home to Maryland and wanted to explore this passion outside of academics. She found her hobby in filmmaking, but because of the pandemic she was unable to work on producing films with other people so began to write scripts instead.
On a sub-Reddit, she discovered the Green Light podcast, where aspiring actors perform scripts submitted by amateur writers. Hartigan’s script was selected and performed on Episode 37 “Plagiarist of the Opera” released January 14, 2021, where she was also interviewed. Her story, “Brotherly Scholars” centers around four college students working on a project who begin to get desperate and look to plagiarize from a classmate. Hartigan took inspiration for her writing from comedy shows like “Arrested Development” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
Hartigan, who is from Maryland, chose Illinois to study mechanical engineering because she felt the campus had a collaborative community as well as a strong engineering program. She said one of her favorite things about UIUC is that “there is an air of helpfulness. Teachers want to help, TAs want to help, other students in class want to help. It’s a very helpful community.”
On campus, she is involved in ASME, Illini Film and Video Club, and Tae-Kwon Do. For ASME, Hartigan is the vice president of external affairs and is in charge of bringing in companies for different events that ASME hosts.
She is also on the executive board for Illini Film and Video, running their social media page. In this club students are able to learn more about film production as well as get feedback on their own creations. Members of the club are able to participate in all aspects of filmmaking. Hartigan wrote a short script for the club which was recently filmed. She is now in the process of editing it.
“I had set out on this project to just get some hands-on experience of actually shooting something, but it has still been very frustrating to be disappointed by my own work. As someone who has focused most of my life and learning around math and science and engineering (because it came easy to me and is a relatively objective field), putting myself out there creatively to be judged subjectively has been daunting. However, I am glad to have the experience, and will be writing more to refine the craft and feel more comfortable creating and presenting stories for visual media,” said Hartigan.
Hartigan hopes to someday combine her film passions and mechanical engineering degree to work in a film-adjacent industry.