Glass Half Empty

It seems appropriate that the 3-minute self-reflexive documentary film I made for my MA was called Half Empty. I've just got my mark back.

Now this time yesterday I said to Daniel that I'd be happy with anything over 60 (a merit). I went on to say that if it was in the higher end of the 60-70 mark bracket I'd be really happy... But I'm not. I got 66. Which just means that somewhere along the way I've dropped 34 marks. It's put me in a bit of a funk really. I'm drinking beer in an attempt to alleviate the melancholy but I don't know if that's the wisest course of action.

Why am I pissed off? I just don't get it. The comments were good and the 'negative' comments were there to highlight what I needed to do to get a better mark. I've actually had to go back over the feedback with a highlighter pen to pick out the positive comments so that I can focus on what I did right - 'visually rich, textually rich, visual metaphors...Very moving story, very brave + beautiful... Essay has good references + awareness of the form... a solid piece with great potential. Look forward to the next one.' All good stuff, no?

So, what went wrong then? 'Mostly this suffers from too many good things all competing'. The pacing suffered- I just needed to give the viewer more space to absorb things. The brief for the film was to use a poem by Hafiz as a jumping off point... I used a whole poem in voiceover even though I felt that I was struggling to fit it in (the running time of the poem was about a minute...) And that leads to the final thing I got wrong... I forgot to analyse what I thought worked and what I thought didn't work in my commentary. Dickhead. I knew I'd tried to get a lot into the 3 minute film (ONLY THREE MINUTES DEGS!) and had struggled to find the space needed for the film to breathe... why didn't I say that???

I know I'll feel okay about the mark this time tomorrow and at some point over the summer I'll go back to the edit and craft a beautiful and succinct film... it's not so far from that now after all. I just need to get back to seeing things as Half Full in the meantime...