Practice and capstones

Each level ends in one artifact you could hand to a crew, and one honest one-line gate. The capstones are the reason the course is not a reading list. They are also, in order, the working documents of a documentary: an answer sheet, a timeline, a question bank, a treatment, and a memo.

Every capstone lives at the bottom of its level’s last lesson, with the full brief. This page collects them, so you can see the whole shape of the work before you start it, and come back to a rubric without rereading the lesson.

The two needles

The course points at one sentence throughout. It is quoted exactly wherever it appears, and it is never paraphrased.

“Corruption in the Philippines is not a Filipino personality trait; it is the surviving logic of an office that was designed, from 1594 onward, to be paid by the people it governed rather than by the state it served, and every subsequent regime, Spanish, American, republican, and dictatorial, rebuilt that office instead of abolishing it.”

The genealogy in one sentence, section 3 of the History research map.

Beside it, the line for the film. It is public domain, it is Filipino, and it is 136 years old, so it can be spoken on screen with no clearance.

“Indolence does actually and positively exist there; only that, instead of holding it to be the cause of the backwardness and the trouble, we regard it as the effect of the trouble and the backwardness.”

José Rizal, Sobre la indolencia de los filipinos, La Solidaridad, 1890. English text: The Indolence of the Filipino, Project Gutenberg #6885.

Every capstone below is, in one way or another, a test of whether you can defend one of those two sentences with something other than agreement.

The five at a glance

Level	Capstone	Gate
0 · Orientation	The sealed answer sheet	Say the nine eras from memory, and hand over a sealed answer sheet you would be embarrassed to publish today
1 · History	The corruption genealogy, as a sourced timeline	Walk the chain from 1594 to 2025 out loud, with a source for every link, and name the one link you cannot yet defend
2 · Culture and Systems	The interview question bank	Hand someone the bank and have them run six questions at you without you needing to explain a single term
3 · Cinema	The treatment beat	Pitch the cinema act in five minutes, from the treatment, without defending a single number you cannot source
4 · Hope and the Playbook	The serving thesis memo	Read the memo to someone who thinks the Philippine film industry is beyond help, and have them argue with the evidence instead of with you

Level 0 · The sealed answer sheet

In one line: your honest current answers to your own six questions, plus what you currently believe about Filipino work ethic, written before any evidence arrives and sealed until the last lesson of the course.

Started in 0.1 · Start where the shame is and finished in 0.3 · The whole board, where the nine eras and the prediction go in.

• Not yet: fewer than six answers, or answers written as what you think you ought to say.
• Passing: six honest paragraphs, including at least one you would not want published.
• Strong: the above, plus a named prediction. Which answer do you expect the evidence to overturn, and why that one.

The gate: say the nine eras from memory, and hand over a sealed answer sheet you would be embarrassed to publish today.

This is the only measurement in the course. It works if the file is honest and left alone, and it measures nothing at all if you go back and soften the first paragraph. Lesson 4.6 is where it gets opened.

Level 1 · The corruption genealogy, as a sourced timeline

In one line: one timeline document with eight entries, one per link in the chain from 1594 to now, each carrying a date, the mechanism in a sentence, the scholar who owns that link, a full citation, and a primary document that could appear on screen.

The full brief is at the bottom of 1.8 · Four days, and the same families.

• Not yet: the timeline is a list of events rather than a chain of causes, or any link is uncited.
• Passing: eight links, each with a date, an owner and a citation, and one disputed number correctly flagged, with both figures, both sources, and the on-screen handling rule written out.
• Strong: the above, plus the counter-argument carried on its own line, that kinship obligation is real and is a resource a rent-seeking structure exploits rather than a cause that generates it, plus at least three public domain primary documents identified with their Gutenberg or archive locations, ready to shoot.

The gate: walk the chain from 1594 to 2025 out loud, with a source for every link, and name the one link you cannot yet defend.

Level 2 · The interview question bank

In one line: eighteen on-camera questions, six each for a scholar, for a practitioner inside the system, and for an ordinary person the system acts on, every question naming the concept it tests and the source it came from.

The full brief is at the bottom of 2.7 · Can a country change?.

No question may contain the word “corrupt,” and no question may be answerable with yes or no.

• Not yet: fewer than eighteen questions, or questions that lead the witness, or any question that would make a subject feel accused.
• Passing: eighteen questions across the three types, each tagged with its concept and citation, each open-ended.
• Strong: the above, plus three questions written specifically to draw out a story rather than an opinion, and at least two designed to give the subject a fair chance to disagree with the course’s own thesis.

The gate: hand someone the bank and have them run six questions at you without you needing to explain a single term.

Level 3 · The treatment beat

In one line: three pages of the documentary’s cinema act, written as a treatment rather than a script, with a cold open, a spine, three sequences and their evidence, and the transition into the hope act.

The full brief is at the bottom of 3.7 · The industry you are walking into.

The spine has to be the archive. For each sequence, name the footage or the document that would actually be on screen, and say whether it is cleared, public domain, or a problem.

• Not yet: a summary of the level rather than a treatment, or any sequence whose visual evidence is unnamed.
• Passing: three pages, three sequences, each with named on-screen evidence and its rights status, plus a cold open that does not begin with narration.
• Strong: the above, plus one sequence built entirely from material the ABS-CBN November 2025 documentary did not use, and one disputed number staged on screen as a dispute rather than smoothed into a single figure.

The gate: pitch the cinema act in five minutes, from the treatment, without defending a single number you cannot source.

The Cinema source directory is the fastest way to check what is free, what is paid, and what is already broken.

Level 4 · The serving thesis memo

In one line: five pages, addressed to nobody and everybody, that a funder, a partner or a future team member could read cold without you in the room.

The full brief is at the bottom of 4.6 · Why you, and why this.

Seven required sections: the problem in one paragraph with its date of origin; the evidence that it is structural and not cultural; the three things the history says the industry needs; what Filmmakers Connect does about one of them and what CineLink does about another; the three strongest arguments against; the one measurable thing that would prove it is working within twenty-four months; and a source list where every claim traces.

• Not yet: the memo argues from passion, or any claim in it lacks a source, or the counter-arguments section is a formality.
• Passing: all seven sections present, every claim sourced, and at least three counter-arguments stated so well a critic would recognise their own position in them.
• Strong: the above, plus a single success metric that is falsifiable inside twenty-four months, plus one thing the memo commits to not doing, because the evidence says it does not work.

The gate: read the memo to somebody who thinks the Philippine film industry is beyond help, and have them argue with the evidence instead of with you.

Nothing in that rubric asks how you feel about the country. A memo can be strong and end in a decision not to do this.

Where the evidence is

Every capstone needs sources, and the source lists are faster to build from the Library than from the lessons. The six research documents there are the full base the course was distilled from, published as pages, with their disputed numbers and their open gaps still marked.

Your completed lessons are tracked on the progress page.