Reflections of the Southern Institute of Technology, Part 3

In the third year at the SIT, things finally started to improve. Although we didn't really receive any more tutors except for a horrible Media Culture one, the management of the course became a lot more sorted, and the head guy from the Audio faculty became the head of our programme as well.

The year started off with an interesting concept of creating a 30 second commercial with the full participation of both the Film and Multimedia students, and as finished would be a combined live action/cg piece of work. It all sounded interesting enough, if not a bit overwhelming on the scale of which we had to plan the whole project out, even though it was only a mere 30 seconds worth. The class finally settled on an idea by Kat, which would be about a couple of sharks fishing for fishermen. Somewhere, somehow, the original idea of the cartoony sharks disappeared along with the plot of the commercial. It then became a commercial about a fisherman that gets pulled into the water by one of the aforementioned sharks for some reason, with no actual tag line or gimmick planned for the end. This wasn't really realised until right near the end of the project which is rather ridiculous.

Anyway I will say that it wasn't the greatest success, although for awhile it was definately fun. We all got assigned different positions according to our talent/areas of interest, and I became the D.O.P. which I was pleased with. The project involved an on location shoot in Bluff for one morning, and a very involved greenscreen shoot at another time. Most of the filming was a piece of cake after all the preparations and organization had been accomplished for the greenscreen shoot. The postproduction and cg aspects however would be more of a headache, with the editor leaving for a baseball game in Australia and me taking over as temporary editor. The main problem was the lack of communication with the multimedia students, they would continuously provide us with weirdly named files and tons of mixed up HD layers which became very confusing to put together. The multimedia students did some good work, but because of a couple of students a lot of things got mixed up along the way. Anyway in the end it turned out alright, except it made no sense, like a lot of stuff made at SIT.

Later on in the year I did a little side project which involved my brother wandering around some places, just as practice on the camera and to try some pull focuses etc. I also wrote another short which I ultimately couldn't find actors for. Actually make that two shorts that I couldn't find actors for. Me Michael and Steve also teamed up to make a 3 minute short based on some of his earlier ideas, which in my eyes is probably the best thing we've came up with even though it was really short. Sonny and Donnie is one of the signs that we were finally breaking free from both the horrible conventional mold of the SIT, and also from the lack of creativity and motivation that had plagued us in the past. It was basically written and filmed one afternoon, but feels the most complete compared to anything else I've done. Even though its only a single scene, if you watch it in full HD the film-craft is fairly topnotch, except for a slight lack of light on Michael's character due to our shortage of lights at the time. After this I basically leant my help to a few of my fellow students to help them with the feature length movies which took up a lot of my time but gave me some good experience, and earnt me the respect of Patrick.

In the end I only received my Diploma in Digital Film, but thats fine by me. Michael and Steve are returning again for a fourth year to achieve their diplomas, and to work on a television pilot. In retrospect I now can see all the problems we faced and how that affected us, and I can only hope that in the future we now have it in us to make some decent films to be proud of. Although my time there wasn't always enjoyable I think I learnt at least a few things, even though I had hoped to learn a lot more. As to whether I would recommend the SIT to any hopeful filmmakers... I'd probably have to say I would, as the course has been straightened out a lot since all these incidents happened. It will probably never be the same as it once was right back at the beginning, but they are getting some really nice gear to rival any other place in the country. So if you have the motivation and some creativity, it should suit you fine.