The final blog of 2009...definitely!

The penultimate academic week of 2009 began on Tuesday with a screening of This Film Is Not Yet Rated. This was a great documentary which I'm certain I've seen before, it was well-paced and Kirby Dick made for an excellent documentarian. I found the section on how sensitive the MPAA are to homosexual sex quite eye-opening. In this day and age when the world is (generally) accepting of someone's sexuality, why can't art be as well? I don't want to witness "tough" sex scenes in every film but sometimes, the story naturally gravitates that way.

Wednesday & Thursday were Zam's classes where we looked at comedy, good fun and then Thursday with Gav as we looked at the Balamory footage. Friday was a screening of many of our shorts. No offence to the others but Slag! and Little Clown stood out highest among the group, Melissa's Mail, The Golden Rule and Dust were pretty good, each being visual treats (I still love my tracking shot in Melissa's Mail). Suckerpunch came out far better than I had heard from others and it was nice to see a film I was part of, non-creatively, see finished.

The final Monday was our day editing Balamory and I soon realised any "performance" on the show, is crafted in the edit, since none of them seem to know what they are doing. Tuesday was all day with Zam and then a confidence boosting Richard tutorial over Skype, which took a few minutes to get used to but then I found a level of comfort with it. Doesn't beat face time though. The class with Zam was entertaining since we had to come up with a story that used a ticking clock scenario and myself, Ross and Luke struggled for most of the time, throwing out several ideas before finding one that we loved and could work with. The problem came when we came up with our idea a few hours after everyone else had settled on theirs. Luckily, we seemed to all know exactly what the idea was and could quickly work out the beats and Ross' storyboards certainly helped us when it came to presenting. I wish we had the budget to do a grad film in a space station!

Thursday was a short day with Cammy and Friday consisted of a screening of Gremlins, which led to Avatar and then our class Christmas dinner, which was great fun. A nice end to the year.

"That's not a place where I'm considered good-looking."
Mark Hoppus of Blink-182, on why he had never visited Kenya.