Soon we'll be out, amid the cold world's strife / Soon we'll be sliding down the razorblade of life
Enjoy this sporadic communication while it lasts, because seriously, two weeks from now I will be posting four times a week out of sheer boredom.
Classes have ended - my last ever classes, with the teachers I have come to know far, far too well. Tuesday marked the last classes for affect and scriptwriting, and they were great. Affect in particular. Of the seven students who started out in the most difficult course with the most demanding teacher, five of us made it through. We ate tiny sandwiches and drank unholy amounts of coffee, and watched a really wonderful film (Sans Soleil, freely available on Google Video and so worth it, if you're in the mood for an essay on memory and experience), and then we did what we have done every Tuesday, which is to discuss it at length and figure out how it relates to the course, and then Tim came back in and we told him our conclusions, and he talked about how he wasn't going to do this course next year because a) he was taking a semester off to work on a paper and b) he didn't think there was anyone in his current 300-level classes who would talk as much as we just had, or write thought-diagrams on the whiteboard like we just had. (Seriously, hardest class ever, but the most worthwhile by far.)
Then we had the last scriptwriting class, and that was good - John brought in four actors from the theatre department to do scenes from a few of our scripts (though mine wasn't one of them, because it's still being written). Finally, Thursday was our last science fiction class, and that might have been the most fun of all, because Sean brought booze and we skipped a screening in favour of showing the whole class 2-minute clips from our own favourite moments in scifi. The examples ranged from Bishop's knife trick in Aliens (mine) to Jeff Goldblum melting his rival's limbs in The Fly, to Sam getting hit by a car in the pilot of Life On Mars, to a particularly ridiculous bit of Lost In Space - it was great fun. Even better, we were then invited downstairs to see the premiere of two short films made by Vic alums - both were great, but the second was the one I was a runner for. Yay!
Anyway, I've still got three assignments to go. There are the two big essays, due in 10 and 14 days respectively, but at the moment I'm still frantically working on my script. It's at 30 pages, and shows no signs of slowing down. I started out absolutely certain it was going to be a Lovecraftian horror story set in a town that was not really but really totally Bluff, the creepy disintegrating town at the bottom of the South Island. Then at the last minute I panicked about originality, asked for an extension, and started writing this weird Gaimanesque bildungsroman about a girl escaping from a children's paradise in fairyland with the heart of the fairy queen, across the wasteland into which said queen throws all the children who commit the crime of being incurably homesick, and reaching physical and emotional maturity in the course of the journey. I think because most coming-of-age tales are about boys, and thus about fights and getting to bone that one chick and how their dad is actually totally right/actually totally wrong, and instead I wanted one about waking up with boobs and the grossness of getting periods and discovering one's clitoris and the humbling realisation that you do not, in fact, hate your mother. All that, and a ride down a river in a macadamia nut shell through a landfill of abandoned toys. I'm hoping to get it finished by Monday.
Classes have ended - my last ever classes, with the teachers I have come to know far, far too well. Tuesday marked the last classes for affect and scriptwriting, and they were great. Affect in particular. Of the seven students who started out in the most difficult course with the most demanding teacher, five of us made it through. We ate tiny sandwiches and drank unholy amounts of coffee, and watched a really wonderful film (Sans Soleil, freely available on Google Video and so worth it, if you're in the mood for an essay on memory and experience), and then we did what we have done every Tuesday, which is to discuss it at length and figure out how it relates to the course, and then Tim came back in and we told him our conclusions, and he talked about how he wasn't going to do this course next year because a) he was taking a semester off to work on a paper and b) he didn't think there was anyone in his current 300-level classes who would talk as much as we just had, or write thought-diagrams on the whiteboard like we just had. (Seriously, hardest class ever, but the most worthwhile by far.)
Then we had the last scriptwriting class, and that was good - John brought in four actors from the theatre department to do scenes from a few of our scripts (though mine wasn't one of them, because it's still being written). Finally, Thursday was our last science fiction class, and that might have been the most fun of all, because Sean brought booze and we skipped a screening in favour of showing the whole class 2-minute clips from our own favourite moments in scifi. The examples ranged from Bishop's knife trick in Aliens (mine) to Jeff Goldblum melting his rival's limbs in The Fly, to Sam getting hit by a car in the pilot of Life On Mars, to a particularly ridiculous bit of Lost In Space - it was great fun. Even better, we were then invited downstairs to see the premiere of two short films made by Vic alums - both were great, but the second was the one I was a runner for. Yay!
Anyway, I've still got three assignments to go. There are the two big essays, due in 10 and 14 days respectively, but at the moment I'm still frantically working on my script. It's at 30 pages, and shows no signs of slowing down. I started out absolutely certain it was going to be a Lovecraftian horror story set in a town that was not really but really totally Bluff, the creepy disintegrating town at the bottom of the South Island. Then at the last minute I panicked about originality, asked for an extension, and started writing this weird Gaimanesque bildungsroman about a girl escaping from a children's paradise in fairyland with the heart of the fairy queen, across the wasteland into which said queen throws all the children who commit the crime of being incurably homesick, and reaching physical and emotional maturity in the course of the journey. I think because most coming-of-age tales are about boys, and thus about fights and getting to bone that one chick and how their dad is actually totally right/actually totally wrong, and instead I wanted one about waking up with boobs and the grossness of getting periods and discovering one's clitoris and the humbling realisation that you do not, in fact, hate your mother. All that, and a ride down a river in a macadamia nut shell through a landfill of abandoned toys. I'm hoping to get it finished by Monday.