Week Beginning 1/2

Monday was a time for us all to give presentations on our analysis of various scenes. I've very much enjoyed doing this assignment, and delving into the art direction of Titus has been both eye-opening and inspirational.

Tuesday was a meeting amongst the class to look at extra-curricular projects which we might be looking at. Almost everyone had ideas, and most of these I thought were good ideas. I'm hoping that when the shortlist for the end-of-year scripts are announced later today, it will give us all (and especially those of us who don't have to continue in development) added impetus to work on these projects.

After this we had a meeting on our documentaries, where we were chided for our lack of progress. However, we did, finally, decide on who was in which group and we have started taking a couple of steps int he right direction.

Wednesday was, for me, a full day filming with the BBC. Sounds exalted, but in reality, it was either a case of watching someone else - and not a very experienced someone else at that - or else manning a camera on mastershot, which didn't require much (if any) fiddling!

Thursday was deadline day for both Ray's essay and Richard's script. It was also an afternoon with John Yorke, looking at online content. I think I have an obvious aversion to online content, as intuitively I think of grainy, pixellated images the size of a postage stamp. This of course is not the case, but when combined with the lack of any feasible business model is not inspiring. This (I suppose) is a key issue with the Internet in its totality. Why would you pay for something, when you can get it for free? We get our news for free on BBC News website and others. We get our music for free on Spotify and others. We get our video clips for free on youtube, our TV free on iPlayer, our books free on GoogleBooks, our information free on wikipedia, our phonecalls free on Skype. It just goes on. And meanwhile, we end up devaluing all these services and taking them for granted. Why would we pay for these things, when we can get them for free?

Friday was a class on Directing, very useful. We looked at the casting process from briefs to auditions. One of the key things is the use of improv in auditions, the importance of giving the actor the script first and ensuring they have read it, and the benefits of having more than one actor in at a time.

At the weekend I was at a Christian Arts conference, called Interface, meeting up with artists from all disciplines: sculpture to fashion, songwriting to mechanical design. We looked at questions like "What is Art?" "Why is it important?" "Does it need to be justified?" and "How can we use our Art to bring glory to God?". One of the speakers was Norman Stone, director of "Man Dancin'" and various other TV and film dramas. He was particularly interesting to hear, and I also met up with two other film makers from the East Coast. Given that film is far more collaborative than most art forms, it is particularly exciting for me to meet new film-makers, and I'm always looking for more people I can work with.