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.