(totally wasn't thinking that title to the tune of Frank Turner's Four Simple Words. Nope. Not at all.)
So I've been meaning to write a new entry for a while now, after all, it's been a month since uni finally finished up and I ought to have written about that as soon as it happened. I'm sticking to the excuse that I needed to wind down from the build-up of stress up to that final weekend and the sudden lack of anything to do. Well, I'm sure there've been plenty of things to do, but there was nothing I needed to do. It's been nice, if initially disconcerting.
Onwards to the details of what happened during the last leg of my second year? At first it felt like everything was falling apart. I honestly thought I'd led my whole group into failure, because we had nothing sorted for our drama film and two weeks until the deadline. I think there's only really been one other occasion during which I've hated myself more. Thankfully, a friend who is an actor had seen one of our messages on the university's intranet system, and he and his friend became our cast, essentially saving our bacon. Over the next couple of weeks we were able to shoot the film and have a beautiful edit ready for the deadline - although if you talk to our editor, he wasn't happy with it - and ready for the in-university film festival it had to be screened at.
Over the weekend 6th-7th of April, our production group screened our drama and documentary films at the u-drama and u-doc festival. I'll be completely honest here, some of the other films were comparatively much better, and some were not so much. Saying that may come across as sounding cocky, but I mean it in the sense that we produced a much better film than I thought we would. I'm incredibly proud and excited to be able to say our drama film won the award for best sound (despite the editor's complaints), and our documentary took home the award for most original. It also turned out that one of our harshest lecturers, and in my eyes the one to please, really liked our drama piece and wanted it to win some other awards, which still amazes me, a month on. It's crazy to look back on all of the stresses and panics I've had this year, and then be able to say 'I'm an award-winning filmmaker'. It just doesn't seem to make sense - no complaints, though!
Hopefully soon I'll be able to come up with a more substantial blog post in the near future, this one has basically just repeated things everyone I know already knows. All I really have to add is that expo is just around the corner, which I'm really looking forward to, and I have loads left to do beforehand. I'm hand-making the entire outfit for one of my cosplays, which involves a lot of sewing, painting, and I'll even have to half-dye a wig, which will be interesting. My main cosplay of the weekend is mostly being made by a good friend of mine - in fact I'm only actually wearing the costume because she wanted to make it - at least, that's how it was initially, now I'm really looking forward to actually wearing it. I have to style the wig, though, which amusingly enough is going to be another half-dye job, along with some crazy spikes. So far, I've done two of the spikes. My final cosplay will probably be Rainbow Dash, which means I need to go to some cheap clothing stores to assemble all of the blue - I already have enough rainbow for it. So less than a month and not a single completed costume - this is actually completely normal for expo, often I've been working on costumes until the day before I travel down to London, so I'm not too worried. As I said before, I'm mostly just looking forward to it. I will certainly have to post another blog after expo, since I'm sure it will be as fun if not more so than the last one I attended in October.
That's all I have to waffle on about at present, so for now I will bid you all adieu.
Turn End,
Devan
