Reflections of the Southern Institute of Technology, Part 2

We now proceed onwards to Year Two, a year that would try the patience of many innocent students and cause a large fallout in attendance numbers. I guess the year started out innocently enough, with everything seeming to be like normal. Everyone was looking forward to a productive year, now that we had some experience and some skills under our collective belts. The first thing that should have warned us that a storm was brewing was the continuing comments made by our tutor Karen, who was getting tired of the SIT management and the stress from being both a programme manager of the entire faculty as well as a tutor for a lot of different classes. Privately she even warned some students to get out of the course, as it was all about to go downhill very quickly.

It wasn't long before she disappeared completely without even saying goodbye to a lot of the students she had made close friendships with. We were told by replacement tutors that they weren't allowed to tell us how to get into contact with her and that she was on stress relief, but probably wouldn't be returning. Our class was left in the lurch, with many assignments looming and now replacement teachers that had the remotest idea of what they were doing or how to teach us. We had the amazing opportunity of burning through three sets of tutors attempting to replace her classes, the first two of which would fail to even try to listen to our pleas, since we had absolutely no idea what to do to finish the assignments, and all they told us was to just get them finished without actually wanting or knowing how to teach us anything. It was a lose lose situation. In the meantime our tutor Pete also left, as did James which was Karen's son and taught us things like web and graphic design.

We pretty much lost all of our tutors except for one, Patrick. Patrick assumed control of roughly all our classes, and although he has a lot of experience most of the classes weren't exactly his area of expertise, although he did try his hardest. Basically this created a vacuum of negativity and crushed a lot of motivation with the students, as over half our class members dropped out of the course to pursue other things. Some of the most promising students dropped out during this phase. The future of the course was uncertain, and a lot of the students thought that they would be shutting the thing down completely. There was no direction and a lot of misdirection, caused by the stupidity of the newly elected faculty members Alan and Lachlan. They met a lot of resistance, and they spouted a lot of resistance and stubbornness back. Another mistake was assigning a tutor from Sport and Recreation to take on our Fundamentals of Research class, where he had no idea what he was doing and openly admitted it. This caused me to drop out of the class due to the sheer ludicrisy of it. This would come to haunt me later down the track however, as due to the new black and white strict management I was unable to retake the class to get my Bachelor Degree.

Meanwhile our film projects of the year started, mine being No Quarter, and Michael's being Daydreamer. My efforts as good natured as they started off as turned into a mess of contrived and complicated plot structures. Michael on the other hand kept his film idea simple which paid off later on, even though he had a lot of troubles of his own which I will go into shortly. First I would like to say another one of the reasons which seems to make a lot of SIT short films into schlock, is the strict adherrence we must pay towards a conventional, three act story structure with all the plot structures of a feature length movie. I always had trouble adherring to such rules, and any attempts in doing so always seemed to turn my work into a mess. The problem with enforcing such strict rules is that it took the focus off the actual creative flow, and turned a lot of shorts into stories which would have fit into feature length films, except compressed down into a short. It simply doesn't work. This became extremely apparent at the end of the year during the film viewings, there were some good ideas in there but they all seemed like mini features and way too rushed to be any good. Back to the movies.

On my film No Quarter, I had some big ideas for the project and was really looking forward to it. Reality got in the way however, and most of the film ended up with me as the only crew member shooting pieces with usually only the main actor Logan. I got as much footage as I could, but it turned into a rush job again with me getting sick while filming. If the plot had been simplified and streamlined down to my original idea, and if it had made more sense the movie might have been better. I had a lot of fun messing around with the color grading of the film which was fun, except for some weird mistakes that ended up onto the DVDs I made with over the top grading instead of my original sepia looking footage.

Michael's movie turned out better, but he had a major continuity issue halfway through filming. One of his main actors, Steven, cut a lot of his hair off after we had done half the movie, which meant me and Michael had to reshoot the entire thing with us two as both the only crew members most the time and the two main actors. Talk about a headache. Seeing as the story was nice and simple however, it turned out pretty good in my eyes.

So Year Two at the SIT was a depressing time which would have ramifications for the rest of the time at the institute. It laid down the mood on all the students, and made it very difficult to get any motivation or creativity going during these times. Things would look up slightly in the year to come however, but would the advancements come too late for anything to be really achieved? I guess a wait for the third and final part will have to be endured to find out the answer.