In the week one blog post I listed 6 ways in which I wanted to grow this semester; I think I have been very successful in the majority of these, and am very happy with the amount of growth I experienced over the course of the semester.

Each goal reviewed, in the order I listed in week one:

1. I learnt a lot about interviewing but didn’t get to put it into practise much.
2. I improved my technical skills quite a lot through practice and repetition, especially regarding the utilisation of lighting equipment.
3. I am very proud of the films I worked on. While we’ve still got plenty more work to do after the semester is over, I enjoyed working on both films very much, and can’t wait to see where they go in the future.
4. I’m happy with the content I created, even though I didn’t delve much into the idea of change-oriented filmmaking. I think I learned just how much of an impact something that isn’t overtly political or emotionally loaded can have. To paraphrase Lindsay in Bogan Bingo, we can make something dumb and it can bring entertainment to someone who’s having a bad time.
5. I think I was hugely inspired by the films made by my peers this semester. Especially the film about Jim the Station Master, what a heart-warmer!
6. I definitely got better at reaching those word counts on reflections!

One thing I was challenged by was the amount of time we had to put into our film. Once we got into the edit suite I learned very quickly that having more source material is not always a good thing. We ended up with easily over 6 hours of footage to cut down to 5 minutes (not to mention the boxes full of VHS tapes we didn’t get to see!), and that proved to be a huge time consumer when we were piecing everything together. I’m glad we had all of the material, but it just meant we had to put a lot more time into finessing the direction of our narrative. It worked out pretty well in the end though, as I feel like we had a very nicely textured piece.