Beginning the new class of Film & TV 1 this week below are a few questions I have answered which look into what I have taken from the first week and also what I eventually hope to take away from the course. 

Q1: In 200 words or less please outline your goals, desires – what you want to get out of this semester. You will review this later in the course. Many will rethink this dramatically – this is a good thing.

A1: This semester my main goal is to produce something that exceeds my expectation of what I currently think I am capable of. I hope to do this through learning about and practicing all of the aspects and roles that go into producing a film. There are several things that I wish to get out of the semester and these include trying roles that I am not comfortable with, learning to work in the most effective way as a team, building good working relationships with my classmates/group members and finally, I hope that I am able to have fun throughout this course!

Q2: Consider Jasmine’s lecture on Screenwriting and briefly describe one point that you have taken from it. A point that excites you, something that was completely new to you, perplexes you or even one you take issue with.

A2: A point that particularly stood out to me this week in Jasmine’s lecture on screenwriting was her information on character and creating characters. Although not all of the information that she gave about character was new to me, she did introduce the concept of creating the protagonist for your story before actually determining what the story is itself. Throughout high school when story writing I had never taken this approach, but now thinking about this method and also trialing it in tutorials this week I learnt that it was a very effective way of coming up with story ideas (especially if you are given no particular topic to write inside).

Q3: Select from one of the readings from week 1 or 2 and briefly describe two points that you have taken from that reading. Points that excite you, something that was completely new to you

A3: From the week 1 reading, “Narratives” (Branston, G. and Stafford, R.), one point that particularly interested me was when it was identified that many ads effectively make use of short little narratives. This made me think about certain ads that I had seen on TV recently and I immediately noticed that the advertisements that came to mind were the ones that used narrative form successfully for example the AMMI ads featuring Katut and Rhonda. Another point taken from this reading that I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about was the idea that there are different ways to portray narrative across different mediums. This meaning that how you depict something through a medium such as film could actually vary vastly using something such as radio or photography. How you might need to change the way in which narrative is told is also relevant across different cultures.