On Monday morning of last week, we had a class with Andy about Production Design, which followed on from watching Metropolis. This was a very interesting class, and whilst I've never been big on production design myself, I appreciate the value it adds, and I understand its importance. I do hope we get the chance to work on more films in which the production design plays a big part. Little Clown was a great experience, and I'd love to do something with more design challenges.Following this, we had a class with Richard, which was a nice screenwriting-refresher. Having been in screenwriting tutorials for the past while, it was good to find ourselves in the class environment again. Whilst having one-on-one time is great for individual stories and troubleshooting particular scripts, it is nice to have discussions about themes and issues, and to fabricate examples purely so that we can then deconstruct them. This can be useful, as sometimes you can be so close to a story or an idea that you can't see what is wrong with it, but working on a very simple outline of something else can make you realise.
On Tuesday we watched the first episode of Teachers as we started on our mission to come up with ideas that could be the perfect thing for Channel 4's comedy-drama slot. I do find the brief funny, however. They want a "young-skewing" comedy-drama, like Teachers or Shameless, which wouldn't look out of place on HBO. That's a very specific brief, and I think that if people focus too much on that, then they may miss out on some amazingly original and challenging ideas, which is exactly what Channel 4 really need.
On Tuesday afternoon, we continued with Zam. It was good to see the remaining film scenes that people had chosen, and to then start on some work for the next lesson; writing a treatment for the scene as the director. I really thought it was a good assignment, and I was happy that I had chosen such an enjoyable scene!
On Wednesday we had a short class about the Internet. Having had to do a lot of research for my dissertation in Advanced Higher Modern Studies, I've been through all the Wikipedia-warnings and the "how to get good search results" stuff before, but Andy was a lot more honest and fair about it, particularly with respect to Wikipedia. Generally it is a good idea to check the sources listed on Wikipedia, and they can often lead you to more specialised information anyway. Oh, and just a random fact I know: Andy explained the various internet suffixes (.com = commercial, .org = organisation), and a few years ago there was a big push for there to be a new extension for the porn industry, ".xxx", which would have allowed better regulation of the web, particularly in helping to protect minors. It never came to fruition, but it was an interesting idea.On Thursday we had a full day with Ray, which started with a little Moodle-madness, and a short quiz. I found that a few of the questions were quite tricky (mostly about things we were never taught), but I think I remembered the most important and relevant work from last year. I'm looking forward to the feedback, just to confirm that's actually true. In the afternoon, we broke out the tripods and new heads, and then some lamps.
I can't help but feel slightly responsible for the fact we now have gloves, as I was the one who reported Paul's accident officially. However, I was only doing what I was being assessed on: carrying out my work with due respect to the Official Health and Safety guidelines of the Academy. And as that rule still exists, and always will, we should use the gloves.And concluding the week, we had our screening of Strike, which I will discuss in my next post, and then I had a tutorial with Richard. It was fun, and I'm far happier with where my ideas are at the moment. I'm trying to keep more time aside for writing, and so far it's been working out, but we're getting a lot of small assignments at the moment, so I'll need to carefully balance everything.
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