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. You may rethink this dramatically – this is a good thing.”

You were asked this at the beginning of the semester. Now, could you review constructively what you got from this semester –  has the course lived up to your expectations, delivered what you expected, maybe even surpassed it?

most importantly for me this semester i want to make a film i am proud of, something i will want to show people. i want to learn a lot more about documentaries and the different forms. it’s never particularly been something that has interested me at all so i think this will give me an opportunity to make something i normally wouldn’t and it will be a really good experience.

i also think making a doco is an excellent opportunity to learn and discover a different way of filming. not everything can be planned, not everything can be perfect and often the idea can evolve and change along the way which i think is really important and something i’m looking forward to this semester.

Although we have not yet finished our film, from where we are currently at (which is very close to finishing), i am very proud of our film. similar to what i was hoping for at the start of semester, making this documentary has been completely different to anything i have done before. documentary is an incredibly different style of filmmaking to fiction and i certainly respect it a lot more.

what i have learned is that nothing has to be perfect. but not just that, nothing has to be done in any certain way. i went into this semester with a lot of preconceptions about the way things must be done when creating a documentary. for example, that if you are interviewing multiple subjects, their framing and time must always be the same. or that you can’t have the voice/questions of the interviewer included in your film. what i really enjoyed learning throughout the semester is that you can literally have anything in your film because it is yours. that was a big thing for me, not trying to base what i was creating off what others had done before me but to suit it towards what i was making.

overall, i enjoyed this semester a lot more than i had initially anticipated and i am a lot less hesitant to make documentaries in the future as i know understand that they don’t have the restrictions and limitations that i once believed.