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?