I’ve spent the last two years trying to decide what avenue of filmmaking I want to pursue, when I was really young and obsessed with fame I wanted to be an actress, I was so obsessed with the likes of Rita Hayworth, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe that I wanted to be around those types of women. It wasn’t until later that I realised my crippling nerves when doing anything that requires even the smallest audience, so I settled on something more behind the scenes around the age of twelve, a film director. I would still potentially have creative control while possessing some fame. But as I grow older I wonder if this is even what I want anymore, I know I want to tell stories through both visual and written forms, but how do I want to go about this?

I guess you could say my epiphany came in one of Pauls classes, perhaps it wasn’t an epiphany at all, as it didn’t necessarily come out of the blue, but was rather a culminating, snowballing mass of reality that hit me. It wasn’t really anything that Paul said per se, but instead the types of people in the class, that always seem to be similar archetypes when it involves filmmaking; a lot of young guys with technical knowledge who often throw around said knowledge and forget about the nuances of creativity and conceptual thinking and often it feels like they dominate the class. So, I guess the epiphany is that I need to go about this a different way, because I’ll never be able to compete with a savvy film student throwing down the specs of the latest Red camera or bragging about their smooth new steady cam rig. I am both too forgetful and poor for that. Originality may be a hard concept to capture in this day and age, but with so many different tools at our disposal, there really is no excuse to be another James Cameron or Steven Spielberg, they already exist, time to try something new.

So I’m going to run with this epiphany, exploring all options. At the moment I’m taking the Alternative Animation course and I’m falling in love a bit with stop motion animation, with the freedom and differing mediums you can utilise to create a story. I want to investigate all creative avenues, I don’t want to be stuck making a certain genre of film or writing a specific type of story. One day I may want to write a novella, on another to compose a poem, maybe make a 30 second animation or a hard-hitting documentary. I don’t think I need to get caught up with one specific thing and this is what I’ve taken away from the studio, because we’re focusing on individual techniques instead of just creating one short film, it’s all about the build up of skills. Well, that’s what I got from the class, anyway.