I hope that you have enjoyed your first year! Yes the adult life has been pretty scary but I think I have been able to adapt well to it and have thoroughly enjoyed my independence and freedom. You said only three years to go but by the time I have replied to your letter, it has now decreased to two. 

Your hopes have been fulfilled because I have truly gained a lot of experience from the projects that we have had to complete which have included group work, individual work, technical skills and reflective work. All of the modules have added up over the year to give me a taster of different aspects of media. I have certainly gained so much more confidence not just with the equipment side of things but also my confidence with people. I am able to talk to people who I don’t know and hold a full length conversation with them as I have had to do for the documentary module for example. As we have been made to work with different members in the class, it has truly given me the opportunity to make new friends and allow the class to support each other throughout the year.

You speak of creating a short film, well I have certainly achieved this as I have made a short horror film at the beginning of the year based on students playing with a Ouija board. I was involved with creating the ideas, the props, the filming, the narrative and the editing. I enjoyed all of these stages of production and realized how much of an achievement it was to have completed something that I never would have thought I would have been able to create in the first place. My ideas on what I wanted to do within the media have certainly changed as I have thoroughly enjoyed the role of floor manager in my production module as well as creating documentaries so these are the areas that I would like to study further in order to establish which of the two I could see myself doing in a couple of years time.

This year has made me even more amibitious than I started off which I think is great and I think you would be very proud of me for.

I feel as those I have succeeded in another one of your aims for me as I have already gathered up ideas for my second year work placement. I will be searching around during the summer holidays in order to investigate which organizations would be happy to take students on for work experience to enable me to get a head start.

I will admit that the library hasn’t initially been my second home this year due to carrying out most of my work within the walls of my flat although I have used the resources available to me in order to carry out more specific research on certain topics that I was studying at the time. This has helped me hugely and has expanded my knowledge and understanding of concepts that I may have not understood beforehand.

The only area that I feel as though we haven’t looked at very much is radio and photography. I feel as though these aspects could have been in-cooperated into one of the modules to enable all of the students to fully gain a variety of mixed media experience but apart from this, the modules have been brilliant.

As you can see my first year has been very productive and I have thoroughly enjoyed myself so you have nothing to worry about. I am going to work even harder in the next two years to truly show people what I am capable of.

Take care

xx

Enjoy

http://yasmin113.wordpress.com/

I like the idea of using a simple beat in the background with the addition of characters repeating their lines at different times. I will suggest this idea to the Orange Group to see what the possibility would be of creating something like this.

After doing some research for set ideas and growing fond of Dean Holbrooke’s painting, I used this to create the set to our children’s programme.

I think that it looks great and very childlike which is exactly the look that I wanted along with the rest of the group for this set.

It is an autobiographical piece of work that is drawn from one of the artistic directors in relation to her culture and her adaption to the life in England. It was interesting to watch as a lot of the movements were quite repetitive and Evelyn began to speak the language of her home land throughout, ‘Astonia’. As I was watching the piece, I was also focusing on the media student filming it to see what methods he was using in order to capture the good shots. There was only one-third year student who used a PDX10 and headphones to film the performance handheld which I was quite surprised at as I thought the dance department would have asked several media students to film it at different angles in order to give the editors a variety of choice.  This then gave me confidence in being able to do something like this by myself as I have the skills needed to operate such equipment. As I was walking down the corridor of the Ellen Terry building, I saw an advertisement for media students to help film the ‘Moonlight Dance companies’ performance so I added them on Facebook and asked them for more information on it which I still am currently waiting for. I think that this would be a create experience and opportunity to put my skills to the test.

The film was released in Hong Kong in 2006 and is directed by Pang Ho-Cheung who has also directed many other films such as ‘Fulltime Killer’ and ‘Undercover Blues’. It stars Isabella Leong and the great Chapman To.

The story of this film is that when Shing was a young boy, he fell in love with a woman named Jia but he soon left her without the knowledge that she had actually been pregnant. Jia stayed a single mother and raised her daughter Yan.  After the death of Yans mother, she was left to fend for herself and make her own money through selling her own body. Yan was further pressurized to find money after her landlord had threatened to kick her out along with her dog ‘Isabella’. This led to Yan in search of her dad and when she finds him, he isn’t to keen on having her around. After a couple of returns made by Yan, Shing gives in and allows her to live with him which is when he finds out a lot more than he had bargained for. As Shing is a lady’s man, he regularly has different women visiting him (not just for a cup of tea!) but Yan soon deals with this by stating the lie that she is now his new girlfriend. As they begin to spend time together, the film allows you to see how he begins to accept her into his life along with many emotions throughout the journey from tears to laughter.

I could only describe the film as beautiful with some great camera shots used to convey the mood of the characters. The story is in separate pieces to begin with but as the film comes to an end, the narrative all fits together and makes sense. I think the way in which Pang Ho-Cheung has done this is very clever and he has truly captured the love between a father and his daughter. I would definitely recommend this film to those who love a slight romantic comedy with a bit of mystery.

Here’s the trailer if your interested!

This programme is based on autistic people within the public who want to learn to drive. They show the journey from when they were in the process of learning to drive up to several of them passing which I think is a great way to show their achievement. It also conveys the struggle that autistic people have with everyday life and how these challenges affect them.

I think that for the media to do this allows the opportunity for people to gain a better understanding of what autistism consists of and how being autistic affects the person themselves. Disabled people used to be outcasted hugely by the nation several years ago. I was talking to my granddad about this and he said that there used to even be a separate school and a bus for children who were disabled which completely pushed them out from the public. It would make the people who were considered to be ‘normal’ look down on the people with disabilities. I think that this has now changed completely as people with disabilities are offered a variety of support and facilities such as extra lifts in buildings or carers to help them out with day-to-day life. I think that the under-represented groups within the media is now beginning to become more represented in films and programmes for example. The public seem to accept the people who aren’t considered the ‘norm’ and are a lot more helpful. I would say that there isn’t a huge amount of films out in the media industry that have included actors/actresses with disabilities but this is something that will hopefully change in years to come.

I was amazing by the amount of vlogging she had done. It’s similar to a blog but instead of posting comments, you post videos of what you want to say which in this case was her daily life. She talks to the camera whilst walking to the bus stop for example which she was very embarrassed of to begin with but now has the full confidence to do it out in the public. I think that this is a great idea as it physically shows your personal development and you can watch yourself grow up  as you continue it over the years. I am quite persuaded to carry one out as an evaluation of my first year so look out for posts to come!