Week ... (that begins on 9/03/09)

On Monday was my technical assessment with Ray. It went pretty well. Now I know that 1 hour flies away so fast, especially when one has to set up the lights! What is more, the daylight kept changing all the time. In the afternoon we had Barbara, and pitched our series idea with Charlotte and Murdo. She gave us some good piece of advice of what to add and develop further, for example, assigning roles to actors who are unlikely to play a certain type of character. On Tuesday, each one of us in the class had to present 6 premises and in small groups decide which are the best. Richard was not extremely impressed and told us to think of more premises. We also discussed the narrative structure of The Shawshank Redemption to figure out why this film works so successfully. The most interesting point that we reached, was that there are no 2 protagonists, but because Andy (the protagonist) does not overcome a fatal flow, the writers have consciously transferred the moral lesson and change to Red. Regarding the inciting incident, it can be interpreted in different ways, which makes the story hard to analyse. I think it's quite useful to discuss films like that, to try to unknit all the elements that make it so remarkable.
On Wednesday, Andy introduced the genre of sitcom to the class. We watched 2 old British sitcoms. I prefer Hancock, it was extremely entertaining!
Thursday morning was Abigail's class, and we gained some insight of how difficult and challenging a producer's job might be, especially regarding legal issues. We talked about copyright; I've done some study on that but barely remember anything. However, now I recollect some of the examples I've looked before. Moreover, we were intorduced to "optioning" of scripts and how much money writers make roughly. In the ideal case, the story will be original, should not need dialogue rewrite or shaping, not to mention changes in characters or relationships. Nonetheless, if any of these is not right, an executive developer or another writer should come to work on the script, which means more money will be spend in the very first stage of the film developing.
I missed the interview with Tony, but watched the screening which was amazing! I want to see more of this series.
CPP! Thursday and Friday was mainly filming talks and performances at the Arches. I must say I was a bit sceptic about the whole art of these students, but after seeing their performances I totally changed my mind. Everything they do has a point, and to my greatest surprise I was fascinated by what I saw and can't stop thinking about it. Believe it or not, it is not just the performance that catches one's interest, but it is afterwards when you go out of the Arches and the images still haunt your mind. Furthermore, I find myself appreciating it in a different way and level everytime I think about it. So in short, this should mean that the CCP students were successful in their performance in every single way. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the talks- I found some of them quite boring, maybe because they were delivered by retired artists with "not so fresh" ideas. But this is just my opinion.
Now I have to concentrate on the Moodle assignement (News/ Info/ Education) and read the rest of the Ofcom report (just 150 pages) huh :/

P.S - I watched only Casablanca this week. I still have a German, French and Japanese films in my laptop to finish with, because they're taking too much space of my hard drive