Category Archives: Miscelleneous

These are posts that are personal or trivial and won’t be assessed.

I Will Survive

Anybody love a good 70’s classic? Gloria Gaynor? Anyone?

I’ve spent a lot of my week at home. Scratch that – a lot of my week in bed. Whenever anyone empathises with me I just say ‘I WILL SURVIVE’. I actually haven’t been to Uni since Monday, which sounds crazy, except I only have 3 days in a week anyway. I was weirdly nauseas on Tuesday, recovering Wednesday and then my chronic illness decided to knock on my door Thursday morning – or rather – knock on my train carriage as I was mid-commute to my 9:30am Workshop. And then to top it all off, Friday my body thought a cold would be a really good addition to an already stressed out Lucy. So it’s really been fun! (I really hope you can sense the sarcasm).

While all that has been going on, I’ve been trying my hardest to manage the workload that’s all due next week. I’ve done a very rough draft of PB3, almost finished by Cinema Studies essay and slowly been working on blog posts. I churned out 4 in one go on Monday, but then was hit with illness for the rest of the week, so those 4 weren’t so impressive anymore, just the bare minimum for the week.

One thing I did do through the week was attend a Top Secret Research Program. Basically I got paid to analyze and critique advertisement and media that hasn’t been released to the public yet. I obviously cannot tell you anything about it aside from that, but I thought it related to my course in some distant way. It was really interesting looking at media that way, it reminded me of year 12 and when we used to analyze elements of media campaigns. Things like codes and conventions in order to attract target audiences. An enormous amount of effort and talent goes into things that we just ignore or not give a second thought. Even things like pop up animated ads (which we were shown at the research place) which usually I’d not even see because of adblock. Made me actually appreciate the work that goes into these things, but won’t change my opinion on clicking next whenever I see one!

Ignoring Media

I went into the city today to borrow the mic from tech to do my interview (yes, I am aware I’m very behind and I am very STRESSED about it). Again I caught myself noticing media around me, mostly because I don’t usually come in on Friday’s and so there wasn’t anyone to talk to, to and from campus. In the Melbourne Central underground there’s these huge Plasma TV type things along the wall of the train tracks and they kept playing different ads while I waited for my train home. It was so distracting, but I found it funny that the sound was muted every time an announcement was made, only to be put back on straight after. As if anyone’s actually listening – or watching for that matter! That’s how I feel about a lot of the media (advertising kind) that is up around the city. Everyone’s too busy going places and doing errands to notice that some corporation has paid $$ to have their billboard hand painted along a building wall (although I notice that every time, there’s a new painted movie poster every few weeks, it’s insane!)

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in high school anymore

To cut a long story short, University is very different to High School. For starters, blog posts are considered assessable, which is interesting. When I first read that we had to make regular posts on the internet about our feelings and what we were studying, I was a little skeptical. I’ve blogged in the past (let’s not talk about the 2010 Lucy on blogspot with a blog entitled ‘Sunny’s Photographic Life’ – who even is Sunny? A question I’ll never get the answer to…) but never with this kind of importance.

I guess I still blog here and there, in a way, social media is a form of that now. I use Twitter and Facebook and even Instagram as a form of expressing my thoughts, but this is still a challenge. Those posts are limited with a word count of 150 (on Twitter anyway) and no one likes to read a paragraph long Instagram comment. I learnt, like most other people my age, how to express my thoughts quick and to the point. This is a different take, a more traditional one and I’d like to see where it goes.

I used to write regular diary entries too – and someone at Uni told me that that’s the essence of blogging really. So I figure I’d start here, telling you a little about myself before I get stuck into talking about Media or Cinema Studies or anything else intellectually driven. So… Hi! I’m Lucy, I’m 18 years old and I, like everyone else here, have a love for film making. My passion is story telling – whether that be writing (scripts or otherwise) or visualising them in cinematic form. And I watch far too many TV Shows and movies, which is probably why I picked the studies that I did. I have a cat called Violet and you’d probably find out soon or later that I really really love all cats. I live in Northcote, so getting to RMIT campus is about a 20 minute train ride – lucky considering some people have come from across Australia to study here. I will be posting on here regularly, obviously, it’s school work… so I’ll see you around, I guess.

P.S. I hope all you Cinema Studies students appreciate the pun in my title. I thought it was very witty.