Cannon Fodder has been a great roller-coaster adventure for me in this semester. Ive learnt new things, ive found new films to praise, ive learnt about the Canon, I’ve learnt how it sucks, how its virtuous, how its influence is so grand on the world and how each person in the class has a different, intellectual, and impressive opinion about it.

Out of all the assignments in this studio, this one was definitely my favourite as i myself had something to say about the Canon by sight and sound and with my teammates in the assignment, we all had the same idea in common which made our flow work successfully from preparing the assignment, communicating and then actually diverging the assignment into parts all of us can work at.

Now, into the assignment. Something successful for our work for working on this project as a collective was definitely our point of views, yes, we were moved together by our teacher but after only having one really major part in common which was “who should really decide the canon?” we collected together our parts of the people who actually decide the canon. the white, straight, old men who decide it—we all thought that this should be changed to a more modern perspective—to definitely not just staying with them, we wanted to explore a younger audience.  Women, film scholars/students like us need to be involved, what if a public poll was made, what if an era poll was made for example 90s best films, 2000s best films etc. Moving on, talking about creativity in our groups production, we were struggling onto whether to continue with a video essay or just create something else like a performance? digitally of course but something like other groups were doing which is why i think the pitch was very useful too. One really good thing we did creatively was the idea of the interviews. These interviews included us going around campus and trying to find diverse, young, and passionate students and hearing their opinions on who should decide and what should be on the list. We had very mixed answers, but all linked to the idea of more publicly open to just directors and critics. Continuing, the real success of our own manifesto was obviously the insights that were given to us, the readings of manifestos definitely not only help myself but helped the whole class to gather a sort of language perspective on how to persuade and make the own work sound and feel like a full on manifesto, my favourites included ‘Against Lists’ by Gorfinkel and Guha’s ‘Revisiting lists in a time of rebellion which helped me understand the readings entirely. Another thing i want to address was that i wanted ours to be persuasive, one point of view: to change the canon entirely, to revolutionise the canon, to turn the tables and to give the people a fair list which meant saying words like ‘must’ ‘need’ rather than ‘we want’ and ‘we should’.

Moving onto the problematic aspects of the assignment. Although our constant flow of communication in this assignment amongst my teammates we did have some overall issues that were just at the heat of the moment and risked our full potential at creating the best piece possible. For this assignment i worked with Alannah and Zoe, we all created a group chat, and we talked through the whole assignment after hours in class at even after midnight which i thought was really special and pretty impressive. However, working together, i felt that i was not doing as much work as i could have, yes, we did split the assignment into three but i thought i could’ve done more rather than just introducing the piece. Also, our teammate Alannah had to get her wisdom teeth out in the middle of the assignment near the due date which risked out exploration into what we can achieve for the assignment, however as she wanted to edit, Zoe and i just had to get the work done together in class which worked efficiently. Speaking creatively, i think we did well to make ours different and unique than any other manifesto in the class however, we kept having the urge and feeling that it didn’t feel like a video essay. We thought our pitch was not going to work out at all whilst presenting as we were basically last, we thought about everyone else’s and were really shocked about how lame our idea was. However, through the two guests we got wide range of feedback, and everyone liked our idea which was really a relief and gave us motivation to keep going. Speaking of insights, with the help of the pitch we did get some expert opinions from the guests but another thing that was problematic was that we didn’t really have enough interviews as we wanted, we got around 15 people which were in about 5 videos, we wanted to investigate more but just ran out of time and opportunity. Speaking of the film canon, we didn’t really stick to one of our ideas of an era-based list with different eras we just thought the way to implement the saying “Enough with the cisgender, white, straight, old men that think they know what’s best.”

Speaking on the final parts of the assignment, i believe it’s going to be a challenging but very proud success for my group. I hope my final work is engaging and communicates what this studio is all about, we are creatively creating our own manifesto that we believe is just and right, we made it fair, we made it believable we made it realistic, and we hope that through our ways it drags the audience to join us. I think the main way i want our work to be engaged is a little bit of satire, we don’t want to just bore our audience with just flat out information, we want to be informative, we want them to walk out after watching and be like “wow ive leaernt something” and “wow im not gonna look at sight and sound the same like i used to” not just “that was cool” and just bland we want to give our audience a unique and sort of connected relationship, we are all students this is our similarities and you need to join us to make a difference to be fair. We want the studio of canon fodder to be seen by other students as a studio of a fun, experimental, affirmative, and relaxing class with lots of work that flies past in an instant and can be challenging if you put the effort in and enjoy the course. While i was deciding my studio for this semester and was looking through what everyone chose, i felt that Canon Fodder was a studio with less people in it and i want to make it the opposite with presenting our piece.

Talking about our media piece and its future. What do we want from it? I think myself to experiment with it, what do we have to lose? If we don’t get the best results, then obviously it will be limited but why not explore what we can do with it if we and others believe its powerful. We will first present our piece to a cinema on campus amongst our classmates, people of the public, students from other courses, students from other studios and whoever we want there, this could be the groundwork for what can come in the future. Do we want it to be local? Do we want it to be public and worldwide? Websites like youtube, vimeo even TikTok can give us the popularity to work on it more and more and even make an impact outside of class if we are passionate about it. I myself am not fussed at all, if my group wants to lock it away im fine with it just being on the canon fodder webpage sitting amongst the other manifestos over the years but im also happy to explore what else we can do with it. If we continue to explore why not interfere with festivals, screenings amongst the entire course, on Tuesdays in my Media 2 we have a lectorial with Liam where after an assignment, some are showcased for exceptional work so we can even explore that category of different lectures online and showing people what we have created.

Finally, the improvements. The main feature i would want to say is just what i believe in viewing, i think humour always guides the audience however seriousness does too but it goes both ways. I also think if we had more time to interview people, we would be more successful in answer we got especially from people who did the same course, they would have a wider point of view than random students studying various courses who didn’t really know about the canon like we did. Another thing we could improve on was time length, we just didn’t want to bore the audience, what if it was shorter? Did it need to be longer?