Week 3 - So it begins...

Unfortunately I was away competing at the Royal National Mòd in Falkirk for the majority of this week (that makes it sound like I hated it; actually it was very enjoyable… I came first in all four competitions!) so my experience of the first actual classes was somewhat limited.

The first hour of screenwriting was very productive though. We started with a simple game called ‘Statues’ (Richard always begins by doing a warm-up exercise to get our writer brains ticking) in which two people froze in certain positions and we had to create a story around that image. I got a good one going about an honourable soldier determined to do his duty even when it costs him his life. Feature film material! The short time I had in that class was enough to convince me it would be really enjoyable. It seemed like the perfect setting for ideas to come alive.

Content Origination was on Tuesday morning because Adam had been ill on Monday afternoon. We got a good introduction to this module and made a start on analysing television content and compared channel schedules. It was rather gratifying, in a way, to be told by Adam, two or three times, that we were not the lowest common denominator audience. Sure enough even within that one lesson I felt like a much more informed audience member than your average television viewer.

I missed out on a class that afternoon with Gavin; setting up our Edit Share accounts. I did take the necessary steps to catch up on that score.

If I thought the old Creative Beginnings was over then Wednesday morning proved me wrong. I knew it was coming, I just couldn’t be bothered. What made it worse was I arrived well before 9am to ensure I wouldn’t be late only to discover it didn’t actually start until 9:30. Not a good start to the day! Of the Group Presentations that morning I will say little – I prefer to forget – but it was obvious some groups had done more preparation than others. It was interesting however to get an overview of the previous two weeks from different people’s point of view. Anyway, enough of that. Creative Beginnings is over.

We had the first of our Programme Meetings at lunchtime that Wednesday. Not much to talk about yet though, we’ve barely got started.

Wednesday afternoon we watched Inside Man. I like heist movies in general so I enjoyed it but what I liked most was that this bank robbery was completely harmless. The tension rested on the fate of the hostages when in fact there was no threat to them at any point. I am fascinated by stories where the bad guy is not actually doing anything that bad but fools the good guys and the audience into thinking he is. To be fair I did actually guess, about a third of the way into the film, that the robbers did not intend to be violent but the clever placing of the fake shooting of the hostage caught me out momentarily. I did think that the tone of the film was slightly too light (maybe because of Denzel Washington) meaning that I did not feel enough concern for the hostages. I was expecting a good old gun fight at any minute when I should have been worried sick that someone would pull the trigger. It didn’t feel real enough to me. What amazed me most was the selling point of this film. 76% of the audience went to see Denzel Washington. I did not realise; first, that Washington was such an influential actor, and second that a film’s success could rely almost entirely on who stars in it.

I missed both Andy’s classes on Thursday but caught up sufficiently by looking at the slides which he emailed us.

On Friday morning we watched The Truman Show. I had not seen it and I loved it. It’s scary how close it has come to reality (no pun intended) and one wonders if TV will ever become that extreme. I’d managed to get a glimpse of the goings on in a BBC live edit suite during the Mòd and the director demanding what cameras to cut to rang true in the film as in real life. What fascinated me most about the film is that it makes the point that even if we lived in a world that was perfect, and we discovered that it was not the real world, we would still want to escape to the imperfect real world. It’s a similar idea to The Matrix, in ways, but in this case more realistic. Ultimately I suppose this is because humans are constantly searching for the truth. We are greedy for answers. It’s like we know there might be something bigger out there and we would sacrifice our present relative comfort in order to know what that is. An interesting one, this constant search for the truth. Something within all of us that needs to be satisfied… a hunger. I know a few people who seemed to have found a way to satisfy that hunger. They’ve found truth but surprisingly it wasn’t in learning, spirituality, some inner revelation or anything like that. In fact they simply call it faith in Jesus Christ….