Crikey! 21 more days ’til the end of the semester. 2 x 2500 word essays. Potentially the end of my student career.

And I am on a plane to Brisbane tomorrow morning to play Frisbee.

Yep, I’ve got my priorities right. :)

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Over the last few weeks, I have been pleasantly surprised by some of the in-class film screenings. One was Grizzly Man, a documentary about the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent summers living with bears. Then there’s Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line. Yes, shame on me, calling myself a film student. And then there’s the good ‘ol white Aussie versus indigenous people, Beneath Clouds. I know what I’ll be doing at the library during summer…

I traveled to Yeoval to help on a classmate’s final year project. We stayed in a pub and had meals cooked by her grandmother. One night at about 1am, the director told us city kids to head outside and experience a dead quiet sleeping town.

As we entered Yeoval, this was the sight that greeted us. The photo really doesn’t do it justice, but it was a whole field of canola flowers. In the midst of Spring greenery, blooming yellow flowers.

The production van speeds down to a ranch.

The actress gets her cue to ride her pink bike. The lush green grass prompted the local country girls in the crew to warn us of snakes that come out during warm months.

A puppy at the house we stopped at. The crew plotted to return later in the night to dognap her.

Our prop bicycle.

Our cast seeks shade under the giant umbrellas. This was a pretty good day for the skin because there were clouds! But particularly annoying when we began filming and the clouds blocked the sun. (Note the cloudless skies in the other photos!)

Sunset at the canola fields. We headed out to capture the sunset for our personal cameras, but arrived a little late. I wonder why I didn’t take a close up of the canolas - oh, barb wires.

I managed to snap a few which turned out pretty well. Interestingly enough, my trusty Lumix produced some of the best shots in this series. Wonder if you can tell the difference.

I enjoyed the actual production and the time spent in the country, away from the internet and phone reception. The cast and crew were brilliant people to work with. And I suppose with most shoots where you have to stay over, you end up bonding. I realised I missed out on a great bunch of classmates because I was a year behind. Then again, the director and production manager have been in at least one of my classes every semester…

Wow. That was a great project to work on.

… maybe.

A second year student said my claymation video was shown in this semester’s class. I sure hope the tutor showed it as a good example. What’s icing to the (chocolate) cake is that he didn’t teach this class last semester, which means it wasn’t a biased selection.

I look forward to Fridays. It is my favourite class of the week. We get to watch a (contemporary) film. And I think my lecturer is so super cool with her insane vault of film knowledge. There’s just something so casual about the way she delivers her lectures. Hot. It also helps that she makes so much sense in her tutorials too!

I can’t believe we are at the halfway point of the semester. And that she has decided to cut short her lectures to 13 instead of 14. Oh no! I wish everyday can be a Friday.

Is my last semester. Perhaps the last few months of my student life.

It is also my last semester to play Frisbee at uni level. Second and last uni games. Last semester to make use of the library’s awesome DVD collection.

But this semester I am also taking not one, but two classes with weekly screenings. This should be fairly exciting, although I have seen some of the films already. I anticipate final essays to be extremely interesting.

And final projects will probably be camera operating a few productions - potentially tiring, but usually a few days long. I might have a slack semester so I can fit Frisbee tournaments and other touristy things around uni work.