Week 1 - Tasting Term Two

We really hit the ground running this term. No classes on Monday.

Tuesday was intense. A full-speed action-packed introduction to lights with Ray. It’s all pretty much new to me but I grasped the basics fairly easily. Lighting is where it starts becoming much more impressive and professional, whilst, of course, becoming a huge amount more complicated and time-consuming.

Screenwriting has been newly allocated to Tuesday afternoons and I find this more challenging. Somehow I can think and concentrate better in the mornings as a general rule and it has to be said Richard’s classes are always among the most strenuous. However, this time it was a bit more relaxed than normal as we were recapping on last term. We came up with a story, as a class, in the last twenty minutes and I was pleasantly surprised with the result. Sometimes writing seems so easy. The truth is: writing is easy, good writing is fiendishly difficult.

Wednesday afternoon saw us discussing television with Andy, once again, and more specifically ‘Appointment’, ‘Family’ and ‘Event’ viewing. We watched the Doctor Who episode Rose which was the very first of the new series, originally broadcast on BBC One on 26 March 2005. Incidentally I had not seen any complete episodes of the new series up to this point (shocking, I know) but I had seen some from the older series’. So I got the same experience that I’m sure many fans were going through when they first saw that episode. What struck me most was the action-packed, fast-moving, humorous and even childish (a burping wheelie bin!) tone of the new series. I seem to remember the older ones being slower, more serious and a lot scarier. I like the new style, I enjoyed the episode and I am now, I fear, dangerously close to becoming hooked on Series Four… and about time too!

I am genuinely pleased that we have started studying the history of cinema. I know very little history and yet I just love learning about it. As cinema is my passion I get double the enjoyment when studying its history. I can tell Andy enjoys teaching it also and so I look forward to the rest of this term. The birth of cinema is perhaps the most fascinating part and that is what we covered on Thursday morning.

A nine o’clock start! “It’s ludicrous,” I thought until I realised that school started then and therefore I’ve been starting at that time most of my life. It was quite nice to be going to work at the same time as everyone else for a change. We made a start on the promised silent Russian cinema by watching Battleship Potemkin. I couldn’t find any significant difference between the editing displayed in this film and editing in today’s films. Suffice it to say, it was well ahead of its time. The soundtrack proved to be somewhat wearying because it was more monotonous than we are used to but the story (although not entirely clear at some points) captivated me and held me to the end despite my ignorance with regards to the Russian Revolution. It is, I believe, by today’s standards a good film and therefore I can hardly imagine how amazing it must have been in 1925.

Finally we had our first class of a new module: Introduction to Production (has quite a ring to it!) with Abigail Howkins. Most of what she said seemed common sense to me but I look forward to discovering the secrets of that great mystery: what do producers actually do? Producing is something I can really see myself doing actually, and I’m keen to give it a go but I’m not sure if I really want to specialise in it. I feel more at home on the creative side of things. Anyway there’s plenty of time to decide, this is, after all, only the first week of Term 2 and I’m sure there’s lots of fun to be had in the coming weeks!