This week we had another guest speaker come in to talk to us, an RMIT graduate named Amiel Courtin-Wilson. He was super interesting to listen to and shed light on what being in the documentary industry is really like and the amount of work that goes into simply making one film. He said he spent ten years on one doco! He showed us the trailers to a few of his documentaries and it was just so impressive to see how his perseverance paid off. He also said that when he was studying screenwriting at RMIT, he never really considered making documentaries at first and now that’s what he does for a living. It’s cool how inspiration for new things can hit at any point in life.

Here’s the trailer for one of his films ‘Hail’

We read an article today. Wow that was really vague, but I mean today, as in today being my first ever Media class.  Anyway, the article discussed the different learning types regarding deep attention people and hyper-attention people. I found the link between psychological learning tendencies and media very interesting as I had never really thought about the connection between the two. It got me thinking about my own attention span and I realised that most of the time I prefer to focus on more than one thing at once. To me this feels productive and keeps things interesting. However, if I am thoroughly interested in a subject or activity, I can focus on the task alone without being distracted too. It had me pondering over the idea that we might actually be moving into a generation more prone to hyper-attention due to the increase of media and technology. I think this is could be a great thing, if education foundations begin to adjust their ways of teaching to suit the needs of the generation.