I'm not an actor,

But I know some if you are interested...



"Employ us, we were on Neighbors!"



One of the hardest things to see in my degree is the amount of talented people being diddled by university bureaucracy. My degree has suffered much raping and pillaging from the hob nobs that run this joint in the past several years. To this end it has been canceled, the last intake was my year, and we will all be graduating come summer (sans those sado-masochistically undertaking a honors year). The cancellation of the Bachelor of Creative Arts is all part of the bigger picture apparently (its what the promotional information is telling us). Our University wants to be swanky and cutting edge so damn bad, unfortunately they also have money issues in abundance and those issues kind of work in opposition to the whole best university in the galaxy blueprints. So in trying to disguise the mass lay-offs and course culls they deem necessary to tighten belts around campus they tacked these actions onto a movement which is now called the Melbourne Model, my uni can multitask betch! You should google the Melbourne Model, the internet will provide the answers I cannot, I'm not smart like the internet...

Anyway I think I was making a point of some sort...oh yeah, so we have a bevvy of beautifully talented peeps in Creative Arts. Actors, photographers, movie makers, art makes, makers of beautiful things in general and you know what, they deserve all the breaks. They deserve the support of the uni, they deserve the love. I'd give it to them (and I do, only in appropriate ways) but my love ain't gonna put food on the table. We have only a handful of dedicated teachers left who do provide great mentorship but they're stretched thin, we outnumber them. We need more staff, we needed them when we began our course, we didn't need the subsequent cuts which happened after we started.

It has gotten to the point that for our final semester instead of separate classes for film, print making, painting, photography and other crafty arty things there is one class with the lot of us tossed in and left to tread water. Its hard and it totally sucks and it makes me mad. If I had know things would get like this when I began my course (and we were made to believe otherwise) I question if I would have spent the time and money I did to get my piece of paper come graduation.

This is boring, isn't it? Questioning bureaucracy is boring aint it, even if you throw in savvy youthful words like totally and aint. I guess that's the problem, people get bored with fighting for the things they deserve. Sad.

Would a picture make this interesting? Demonstrate why we Craties (creative arties) deserve more than we got?
I took these last year...make of them what you will.

YouTube Sunday

The assembly cut of Gangsta Farm: the legend of slaughterhouse road. Totally hilarious, inspired, genius, spectacular, touching, dramatic, horrific student film some randoms did. (Too many adjectives? Never!)





Enough shameless self promotion for one day. In other news I was the unlucky recipient of the commonly miss-understood season-change-flu this past week. What a cruel stroke of irony, in the Alanis Morissette sense of the word. A week of troublingly beautiful weather that brought with it no picnics or sessions of croquet in the park but rather many uncontrolable bouts of sneezing, vomiting and fainting. Apparently when ill I'm like a character in a Jane Austen book, I should look into investing in some smelling salts.

Anyway, regardless of said flu I persevered and attended all of my classes this week, I think I am at my creative best when under the influence of fever.

Thanks Obama

Looks like some change we can believe in...

Hitler by any other name.

Having a keen understanding of romance my boyfriend and I decided to see Inglorious Bastards for our one-year anniversary. I’m so glad I went. I got to have a peek at the next instalment of the gothic Mormon love-fest that is the Twilight saga and a bucket of pop-corn the size of my face. Also I now have a keen understanding of just what it takes to pitch a film in Hollywood these days. Useful no? If you’ll bear with me I’ll try and explain how you to can get a film into Cannes.

In my Writing for Screen class we do this exercise called ‘What if?’. It’s load of fun, basically it’s an idea generator and you just try to create the most ridiculous scenarios you can by continually asking ‘what if?’. Here is the example my class came up with the other day.

What if….the scene is set in a supermarket and the checkout chicks are zombies?
What if…A twelve year old boy tries to shoplift?
What if… the zombie checkout chicks attack him?
What if… one zombie, a lonely spinster on the wrong side of fifty falls in love with the boy?
What if… she tries to save him from the other zombies by putting him in a meat freezer?
What if… she can’t help herself and has a snack on his left leg before she freezes him?
What if…the boys mother comes in the next day and accidentally buys her sons corpse and serves him up to the entire extended family where the zombie virus takes hold and BAM, zombie apocalypse?

Got a basic understanding of how it plays out? Apparently so does Quentin Tarantino. I think he got bored one day and played a game of ‘What if?’ that went like this.

What if…some Jews go to France to kill some Nazi’s?
What if… Brad Pitt looked like Hitler?
What if…I sort of but not really make this movie a comment about the violence in my films and in cinema today.
What if…I can’t be bothered buying realistic special effect make-up artists anymore?
What if…I kill off the most interesting character in my movie less than halfway through?
What if…we got Mexican for dinner?
Etc…

There, now you have the formula, go forth and create. And fyi that zombie idea, I think I will turn it into my first screenplay, it’s going to be like Harold and Maude but with more entrails.

Practicing

I enter the job market at the end of this year. I’m going to take my Bachelor of Creative Arts and shop around, see who is interested. The plan thus far is to have my TV pilot picked up and whilst I make award winning radical television I’ll build my portfolio on the side, working as the worlds laziest freelance writer. I personally think I’m a bit of a catch (just quietly the tele pilot is nothing short of genius) but I’m not to sure how well shameless self promotion translates into graduate jobs for people who sort-of-but-not-really know their way around Final Cut. A writing tutor told me a blog was a good thing to have if you want to write, ‘cause prospective employers totally dig semi-literate ‘artists’ and what they post on the interweb. I’ll give it a go although as previously mentioned I’m pretty damn lazy so we will see how this all transpires shall we?