Week 9 Update

Monday morning met us with a slightly daunting task of having our reviews on the short films read to the class. Alex showed us each film again before reading out each one aloud to the class. Reading aloud and seeing your words on the big screen is something else. It really makes the mistakes stand out. The flow of the piece is obviously great or not so great when someone else is reading your work. It also really made me see clearly the overuse of punctation to make sentences too long.Alex was very kind with the feedback, focusing on all the standout parts of each piece giving only constructive advice to us. I made some notes of Alex’s top tips after reading our work:

  • What’s the contemporary hook? How do I answer the why are you talking about this now?
  • Context is very important
  • Short sentences are poetic
  • Reading aloud is very important
  • In humanities, critical and arts writing sometimes it is okay to use I and ME and reference yourself
  • Short film allows for more detail to get fleshed out
  • How does this fit into the bigger picture of the director
  • Starting the review off with, something that doesn’t relate to the film but relates to the theme is fantastic
  • After every sentence you should be asking yourself, so what? So why? So before

This was an extremely valuable experience that I am lucky to have been apart of.

Week 8 Update

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Australian Film critic, payed us a kind visit on Monday of week nine to run a lil workshop! We wrote reviews of the 2014 Australian short film I’m You, Dickhead. Alex helped us through the process of note-taking while watching the film twice, and then we swapped reviews and discussed/analysed the different ways we interpreted the task.

Here are the points she discussed:

  • TASTE ­
  • PRIVILEGE AND BIAS 
  • AUDIENCE
  • SCALE AND DETAIL
  • HISTORY
  • CONTEXT & OPINION

During the week we watch three short films! Spanish 7:35 in the Morning, artsy Absurda and teen angsty Lick the Star. Our task was to choose one and write a 600-800 word review on one of them. I actually found this extremely difficult. I chose 7:35 in the Morning however I really struggled to meet the word count (and the deadline). After fleshing out as much as possible, I sent it off to Alexia who will then pass them all onto Alex so she can have a read before Mondays class in which we will be reading out everyones reviews nameless!! SCARY.

Wednesday’s class was cancelled so we all got to writing our reviews!

 

The Pitching Party -Wk 7

Monday Mid-day Pitch session!

It was made into a real life pitch sesh (mmhmm I went there) because Alexia brought with her donuts! She did promise this to happen however in my head I was thinking sure; I’ll happily accept your classic Coles cinnamon style circle donuts. Delicious! But no no no, we were throwing back gourmet true Melbourne style over achieving donuts. There were green ones, crunchy ones, iced ones and misshaped ones. It was fab.

Anyway, in other news. we also pitched our ideas for a piece we would contribute to in the final publication! Hooray. We went around the circle and gave a quick synopsis. Among the myriad ideas such as critically looking at a range of films, film genres, TV series, music, pop culture trends, food and much more.

 

My idea is to follow the Acai berry. The oh so trendy and oh so expensive delectable berry that is not only a super food (this word will possibly be discussed) but it’s also a tool for Instagram success if photographed right. Food porn is as popular as ever and the Acai berry is getting dragged into peoples feeds everywhere. Perhaps looking at places in Melbourne and if you want to travel abroad, where to get it overseas aswell.

Wednesday’s class saw us working on our grammar again. We looked at the common grammatical errors in our Project Brief assessment tasks.
The topics we covered were:

  • Passive and active voices
  • The difference between colons and semicolons
  • The different types of dashes (hyphen, en-dash, em-dash)
  • It’s versus its
  • Effect versus affect

Alexia introduced the class with the simple activity of reading out sentences by switching from a passive voice (filled with film references) to an active voice. This made us realise how important it is to maintain an active voice in a critical review and how easy it is to fall into the passive voice again.

The Week Six Recap

Monday’s class saw us discussing the definition of a curator. We analysed how it has changed over time. It doesn’t solely refer to art gallery or museum curators anymore, now any individual can be a curator online using a blog, website or Instagram; much like the idea that everyone’s a critic. As a class we tried to outline the differences between a critic and a curator. In this task we unravelled the wide and jumbled web of a modern day curator like Gwyneth Paltrow and her lifestyle “instruction manual”, Goop. We asked ourselves is it a genuine collection of tips and tricks to achieve a healthy happy life or perhaps just a pretentious collection of products the average Jo or Joanne could never afford?

Alexia gave us two readings for the class to read out together, prompting more discussion that helped us nut out the confusing world of curation. The studio finished with an update on PB3 and what our coming weeks looked like.

On Wednesday we tackled a couple of writing exercises. Alexia asked us to think of a tv show, it could be anything we liked. This was daunting as we knew we would be writing on  it but had no idea in what context. I chose Sex in the city. We were then asked to choose from a basket full of pieces of paper with a single word written on them. we then had to use the word and our tv show and write whatever came to our head. Use both topics as prompts for each other and see where we ended up. I received Architecture. At first i was thrown off and started listing the obvious, then i got a bit more descriptive with my prose. When we went around the room and read out our topic and word it was fascinating to see all the different ideas and obscure topic people got onto using their imagination and by following a trial of thought.

We moved onto a grammar lesson. We discussed the difference between active and passive sentences, for example:

Somebody stole my laptop.

My laptop was stolen by somebody.

We identified the object (laptop), the verb (stole) and the subject (somebody). We can identify the first sentence as ACTIVE because the subject does the action to the object. This sentence is more clear and gets to the point quickly.

Another example is:

While Mr. Taylor was driving down Highway 101, he was pulled over and given a ticket by an officer. (PASSIVE)

 While Mr Taylor was driving down Highway 101, a police officer pulled him over, and gave him a ticket. (ACTIVE)

Heading into the second half of the semester, it’s extremely handy to have these sorts of grammar lessons as we are delving into our portfolios and final pieces.