by Joe Watson Issue 90 - June 2014
Once again I am writing to inform all of you what Uni life is like¦ right now one word does come clearly to mind, "hectic". Myself and my fellow students are approaching deadline day for the final year of the course. We\'ve gone through many projects together and we\'ve all had some form of work experience which is what my previous article entry was about. There are many things that have to be done over the next 3 weeks, we have to make a show reel out of footage we have shot and then also create a professional looking website or webpage for that show reel to be posted onto, we have to submit a journal of 30 days work experience and finally we have to do our FMP (Final Major Project).
We\'re actually allowed a bit of freedom with our FMP as we can create whatever we want as long as it is roughly 15 to 20 minutes long. It\'s really nice having this freedom because since the beginning of the course in 2012, no-one on the course has created a dramatic piece. We have made documentaries, news stories, adverts but never something with a fully scripted storyline. The year group decided to split into two teams and while one half is creating a documentary on a historical monument here in Weymouth, my group has decided to create a short thriller film. We did realise that creating a drama is more of a challenge than making a documentary however I think all of us are up for it. We actually started drawing up ideas at about the end of March. We really wanted to go for a dark murder mystery with a modern setting. One of the main ideas that we all agreed on was to have a character who is kidnapped and tortured by a group of masked people. We would have then revealed that the group of people were actually woman who were after the killer of their murdered friend (which would be shown in flashbacks), the man that they were torturing. It wasn\'t until around mid to late April that we decided that this idea was rather silly so we scrapped it and began working on something else.
Our current project has a similar style to the film \'Phone Booth\', I won\'t reveal to much as I don\'t want to annoy my co-workers because we are still in production and have only filmed roughly one third of the project. I feel that all I am allowed to say is that there is murder, there is mystery, there is a bit of gore and you won\'t stop guessing until the very end.
It\'s actually very interesting working on a drama as well because something we\'ve not really had to do before is look for actors. Out of all of the projects we have done over the past two years we\'ve never really had to work with actors and I think the only time we have was for two corporate videos at the beginning of this year and the actors were already chosen for that, we were only required to film it. We\'re actually quite lucky because we have some friends who are students on one of the drama courses here at Weymouth College who were initially quite reluctant to take part until we found we could credit them with work experience. We prepared as professionally as we could, we had auditions, decided who was better for the role and then called them back telling them they got the part. We\'ve decided that myself and the other two people working behind the camera will make cameos in the short film, too.
So that\'s pretty much it, got a lot to do over the next few weeks and I look forward to completing the year. It\'s been a great two years really and the people I\'ve worked with I\'m glad to call my friends. We always have a laugh and University really is an amazing experience. I would like to also thank TV Bay for giving me the opportunity to share my experience through these articles.
