Introductory Week

Tomorrow I start BA1, a module focused around the theme of "Narrative", which seems a good place to begin. After a briefing on the project and a health and safety talk, there's a lecture on The Classic Hollywood Narrative. Guys, I'll be honest here. I probably wouldn't be doing a second degree if the first one had given lectures on stuff like The Classic Hollywood Narrative. Excited for a lecture is not a state of being unknown to me - the philosophy and AI stuff was all pretty rad - but it was never common.

Anyway, that's tomorrow. That's the future. Who knows what'll happen there. In this post I want to talk about the past because some kinda cool things happened in the past like that time I ate ice-cream at the cinema and the time I went on a bouncy castle and the time I made that film forty eight hours. Those are probably the salient points of the last week.

The 48-hour film challenge was our first piece of uni work. We were split into groups and given the challenge to make a 3-minute film in just under 48 hours, with a whole bunch of rules and limitations. For example, it had to be shot sequentially. We couldn't re-order the scenes or even the shots later; if we wanted a flashback, a reaction shot anything like that, we had to film it in the order it would appear. We also had randomly selected rules on what to include in the film, ours being a Journalist character, a Talisman prop, a Bicycle Shop location and the concept "everyone talks in riddles", all of which served to make it much easier. You tell a group of people "make me a film" and they'll argue what sort for ages. You tell them "make me a film about a journalist in a bike shop", it's much easier to come up with a story.

Also, when your bike shop ends up being someone's office with a couple of bikes in it because all the bike shops in Norwich have said you can't film there, that's another limitation to shape the story.

Hopefully soon it'll go up on YouTube, if it does I'll add it here.

Several Months Later

At some point in my life I developed the legal sort of coke addiction. The cola variety. There have been times it's the only reason I've left the house. There have been times I've ordered takeaway not because I was particularly in need of the food but because it meant people would bring cola to my house. To help get over this problem I've started buying it in the more expensive glass bottles and treating it as a treat again, like when I was a child. There's a bottle sat in the fridge at the moment chilling. I have earned it, for today I became a filmmaker.

It's been nine months since I started this blog though admittedly it hasn't been updated for the last seven, so if you're just joining here let's do a quick recap. I work as a projectionist, a job without much future in the digital world. Last year I was offered voluntary redundacy which forced me to really think about what I would do, where I would go if I left the job. I can't move away from film. I mean, I don't want to; it would be too sad. Moving to making films was both an impossible leap and a strikingly obvious choice.

So film school it is. Norwich University College of the Arts to be precise. The blog up until now has been How To Get Into Film School When You've No Academic Background. If you don't want to read the previous entries, here's the tl;dr version: Work Hard.

That's the story so far. Today I made my first film and over the weekend I'm going to talk about how bad it was, how fun it was, and where we're going from here. From here on out this blog is an assessed part of the course so don't worry, I will be updating regularly.