"Hi Honey - it's Thursday night!"

In an attempt to stay on top of blogging, here's my post about the past week - the week beginning the 19th of October.

On Monday we played party games with Andy, as we dove into discussion about sound design. I'm surprised to see that it was such a recent development - talkies were introduced in the late 1920's, production design in the 1930's, but yet sound design took until the 1970's. It would have required necessary technological advancements to fully realise the potential, I suppose, and other such advancements (such as colour grading) have only been possible lately due to technology. Nonetheless, it was a very important step.

Monday afternoon was spent with Richard, as we explored more ideas regarding film structure. An assignment to write a story that was stronger because is disobeyed the structure was seemingly less important than I had assumed it would be. I thought we would exchange the ideas in groups, and then try to work out why they didn't work. Nope. We handed them in. Since my idea wasn't great, I'm guessing it will be a brief point of discussion in a tutorial, and then we'll go straight back to my other continuing work.

On Tuesday, Andy taught us how to deal with interviews and surveys, with some top-tips from his own experiences. I loved the story about Liza Minnelli. That's the most exciting name-drop we've heard so far! Well, for me at least! Again, a lot of the Factual Programme classes on research cover things I have done before, but at least I'm considerably more interested in them in a filmmaking context, and it's good to hear it from the perspective of someone who has conducted many interviews.

After a delightful day off on Wednesday, we had an all-day session with Gav. I must give him credit - he has taught me more about AVID in 6 hours than I have ever learnt when using it before. I used to claim I hated AVID (purely because it makes less sense than Final Cut Pro, or the similar Premiere Pro), but now that I understand it better, I'm looking forward to using it properly. I also must credit this class, along with Andy's class on editing, for making me seriously consider editing as a specialism. Currently, I'm loving screenwriting, the core of which is storytelling. None of the specialisms, apart from editing, really focus on this. I'll just stay open to all the options at the moment, and see what takes me.

On Friday we continued with Adam, looking at shared themes in popular TV shows. I did a similar thing once in Higher Drama, where we tried to find the common themes in Contemporary Scottish Plays. If I remember rightly, sexism and poverty were the two most common. But at least now it's about exciting TV drama which appeals to me (like Life on Mars and Shameless) - though there will always be a place in my heart for The Steamie, and Men Should Weep. I've never thought about the themes of my work before, really. Obviously I mean "theme" in the Adam-sense of a topic, not in the Richard-sense of what a film is trying to say. I have a tendency to write about outsiders, and I often have strong female protagonists, but I really should try to actively incorporate themes that appeal to me, and ones that would be successful with an audience.

The week ended with a screening of Twelve Angry Men, which I have decided deserves its own post later in the week. Until then, stay shiny.