Another class at Full Sail down and so is another month of quarantine. Like last month this class was entirely online and I feel like this class was hit much differently than the last one. In Directing Talent, it was clear from the get-go that the class structure was gutted by the removal of on-campus labs and events like the casting day and simply doing projects as a group. This month, though, felt more like quarantine had just finally caught up with everyone and it seemed like everyone was either burned out on motivation and didn’t want to put much effort in or were burning themselves out on numerous projects as they didn’t want to do anything else as they came here to be filmmakers. Personally, I’m at the point where I came here to be a filmmaker but I also didn’t move to Florida just to do online classes for several months when I came here to get hands on time with equipment and locations for filming that I don’t normally have access to. Plus, without any filmed projects in development I haven’t had anything new to cultivate my editing skills since March. Being stuck in quarantine alone has definitely not done much for my morale and motivation which had only just started to go up leading up to my move to Florida.
Talking specifically about this class, as described by a classmate, it felt like a recap of what we have been learning at Full Sail thus far. There hasn’t been an abundance of new information, rather, we went more in depth about things in story development that we should already have some grasp of. This makes this class feel like we’re treading water due to the last class also being adapted for online learning to feel almost like a continuation of script writing as instead of doing the labs where we would have worked with actors to learn more about the directing process we pretty much fine-tuned some previous scripts as well as edit existing scripts for the purposes of adaptation and adding subtext to neutral dialogue. This class also felt like an extension of that as we spent several days workshopping various scripts we wrote even one, like mine, that we weren’t planning on pitching for thesis. The workshops were helpful, and I got some great feedback for my tv series idea as I needed to work out a lot of it as a concept outside of the first act of the pilot that I wrote so far. The assignments also helped me develop this idea further including delving deeper into the protagonist and the world in itself not to mention developing a theoretical pitch keynote for it so I can narrow down the look of the show and what the series will feel like as well as what can be expected from a given episode and how it could possibly be filmed and produced. These assignments and workshopping have helped give me more motivation to develop this project further even if I leave full sail with just a completed pilot script that could be useful for the future.
What this class hasn’t helped with is deciding on a thesis project. Before this class even started I’ve been hoping that we’ll be able to film something for thesis as I’m not confident in myself as a writer enough to write a feature film script that I would be happy with by the end of the year nor is writing why I came here. No, I’m hoping to get on another of my cohort’s thesis project and be the film editor and/or a camera operator. After the last, and only, project I’ve filmed at Full Sail I don’t think my path is leading towards my being a Director of Photography. Rather, editing is my real passion. The problem here is that everything has been locked down since mid-March and I haven’t had any new projects to edit, nor have I been confident in the ability to be able to even be part of a thesis production given the state of everything. Recently, I’ve become more confident we’ll be able to shoot something for thesis as well as other projects, but that’s only been within the last week. That means that I still don’t know who is going to pitch a project or what project they’re pitching. Hopefully that is sorted out soon so I can get excited to work on something again. In the meantime, further developing my series idea using tools from this class will be a goal of mine, if anything as a backup thesis project and at the very least something I can show employers in the future to show that I can write tv.
One thing I’ve enjoyed from the lectures this month is the use of referencing clips from movies as well as watching some full movies and TV episodes and analyzing them as I always enjoy digging deeper into things that I watch and these times were no exception. Especially watching clips after going over the same scene in the script is very useful as I know I and others in my cohort have struggle with not directing on the page and knowing that we need to trust our actors. For example, we watched the diner scene from the end of Pulp Fiction which was mostly the same as the script but several lines were improvised or removed but if you just watch the scene itself it all flows perfectly and no one would ever be able to tell anything is missing.
In any case, I definitely learned more about story development through this class, although admittedly its mostly been outside of the lectures. The assignments, though, are useful so far to help me develop this story, which I suppose is the entire purpose of this class. As someone who wants to be a film editor, though, I hope soon I can get more experience at it and learn more on telling the story through the edit. Here’s to next month hopefully being the last class taking place entirely in my bedroom on Zoom.
Anthony Dorsey's Mastery Journal 