Welcome to my MPoL, which actually turns out to be my last one. Ever. Which is shocking, and I’m not ready to think of a life where I won’t be doing MPoLs every year, or the implications that has.

But, moving on, this is a presentation on my learning. It’s to show what I have accomplished this year, what I probably didn’t accomplish, and what I’ll be working on as I move on throughout the year until I graduate. Yikes.

Let’s start with the positives, because it’ll all be downhill from here. What’s something I did well this year?

Public Speaking

I’d say that was my project on Punk Rock. More specifically, my presentation. Now, I’ve never been awesome at talking in front of a crowd. In here feels different, though I remember how nerve wracking it was to do my first class presentation. Though as I’ve gone on, my public speaking has gotten better and better, up until this most recent presentation. I didn’t need a full length script, or any uncomfortable jokes to make myself feel better (okay, maybe one stupid comment that reminded me of John Mulaney)

But my public speaking has really improved, all I needed were a few notes and I was good to go. I felt confident in what I was saying and, not that I should be bragging, I hardly rehearsed for the presentation.

Learning From Those Around Me

Switching gears, what is something that I’ve been developing? That would be learning from those around me. I set a goal for myself early this year, I’d like to say halfway through our Shakespeare unit on the Taming of the Shrew: I wanted to learn one thing from every classmate in PLP. I had this whole revelation that this was my last year with everyone, and “oh god was I even going to remember them in twenty years when I’m sitting at home thinking of high school?” Something that is always so key to remembering people is to learn something from them. I don’t want to name drop anything, but I have a few things I’ve learned so far, such as knowing when to speak up and when to step back, expressing myself in my work, and the art of patience. Many people taught me that during our film.

I’m still working on learning more, and I’m hoping by the end of the year I can look at each person in our class and think of one thing they taught me, whether they meant to or not.

Now, onto the dreaded part. What hasn’t gone so well?

Workload

I realize this was brought up last year, I wanted to be more involved in class, but it was something on the list of “things Parker said he would do and then he never did.” I will be the first to admit that this year for me was not as stressful as past years, and that is a me problem. Not that I should be stressed all the time, but compared to past experiences, I feel like I don’t have the same workload  that’s because I haven’t been taking on as much as I could be doing. I’ll use the example that everyone in our class has used by now: The Horrid Film. Sorry, Horror Film.

I’m sure you’ve heard enough of how terrible the communication was, or the project itself, or dealing with certain people, and a million other reasons. But, for once, my issue isn’t the teamwork. It’s me. Part way through the process of our horror film, we had a chance in Key Creative Team. Willa and I were offered roles as co-directors, but I turned it down. While I did have a few other things going on at the time, that was more an excuse I made up, both for myself and for the people who were expecting an answer out of me. Frankly, I didn’t accept the role because I didn’t want to deal with directing. The idea of all of my classmates looking to me for direction on a film who’s plot I hardly knew anymore was a lot, and so I backed down.

In hindsight, I regret that. While the film was a flop, the experience of directing would have been good, and there were definitely moments on set where I wanted to speak up about a certain thing, but then didn’t want to add to the plethora of voices already telling everyone what to do, especially considering it wasn’t my job.

I need to learn to take risks more, and find that balance between taking on too much and not taking on enough. It’s something I plan on working on throughout this year, and most likely into university and the rest of my life. But I’m aware of it now, and it’s a balance I’ll probably spend a lot of time trying to achieve. And there will be times where I won’t be able to find that balance and I will need to take on more work than I can handle, and I need to figure out how to deal with that too.

Which leads me into my question: What is a good way to guide me towards that balance between taking on too much work and not taking on enough? How can I shift my weight to a place that is comfortable to me?

Thanks for listening!

Parker

 

I’d like to preface this by saying that while that title may seem dramatic, it’s ultimately what this project became. So what was this project? Our task was to use what we had learned in our horror unit and create a short horror film surrounding the driving question:

“Why is horror such an effective way to reflect and comment on our society?”

But let’s take a step back. Where did this all start?

Well, that being Seattle. We traveled down and went to the MoPOP, a museum that had a whole exhibit just on horror. It was really interesting to see interviews with famous directors and horror actors, and see their perspective. We also got to see examples of different horror monsters, such as the difference between an <alien> and a <person>, and how that affected the theme and tone of a movie.

With our research started, then came the next part: planning the movie. After a few pitches, we had a fairly good idea of what we wanted to do. We needed to cover something that was doable with what he had, obviously, and it had to comment on our society.

We chose to go with something relevant to us: teenage stereotypes. Our story was going to center around two groups of teenagers who don’t like each other, nerds and jocks. They had planned to put halloween pranks around the school on the same night. Slowly, the students are picked off one by one, and each side suspects the other side did it. At the end, however, it’s revealed it’s the janitor who’s tired of their antics and cleaning up after them.

It felt strong, though that was probably where this project peaked. As they say, it all went downhill from there. Our script had quite a few revisions to do, including cutting characters and making the students be in detention, set after the pranks had happened. Next, we were on to filming.

 

If we thought script revisions were hard, we had no clue what was coming for us with filming. I was set to makeup department, so I luckily didn’t need to deal with anything such as directing, but it was still difficult. Origin in ally, we had Ryan set as our beautiful Janitor. Of course, Ryan is not a middle aged man, but I used stage makeup the best I could to make him look as such:

I was also acting, playing the character of a gay theatre geek named Kirk. Acting was interesting, as it was a lot of waiting around for everything to be set up, and doing the sam elites over and over and over again. I think over all, I preferred doing makeup.

After a long few weeks of work, we found that our film wasn’t quite there. So we had a few recasts, in both actors and production crew, and reshot everything. Everything. It was exhausting, but I got to do a major part of my job: more makeup.

Then came the final day of filming. We were so close, we had just shot Willa’s death, and the news came. We would have our filming cut short, and we didn’t get to film our final scenes

We didn’t communicate very well in the end, I think. We were trying to manage a full class of people and work around all of their schedules on short notice. So, fo the future, we really need to plan ahead of time, and communicate better.

But, on the bright side, we made a really good trailer!

I still have 2 gallons of fake blood in my house that I never got to use, but I’ll find something for it.

Read ya later

Parker