The running theme that seems to underpin this blog is that of vast amount of time present in between posts. Last year I used to blog near enough every week and the reasons for this I see as two fold. First of all, second year workload compared to first year workload is substantially greater so time for such mandates that aren’t required immediately inevitably get pushed to the back of the cue. Secondly comes a reason that to be quite honest, I find rather worrying…Have I fallen out of love with what I want to do? Now that the initial honeymoon period of BATV is over and where everything starts to matter, I feel as if i’m getting a case of the old Yips. I’m sure this feeling is wholly down to the absolutely chaotic term that we’ve just have, where many of us and whom I include myself, have had to increase their workload in order to compensate for others. Challenging when your up to your eyeballs anyway and extra effort whilst happily given, isn’t entirely welcome. I’m not pointing fingers at anyone in particular in this instance but I often got the feeling that your never going to be able to excel yourself as a team. This is mainly because your always having to compromise your task in order to complete those of others to a satisfactory standard. I hope these last few sentences don’t sound egotistical, but it is the fact that the majority of us worked a lot harder than some.
So what have we had to do I hear you ask? Ha. Well. In the last term we’ve had quite a bit to get our teeth into including Studios, Dramas and Docs. First day back, we were in the studio tasked with creating something that ‘had shelf life’. The possibilities we’re seemingly endless, but due to the lack of prep time at our disposal which was seemingly down to the christmas break, we went for a comedy panel which was not dissimilar to that of Never Mind the Buzzcocks but revolving around the theme of Movies. I did the old vision mixing job which looking at the end product was rather successful. However the real superstar was Tom Farmery who done an absolute superb job calling the shots. We went to London to make a documentary all about the Housing Benefit System and how it contains flaws which was good fun indeed. It was the first project that we’ve done on the course outside the Bournemouth and Poole area. Whilst it was fun to do, personally i thought a different subject type would of been more interesting, but I would say that being a lad and who was chasing up leads at Lotus Grand Prix and at the RNLI. It turned out well, and we got marked at 65% for it. We also had a Conflict and Power essay to write which didn’t go down too well. Made a drama about Scrabble, the link of which will be added below later as well as another essay, 4000 words this time and another studio. For the final studio, which seemed to bookend the term nicely, we done a second version of ‘ The Reel Show’. I directed this time but as of yet I haven’t been able to dissect the footage to do something with it yet, but this will happen in due course.
Personal development time. Last term has been very chaotic, thats for certain. However it’s been the last two weeks of term that have destroyed me more mentally than anything, just trying to get everything done. Doing 16 hour days at times to make sure it would all get done was pretty soul destroying, and makes you wonder a bit if you really want to continue with such things. What it did do however is give me a good lesson all about time. My time management skills have been pretty shocking to say the least, but during this last term I have identified this as an area to improve on. In hindsight, that has been the silver lining of this term, whilst I haven’t been particularly happy with the status quo, I have managed to learn about myself.
The next 3 weeks at home are desperately needed just to unwind and to relax, detaching myself from all things BATV…well sort of atleast. Anyhow, I’m off to watch that Jason Bourne film on ITV-2 but here is that film I promised.
Sorry if this post doesn’t read well…brain is still pretty fried.
Arrivederci x
I’d hesitate to say Laurie that probably everyone on the course has had the “oh, shit…do I actually want to this?” moment. But I think you should take solace in the fact that rather than larding about and leaving others to pick up the slack, you were one of the ones who kept on powering through – and surely that’s the best sign that you do want to do this TV malarcy, because you still care about it! And you’re right, teamwork is only as effective as your team members. But in industry, slackers don’t exist – fact. Nice thought isn’t it?