And after three days drinking with Larry Love, I just get an inkling to go on home.

Our Director Writes:

Diary of a Goddamn Mature Student: Winter Break

It's been a long and strange year. I guess that's just the way it is, really.

I mean, it surely reads like a myth being told, this tale of 2009.

Lost a job.

Lost an old friend.

Gained a new calling.

Gained lots of potential new friends.

Learnt how to direct and control a passion.

At least, it reads like one of the myths from Phonogram; the guide's explanation of the Battle of Britpop. "Wins a battle, loses the war."

That's the way it is, though. Lost a job because of the way of the world - got made redundant for the first time. Lost a friendship on the rocks of assumption and greed. Got my shit in order and decided, prosaically, to follow what is apparently a dream, and ended up surrounded with lots of little 'unformed people', becoming a rock in what is, apparently, their stream. Started to learn how to work with film until it actually starts to matter, as much as anything else.

Film matters because film doesn't matter. In any sane society, the storytellers would be given a cave of their own, far, far away from the scientists and the normal folk, because what they do is of no intrinsic value whatsoever. Films don't advance humanity in any great way; look at it like this. Spider-Man 3 had an approximate production cost of $250 million. Kiribati has an annual GDP of approximately $240 million. This is just an isolated statistic, obviously, provided out of interest, but a single film's production cost more than a year's production of an island of 98,000 people.

Hunter S Thompson surrogate Spider Jerusalem talks about Transients, people who choose to be different, in simple terms, when he says - paraphrasing - that "In any sane society these people would have been tagged as the waterheads they are and left alone". That's probably a horrible misquotation, but this is how I feel about filmmakers in general; you can try and justify it as art, or passion, or love, but it benefits society as a whole not a single jot. The film industry is an immeasurably huge beast that's sucked up money from humanity's need to be entertained for so long that it is now more or less self-perpetuating.

And, curiously, this is not a bad thing. I hate to pull a role-reversal on you, but humanity does need to be entertained, or, more accurately, distracted, because people, fundamentally, suck.

We're all self-contained little units, but culture - film, music, to some extent books - allows us to pretend that there are other people out there like us, when there aren't, and there probably never will be, really.

In other words, Chuck Palahnuk was wrong; you are a beautiful and unique snowflake. Nobody exists out there with the same conditions of production as you, the precise same data input that's made you who you are today. And that is, somehow, more terrifying than the possibility that you are unique; you are unique, apart from some broad brushstrokes, and while that may be a wonderful thing, it's crippling to think that there will never be anyone precisely the same as you down to the final, last mental detail.

Of course, broad brushstrokes are your friend, and so they should be. Without broad generalities, society wouldn't function. And that's where things like film come in; they create deep and broad brushstrokes that people can relate to. Going back to our previous example; Spider-Man 3, having spent a quarter of a billion on production, took $890, 871, 626 at the time of writing in gross revenue. That's a lot of ticket sales and DVD sales among other anciliary profits, which means a lot of people saw the film, whether they liked it or not.

That's a lot of common experience for people across that world, i.e. one hell of a big brushstroke.

Film is a way societies across the world use to communicate, and American films are fascinating because of this. By contrast, British films are fascinating; consider the Bond franchise as cultural communication instead of profitable franchise, and things are somehow more interesting. The Bond films are the equivalent of bragging to your friends about just how fucking cool you really are - the best suits, most expensive food and drink, the talent and expertise to take on the most intense situations and walk away nearly unscratched; British people and Britain by extension are just that cool. Seriously, like.

So I find the people I'm studying with fascinating, because they want to study the subject. I'm studying it because, basically, I can't not; film is that which drives me on, keeps me interested, that which I enjoy doing because it's the only way to channel countless hours of work into one (hopefully) perfectly-formed product, or at least they only way for me.

And so here I am, on the raggedy edge. Don't push me, and I won't push you...

Because if you're not really here...

Our Director writes:

Diary of a Mature Student, Term Week Nine

So... Yes. The last eight weeks have fallen like leaves into the Seine, and here we are after nearly ten weeks of tuition with two weeks left to go, and what have we learned for it?

Well, lots.

You pick up interesting things, in what I call the If you'd just done it right the first time we wouldn't be reshooting for the fourth time school of editing. The fourth reshoot's the charm, we told ourselves, as we forced the Talent into wearing the same t-shirt and jeans as the previous three shoots and made him do the same things as before, only different.

Here's the thing. I know I've put too much effort into what's going to be an odd little product; if I'd just shot a simple conversation and made it look good, I'd probably get better marks. But I'd rather be hung as a lion than a lamb, and so my few minutes of joy include an interview, a setup, a conversation and an assassination. Stitch that, basically.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, but strangely compelling.

There are a few things that I find - and I think this is unique to my capacity as a mature student - strange.

Firstly, the first year appears to be being treated as some sort of foundation year; the lecturers have said, in class, that the marks don't matter as long as you pass and don't count much to the final result. So what's the point in trying, I hear none of you ask? Well, this is a question I've struggled with, so I have to go with the Sir Edmund Hillary answer; because it's there. There's no point phoning it in when the tuition fees are as high as they are; do your best, or what's the point?

As I say, this is unique to mature students. The whole approach is geared towards not stressing out the newbies too much or putting a permanent kink in their final result; first-timers away from home and new to study do need, not to put too fine a point on it, a little mollycoddling.

But then there's the weekly assessments, which get you... Nothing. Oh, you're penalised if you don't do them, but if you do do them it's just an excerise in negative-equity amelioration; you're merely shoring up your final mark by not adding any negative modifiers to the result.

So you have assignments that don't count towards courses that don't, apparently, matter - as long as you pass them. This is an odd little dichotomy; they matter in as much as they're prerequisites but other than that all you have to do is 'not fuck up'.

Theory course? Pass the essays. Study course? Pass the test. Filming course? Film a boring-ass conversation and make it look pretty.

They do this without reckoning on Mature Students, I think, because we tend to sit in the front row of our lectures and ask questions with crazy enthusiasm. Or, at least, one of us does, because I'm hiding towards the back for the theory and study classes.

For the filming course, though, I have crazy enthusiasm and then some, because I've been using these godawful handicams for so long that to get my hands on something - relatively, because they don't trust the first years with the good stuff - decent is like a quantum leap. For instance, did you know that cameras can pan and tilt?

I apparently didn't, according to my previous year's work. Now I can't get enough of it.

This is, technically, a problem. But one worth solving. And aren't those the best?