Reflections of the Southern Institute of Technology, Part 1

Well some time has passed now since being in attendance at the Southern Institute of Technology, SIT for short. It is only after spending this time away from the place that I can make some clearer observations of my time spent there, and the implications thus far.

I came into the SIT, in particular the Digital Media Bachelor programme, as I'm sure many did in high spirits and with a lot of hope towards the future. Most of us were assured that this course was exactly for us, and that we would be able to grow and hone our skills all the while learning and having fun. It definitely started out that way, and with Karen Love as our programme manager things started off very well indeed. Karen, like another couple of our tutors, was originally from America so of course offered a different perspective. She turned out to be a surprising wealth of knowledge, and during classes with her I was always overwhelmed by the sheer amount of wisdom and the differing perspectives offered by her. She was very interested in Mythology, Feminism and of course Films, and had been a University professor for many years before hand. The other tutors were good as well, we had Pete who was originally from Australia taking us for the pratical side of things, and he always got excited in student projects and generally anything you told him about. Patrick was our tutor for screenwriting and sound design, and he also had a lot of experience and stories to share with us.

Myself and Michael had already tried making a couple of short videos before starting the course, and with the help of Steven, a like minded student, we started off on our first project right at the start of the year together which was The Storybook. I rushed together a script very quickly which was roughly based off one I had done for the screenwriting class, and with our limited knowledge and skills we shot the entire thing in a few days. It turned out pretty good, of course it had many flaws due to many reasons (one of which the fact that it was edited on buggy Premiere 6.0 on a piece of crap computer), but it got us excited about future projects.

Before this we had only worked on short chase scenes with varying success. Steve's short, Frankie and Louie would serve to be the inspiration for many of his later works, but until our third year we never really managed to recapture how well the chase scene worked. My chase scene, Retard without a Cause, as a fun piece of horror schlock with a script I wrote during another class. Although it was fun to make, I had some continuity errors and the footage was rather grainy due to poor light conditions which the PDX-10 camera couldn't quite handle. At least all the projects back during these times were really fun, and as it would turn out before a lot of our creativity and motivation would be quashed from us.

After these our individual film projects would be made, which included The Ones Outside for me, Numb from Michael and Natalie's Dream from Steve. This was were some of the first problems started to arise, one of which being the extremely limited amount of time spent on developing the scripts. This is one of the problems that plagued almost every movie project done at SIT, and one of the main reasons the general quality of movies made there were generally low. We all had to rush to write a new story, then scramble together to actually try and make it. Although I'm sure we all tried our best, if you start with a bad script its going to be difficult to try and make a good movie out of it. My script was based off an idea I had whilst walking home one night, and while it sounded good to me at the time, later on it became apparent just how many flaws such a story would have. The execution of actually making the movie was also really poor, and because everyone was scrambling to make their own films I didn't receive a lot of help and had to attempt to film the entire 15 minute movie in the space of just over two days. Believe me it showed. Anyway it was all a learning process, and I guess you have to make a lot of bad movies before the good ones come, at least for those of us not blessed with godlike directing or writing skills. Michael faced similar problems, while Steve's movie turned out fairly well considering the time spent making it, although he himself was disappointed with the end result.

These events would serve to be an indication towards a turn for the worse in the upcoming time spent at the SIT, which I will cover in the next post.