And I know that I should let go, but I can't

Our Director Writes:

Diary of a Mature Student, Semester Two, Week Four Point Two

Quantum Mechanics.

I subscribe to the Many-worlds interpretation. I just do. It doesn't mean I have to like it.

For instance; there are a few parallel universes out there where I didn't push away the people that mattered to me. In those worlds, the toast is always buttered, and I go to a regular job, surrounded by regular people, and I come home to a regular life. Don't laugh, it's possible; such is the nature of causality.

Hell, in some parallel universes I own my car, and maybe even my own house! I mean, let's not go crazy, but in an infinitely possible universe everything is possible, even a lottery win.

And at night, those other me's lay their heads down onto a fluffy pillow next to a loving wife, and sometimes they dream. They dream of a world where they get up before it's light to commute to a job, but not any ordinary job; this one they have to pay to do, instead of being paid for their work. And they do; they work their little hearts out and, at the end of the day, go back in a car they don't own, to a house they don't own.

If this sounds unnecessarily negative, perhaps it is; no, of course it is. Because it's incredibly easy to while away innocent hours with 'what if' questions about a past you can't change. It doesn't make the present any easier, and at the end of the day, it's still the night. We always find innovative ways to fuck things up; it's part of what makes us so delightfully human. I can count on four hands - you don't mind if I borrow yours, do you? - the interpersonal relationships, both friendship and the sticky kind of friendship that we call love - that I've frittered away, given up on, or actively screwed up, leading my life to the odd little crossroads it's at now; but instead of offering me a price for my soul, the Devil - at the crossroads, remember? - just gives me a quizzical look.

Being a mature student is a difficult balancing act. One one hand, you have this boundless opportunity to do something that actually matters to you, but on the other hand you pay for this every day by making no progress towards a real life ^(tm). And yes, perhaps a real life ^(tm) isn't all that great, but... This does, for whatever sins are available at a discount, matter to me. Just being here matters to me. The price is the price, but the goods are good.

God, I'm complaining again. Floridly. This seems to be happening more and more regularly, recently.

Here's the thing. Student life - the first time around on this particular merry-go-round - was messy, irritating and complicated. Drinking too much, a complete lack of financial awareness - hell, a complete lack of personal hygiene awareness, in some cases - stress, discontent, friendships made and broken, and essay deadlines, all boiling away in some jambalaya of the heart and soul. I actively hated parts of my first experience of student life; mainly finding out just how long the leash was on this supposéd taste of freedom before working life beckons.

Back in the day - when men were men, lecturers were (96%, anyway) utter bastards, a degree was something that demanded nothing less than total concentration. Some parts of the course were a lot like how I imagine purgatory to be; lots of work for no discernible reward, or long spaces with absolutely nothing to do punctuated by a frenzy of work that defined, apparently, the rest of your life's course. Put it this way; there were, on average, four lectures a week at, on average, two hours a lecture. This meant - and I'm glad you're keeping up with the maths here - eight hours of 'work' per week, leaving the other one hundred and sixty hours at your disposal.

Give a man a fish, and he enjoys a fish supper for a night. Give a teenager 160 hours a week to do some sort of nebulous 'study', and you can kind of guess what's going to happen.

It's - kind of - different, now, it seems. Oh yes. For instance, we have a shocking eleven hours of lectures a week instead of eight. How these young people cope with such an amazing amount of work is a source of constant mystery to me, it's wonders to behold.

But here's where the kicker of being a mature student comes in; socialising? Who he? Outside of lectures, normal life - as much as it ever existed - rests it's clawéd hand upon my shoulder, reminding me, cruelly, that the real world existeth and that it cannot be déníéd.

Anyway, enough with the accents. But I hope you see my point; the benefits and detriments columns of being a student are completely upended once you add the prefix 'mature'. I don't have to worry about socialising, about how much I can drink before I pass out, about whether girl (x) likes me...

... Well, I still worry about that a little...

... but I do have to devote myself, heart, soul and occasionally other things, to being a 'proper' student, which is just as nebulous as anything else mentioned herein.

My grades must be high.

My work must be good.

One comport oneself with dignity, efficacy and grace at all times.

Oh, you know what I mean, I suspect. Because for an 18-year-old to flunk a course or two isn't just acceptable, it's even expected; our lecturers banally announce that by the end of the first year, 10% of the students on the course will have dropped out. For this course, that's something like eighteen to twenty students. I find this amazing, because it means that 10% of the people on this course are too stupid to ask for help. I can say this because I was too stupid, back in the day, to ask for anything. Been there, done that, got the free Budweiser t-shirt. But for 10% of the class not to think "hold on, I'm paying these tuition fees, I have an advisory, I have tutors, I have friends, why don't I try to arrest this backslide into mediocrity?" is kind of alarming. And yes, statistically, of these 10%, some will suffer a personal tragedy, while others will simply run out of lawyers, drugs or - most importantly - money. Such is this bastard thing we call life. But still, a 10% dropout rate is just heinous, somehow.

Of course, in the same breath, they tell us that we don't need to worry about marks - we only have to pass; and that our negative-equity assignments don't matter as long as we do them, but if we do them, we win... Nothing.

A caveat; I love this course. With my heart and what passes for, yes, my soul. I as much of it as I can, which seems to be more than a lot of people; I work harder and longer than some of my confederates, but not as hard or long as, I suspect, the true devotees, of which shadowy sect I have yet to meet one. I like to believe in their existence, however, because the prospect of being one of the hardest workers on this course is, instead of happy-making, kind of terrifying.

So anyway, there's a whole chunk of confused young people there, especially when you consider that you have to pass every module to be admitted to the next year. So if you shoot for a pass and fuck up, well, damn, boy, it's resit time for you. The changes between course assessments and styles don't help, either; one course hands out no notes or handouts, so you attend and take notes or you're fuckéd. Other courses, by comparison, lull you into a false sense of security with copious handouts and lecture notes and - get this - useful seminars. Some insist on group work while others leave you to your own devices. So where do you pitch your tent average range of effort?

Where indeed? There's a whole lot of space between 'just pass' and 'do well'.

And - as I keep trying to get across to my confederates - because of this, you have to shoot high, gods damn it, because if you shoot low and miss, shit. But if you shoot high and miss, you've still got the chance of leaving someone with an unexpected centre parting...

Although not the most honest means of travel, it gets me there nonetheless

Our Director writes:

Diary of a Mature Student, Semester Two, Week Four

I've found myself developing some somewhat strange, somewhat comic behaviours over the past few weeks. Nothing too strange, but just different enough to make me wonder what's prompted them.

There's a moment of existential ennui, it would seem, upon returning to the Park and Ride on a daily basis. If you do something four days a week, every week, for fourteen to fifteen weeks in a row, your brain starts - it seems - to give up on remembering exactly where your car is when you return after a hard day's studenting.

So I stand there, for a few seconds, trying to remember which particular space I could find that morning. It doesn't matter, of course, because I have a relatively distinctive car anyway, but it's always a very confusing short space of time.

My car is distinctive for a number of reasons. For one, it's dinky. Of course, size apparently doesn't matter, but on a few occasions people have been slightly shocked when I unfold myself from the front seat. But another reason it's distinctive is that it has a very strange music system. Oh, it was beautiful and up-to-day in, let's say, 2001, but since then, it's been all downhill, baby. The radio, for instance, works out of both speakers - 90% of the time - but the cd player doesn't, something I wouldn't have personally thought possible.

Then again, the CD player only works 30% of the time anyway, so if you find a CD that actually works, hoo boy, that's the goddamn jackpot right there.

[Sidebar: for those keeping score, I do actually like my car. It drives well and it gets me where I'm going. But every car has it's quirks.]

One of the CDs that works, for instance, is the soundtrack to the 2006 version of Casino Royale. I discovered this on one of my first journeys, wherein I tried eight or nine different CDs - getting Error 3 or Error 6 depending on whether it couldn't or wouldn't play them, respectively - before finding that my car likes, for some reason, David Arnold.

This is one of those things that couldn't really be much more inappropriate if it tried. The only time my car would ever be in a Bond movie is if it were being rammed off the road by the villain. Oh, sure, it might fit in in a Bourne movie, but shit, whoever accused them of automobilic taste?

However, I find the disconnect really funny. More funny than I should.

The entrance to the Park and Ride is a side lane, alongside which runs three lanes of traffic, which will either be waiting for the lights or pulling away.

And so, I find it very funny to get into the side lane, and cruise past the traffic with the Bond theme playing at an audible volume. Slinking past succinctly, like a shark, you might say.

Of course, you might not...

What a mess, what a marvel

EDITOR'S NOTE: This was supposed to be published directly after the last entry, but Blogger decided this just wasn't, apparently, the done thing. Anyway...

Our Director Writes;



Diary of a Mature Student: Semester 2, Week 2; Addendum



Of course, the last entry looks incredibly churlish. But hopefully the point gets across.



Because the course I'm doing doesn't quite fill out the course units spectrum, we get plunked into other courses from other fields with relative impunity sometimes. Last year we were left in a course slightly to basic for the field students and slightly too advanced for our course.



This year, they've stuck us in a room with two hundred other students from a very popular course and, well, just left us to get on with it. I say us; I recognised something like ten out of the two hundred as being from my course, so there's either been a prodigious drop-off rate or something odd's going on.



The other thing is that it's a course that my previous degree was in. I don't plan to mention this at any point during the proceedings, because how the hell does that work? "Hi, I'm Eton, and I'm already qualified in this area - I'm just doing this for the laughs."



Kind of funny, kind of... Well... Patronising.



What was kind of funny, however, was being - thanks to a 66% dropout rate in the male student population of my seminar group - the only person of a male persuasion there.



Me.



The lecturer (a lovely lady, for those keeping score.)



Twenty-one eighteen-and-nineteen year old girls.



Hmm.



In all total honesty; what exactly does one do in that situation?



I opted for sitting fairly quietly and letting them all get on with it, because frankly it seemed like the safest option. Besides which, what exactly would I have to offer someone from the generation before me other than a searing insight into a time before downloadable content?



It's one of those tricky social situations. For I am not a particularly manly man's man; I'm a geek, and proud of it. Hell, you have to be a bit of a geek to study Film. They put it in the UCAS requirements and everything. And god knows I don't want to end up some strange Steve Buscemi-a-like character in the class. So contributing occasionally but otherwise sitting quietly seems to be, for me, the way forward.

This is a gift, it comes with a price

Our Director Writes

Diary of a Mature Student, Semester 2, Week 2

There are some things about being a mature student that you just don't talk about, it seems.

Then again, they're more or less the same as any other time in your life. There are some funny moments, too; this week I had to submit proof of the qualifications that got me my place at my university, which meant, basically, submitting a copy of my degree certificate to prove I was eligible to study for my degree.

This is one of the main problems; I can't find part-time work because of an odd kind of situation. The basic conversation runs like this:

"Hi, I'm looking for some part time work while I study."

"Okay, what qualifications do you have?"

"Well, I have my degree in something not that relevant and my GCSEs and A levels."

"Oh, you already have a degree? Why would you want to work here?"

"Well, I'm just looking for-"

"Sorry, we think you're overqualified."

'Overqualified' hides a multitude of sins. On one hand it's "well, why would you stay here for any length of time with that qualification?"; on another hand, it's "what happened in your life that you can't use these qualifications for something better?"; and on a theoretical third hand, there's always the question of intimidation.

Now, intimidation is just asinine. If you're intimidated by someone with a degree, stop it, stop it right goddamn now, because it's pointless. In all my time since graduation I haven't put the letters after my name once. The only time I've had to use my degree certificate is in submitting for further academic courses; no employer has ever asked to see it. And yet I was treated differently - at least, at first - for being a graduate. It meant nothing other than the occasional higher expectation, because I remained for four or so years consistently the lowest-paid person in the building, but there was something there somehow.

So I can't find work, which means living off what savings I'd put together before being kicked out of my work last year with a cheery goodbye and the promise of a reference. And this is what I mean by the things you don't talk about as a mature student.

It means smiling every time someone asks you how the course is going, and being incredibly enthusiastic about it, because how could you not be? You're doing something you're passionate about! You're doing what you love! Any sign of unhappiness just isn't done, old chap.

[As a sidebar, I am happy. I'm incredibly happy; I border on ecstatic during termtime, because I am doing what I love, so this might sound churlish; but it's not this that's the problem, it's the lack of any possible other answer than every day I wake up I feel blessed. Although, right now, I do. Sorry. This is rambling a little.]

Sometimes I want to speak the truth to people, just a little, to see what they might say.

"You know what being a mature student means? It means living at home with parental units because I can't dream of affording anything else. It means living of charity and benificence because I can't find any work. It means a negotiated kind of independence where most everything I think of doing means clearance by someone. It means not necessarily being able to afford anything new for a long, long time. Clothes? DVDs? Gadgets? Forget it. Make do and mend."

Look at it this way; at least my clothes that aren't retro now will be by the end of the course.

This is just idle complaining, though. Because it's a small price to pay to do something I love. It's a miniscule price, really.

But of course, it needs paying.

From across the great divide

Our Director Writes:

Diary of a Mature Student: the run-up to the new academic year

I've come to the conclusion that life would have been a lot simpler, if, ten years ago, I'd woken up with the burning desire to be an accountant.

Note, from the last entry, that even while slightly drunk, I can still look up the GDP of small island nations. Think of this what you will.

But, seriously, as long as there's money, the world needs accountants. And they do fairly well out of it if they even have a modicum of financial ability; accountancy would have been the way forward, ten years ago.

If I'd chosen that path - if I'd even thought it remotely the right thing to do - things would be very different now, let me tell you. For one, I'd be able to afford better clothes. I'd hopefully have found some lovely, accountancy-tolerating lady and settled down somewhere suburban. Hell, by now I might even have children, and I could be teaching my youngest the heady joy of balancing figures and tax-deductible income.

Instead, something in me decided ten years ago to just freewheel - or, more accurately, free - and go with the flow. Hence, a humanities degree. Humanities degrees, in the fullness of things, are like filmmakers; they benefit no-one. The recipient spends a lifetime justifying just why their degree is useful in any field other than, say, teaching or perhaps, at a push, proofreading. Anyone who comes into contact with a humanities graduate gets this glossy look in their eyes as if to say you spent three years doing what, exactly?

But a humanities degree, I've worked out, is just a useful way of keeping dangerous minds off the streets and inculcating sound principles on their strange little minds. I don't mean dangerous minds in the sense that yeah, daddy-oh, they're going to go out there and change the world, I mean dangerous in the sense that lava is dangerous when it's molten but solid when it's cooled, if that makes any particular sense. All these eighteen-year-olds I see here at the moment are so, so sweet but sometimes I want to sit them down and gently tell them that the world outside the education system is a dark, and often annoying, place.

I didn't enjoy my first go on the degree merry-go-round, in case you hadn't inferred that from this blog so far. The first year was confused - and confusing - and rushed and full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, leaving a lot of people completely unprepared for the seriousness of the second year. The third year was the only time I started to actually appreciate just what the hell was actually going on, and, more importantly, appreciate exactly what the point of study is.

Kind of.

And then the real world, shiny and cuttingly bright, beckoned, and suddenly the student overdraft needs paying and there aren't any jobs that pay enough to live any kind of fully independent life, and it all goes, quite frankly, to... No, that's not quite true. I paid my student overdraft and cultivated an odd little kind of independence from the odd little job I found and ended up staying at for about half a decade.

Now... I'm back, baby, and the undergraduate education system seems strikingly different to the one I left. It's a lot like returning to a workplace you left years ago to find everything changed; natural, but unsettling.

Take the marking system, for instance. Old style was 'pass 75% of your modules per year and you'll get a degree, if not a great one'. New style seems to be 'pass everything but don't worry about the grades in your first year; shit, 41% will do, kid, just so long as you pass. And by the way, we don't actually trust you to do independent study, so there are weekly negative-equity tests to pass - you get sweet F.A. if you do them but we'll dock lots of percentage points from you if you don't...'

It seems like an odd little way of preparing the young people of today for the sudden second-year seriousness of grades that actually matter, but hey, maybe it actually works. I don't know. I've been trying to convince my contemporaries that doing well now is something to be proud of, but I'm not quite sure it's getting through.

I feel a lot like a Cassandra, except for the 'most beautiful' part. (Or, strictly speaking, the 'daughter part. But hey.) I'm not a shining example of the merits of academia - pretty far from it, actually - but I do want at least one person I count as a friend here to take a little notice of my lessons in How Not To Fuck Things Up, from Crow, who has a P.h.D in the subject.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe not.

One thing that entertains me; upon applying for this course, I was asked to provide evidence of my most recent qualifications to justify my academic existence. This mean presenting my degree certificate in order to prove I was worthy of attaining a degree certificate.

I'm not proud...

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?