The creative impulse

Last night I went to a reading of “Wall” by David Hare. I’ve enjoyed several of his plays, and there was a £5 offer on, so I went along.
“Wall” is about Hare’s own experiences with the Middle Eastern conflict between Israel and Palestine, and is being presented as a companion piece to “Berlin”. I think [...]

Notable people encountered during my time at the NFTS

Today I went to a preview of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was followed up by a really short Q&A session with the director David Fincher. How do you make a film like that? Well, you’re really meticulous in the way that you do it, working with people who are exactly on the [...]

BFI 52nd London Film Festival

As a student, I got free access to the press and industry screenings at this year’s London Film Festival. I could also attend daytime (before 5pm) screenings so long as they hadn’t sold out. It’s a pretty good deal, and one that I’ll be sorry to see go once I leave the NFTS.
I managed to [...]

It never rains…

There must be some law of blogging or general internet social communication, similar to Godwin’s Law (but without the Nazis), which covers the situation that whenever things which are worthy of telling others are happening you’re too busy actually doing them to be able to tell anyone else about them in a way which is [...]

Hello, wordpress

I’ve just migrated my blog from movable type to wordpress. Whilst I do enjoy learning new programming languages (ish) and being able to customise to my heart’s content, movable type was just a little too advanced for me and most of the time I had no idea what had gone wrong whenever something didn’t appear right, [...]

Dead is the king.

Our Richard III exercise is over. It was pretty enlightening, and we had some great tutors – namely Alex Mackie and Roger Crittenden. They were totally supportive, whilst pointing out possible weaknesses and parts which just didn’t really flow – right up to the very last moment. Literally. On the morning of the slightly flexible [...]

Murder, mayhem and moggies

The first excercise of the second year editing course at the NFTS is Richard III. We get the rushes from the 1995 feature film directed by Richard Loncraine and starring Sir Ian McKellen, and each of the six students on the course edit a section. All of the parts are put together at the end [...]