Week 4 Journal

Wednesday 24^th January with DAN

I had a tutorial with Dan today regarding my progress of my Basecamp work, I was pretty confident that I had done enough as I feel committed to post content on a regular basis. When I went in a sat down Dan admitted that my tutorial was not going to be long, that’s because I had completed all the set tasks for that time. He praised me for my strong scripts, good essays and committed behaviour towards posting on Basecamp. The only thing he wanted me to do was more research focusing on my influences of my script, which was completely understandable and I strive to complete this as soon as I can.

Thursday 25^th January with NEIL

This session was the most different of all so far, instead of sitting down and listening to a person talking for 4 hours at least, we actually got up and done work, that’s right, physical work! For this session we picked a script from another student and we simulated what it would be like on set when we record our movies. We were spilt into two halves, some went in the morning by I was allocated for the afternoon session. We picked James’ script which was about a ‘shady man’ wanting a poison to be made by a crazy and old ‘potion shop owner’. I was an actor in this task, I played the shady man. Things went well, I was more confident in acting and also I learned from my peers too on how to direct and do other roles like camera and sound. I had to be mean though, Neil told me and the other actor (Sophie) to be awkward and change the current order of the film, so go in opposite directions and go against the original plan, so I had to disagree with the director’s opinions to put it simply, it was a great experience as Neil wanted to put us in a situation which can be similar to what we encounter later in life if we choose to continue with film. Sadly this was Neil’s last session with us, and we all hope he will have a great future.

Friday 26^th January with ERICA

We watched another movie, we were given the joy to watch Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing”, which was about a black American boy named Mooky who works as a pizza delivery boy at Sal’s Famous Pizzeria owned by “Sal” and his two sons. We are given a sight of the racial inequality in life and a view of black culture. This film was very good and kept me engaged! I loved the mise-en-scene and the characters were quite believable and funny like Esposito’s character “Buggin’ Out”. However this film had a very strong message of saying violence is not necessarily used to cure an issue, famous quotes by Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X are mentioned along with heavy use of Jazz and black celebrities to reinforce their importance. I really enjoyed this movie and I would certainly watch it again. Like last time we got time to reflect on the film which built my knowledge further.