August 2008

This week I was really excited to start my part-time film-making course at the Met Film School. I have always wanted to make a film and am really looking forward to learning all the different skills needed as well as hopefully deciding exactly which one I want to develop into a career. The first session laid out exactly what we are going to cover over the course of the year and was a chance to get acquainted with the other students and their interests and experience. There are nine of us in the class, which is a nice number because everyone gets to contribute and it’s much easier to get to know each other. There is a big range of backgrounds amongst the other students: from an actor who has already directed two short films of his own to a civil servant who is after a career change! It became clear very early on that we all had the similar aim of trying all aspects of film-making out and finishing with our own project.

Our course tutor, Darren, has already made the class feel comfortable about how the course is going to progress: he is really easy to talk to and is full of interesting anecdotes and tips from his own experiences as a director. He also seems genuinely keen to know where our interest lies and what we expect out of the course. In our first session, we went over all the roles involved in each of the stages of making a film – and it was funny to realise how many we had heard of but had no idea what they meant! On the second day we jumped straight into our first shooting exercise, in which we had to film ‘The Punch’, a very simple story using each other as actors. Darren went through the different kinds of shots that exist, showing us examples of each, and showed us how to storyboard our ideas. In groups of three, we were given a camera, tripod and boom pole and our own individual tapes to film on. As a group, we took it in turns to storyboard an idea each that involved someone punching someone else and then went on to film each of our stories, trying to use all the shots that we had been taught. It was great to be given a camera so quickly, and a lot of fun to film our own little sequences.

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Jean Crous

(Story To Screen In Eight Weeks) has been working as a freelance location manager since January 2006. In this time he has worked on five features and three shorts, as well as writing and directing two documentary films in his spare time. he is currently working as location manager on a BBC TV drama which is in the final stages of pre-production.