Someday I'm going to use that post title as a film title. It was something that we used to joke about when I worked at the Kennedy Center, the idea that in schools art class happened at a certain time and that was the only time students are allowed/encouraged to be creative.
I know I'm not the only person who struggles with creativity on demand but I still think I'm loving film school for the endless push to be creative. It's continually "that was great, now make something else." The new term hasn't even started yet and I'm already making something else. We got our syllabus for Production II about a week ago and as soon as I read it I thought, ooh, I can't wait for the semester to start.
Where Production I was about the gear, and the visuals, and the sound each individually, Production II is about combining them. Specifically about blocking* and shooting conversations. So for the first assignment we will be shooting a scene of dialogue between two people. What I like - I would say what makes this grad school rather than undergrad - is that he's not just handing out scenes so that we can concentrate on the production of them. Our first part of the assignment is to turn in a script for a scene. We don't actually have to have written it ourselves as long as we have permission from the writer. But as there are some very specific parameters for the scene in terms of length, location(s), number of people, and being self-contained rather than part of a larger work, it's kind of unlikely any of the screenwriting majors will happen to have something handy. And anyway, it's still break. I wouldn't know how to find a screenwriting major this week.
So I'm working on writing my own. And I'm ok with that. It's part of the endless push to be creative and that is, after all, what I came here for.
* blocking is deciding where the actors and the camera will be in relation to each other at any given moment.
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