Live It.Love It.Lust It.

So; what have I been up to recently?

I’ve realised that I don’t use Tumblr all that often anymore. At first I’de blog, even though it wasn’t much interesting, about things that were going on in life - as you do.

Over the past year now, I’ve been attending University of the Creative Arts (UCA) - Farnham,  studying in the first year of Film Production. The first year of the course hasn’t quite gone to plan. Admittedly, I did go into it with the wrong mindset, but the quality of written work that is required at University was something I wasn’t quite ready for. English has never been one of my strongest subjects and coming up to Uni from a BTEC National Diploma in Media to a BA (Hons) Degree in Film Production was a big leap. Bigger than I had imagined. Therefore, over the past 9 Months or so I’ve been trying to tackle the essay’s that I have been given. Most of which I have had to do referrals on to pass. However, the production side of things this year have gone well and the two films we had to make got good grades.

For the first assignment, which was our ‘Portraits Project’, we were able to attend The Zippos Circus so we could hang out and film Lucius Team. A group of three stuntmen who, at the time, were performing their ‘Globe of Death’ show. I took upon the role of Cinematography and Camera Operating which are my favourite roles. You can see this film on Vimeo. This production received a 1st at 71%.

The second production was made using 16mm film on a Bolex H-16 Standard. All groups were given a haiku which they then had to interpret into a short film; no longer than 5 minutes long. I happily had the option of creating the Lighting. This was a good role to have considering we were filming on 16mm film. The subject had to have extremely bright lights directed toward it for the Bolex to even see an image, so for this reason I could be expressive and use my knowledge of Film-Noir techniques; even though it wasn’t that vast. The group received a low 2:1 of 62% which some of thegroup were eager to attempt to bump it up a bit for a higher 2:1. But seeing the production at the end-of-year screening I thought 62% was a fair grade. Film is not currently uploaded online.

This has recently brought up the question “Do you reckon you could be dyslexic?”. Me? Dyslexic? I usually wouldn’t have thought so, but looking back over the year and how I have struggled to produce one decent essay I most certainly could be. There’s no harm in trying to find out, so I had a meeting during July (2012) to discuss the possibilities for me to receive Student Support with my Essays. I think it would be a great help. Some of my friends doing the same course in the same year are dyslexic and have said that the support they’ve had with their Essays has helped them to produce 2:1 grade Essays. That’s between 60-70% for the overall grade. So yeah, I will definitely take an ‘immediate test’ which can be done for free within an hour, then if they believe I would benefit from taking the full test, I’ll be doing that sometime in the earlier part of nextyear’s study.

Other than being at Uni, not much else has happened for me. We have recently got an extremely hyper, black and white kitten which my mum and partner are constantly reconsidering. Mostly for their own benefit to be able to ‘Go away at no notice’ which they don’t actually do anyway, but as it stand, I think we are keeping him.

Quite a lot of the time, I’ve got my acoustic guitar in my lap and just pluck away. Mostly improvising, but the few songs I’ve learnt which I play most often are Newton Faulkner - All I Got; The Quarrymen - In Spite of All The Danger; Ed Sheeran - A-Team.  I also want to try and learn Eric Clapton - Wonderful Tonight (arranged by Ulli Boegershausen), which I’ve learnt half of, and Yiruma - River Flows in You (arranged by Sungha Jung).  

I plan to complete a few screenplays next year for my personal little production company Yellow Can Productions, with the hope of filming them and maybe sending them into a few Film Festivals to see where they can go.

Next year of University is going to be a lot busier and demanding, so when the spare time comes for writing, I will most certainly post updates on how my progress is coming along. I will probably post them on the Yellow Can Productions tumblr page which can be visited here.

My tumblr is nothing more than what it says on my page. A ‘blab on about anything that happens in my day’ kinda thing. If you’re expecting more from my un-educated posts or w/e. Fuck off :]