Welcome to my site, if this was the first place you have chosen to look at on the site, well thanks. Now where to start...
I am a 20 year old student from the South of the UK specifically, just out of the M25, born and raised in Surrey. My affair with Filmmaking began with the man you can see suited and booted in the photo above. It was in Year 10 during High School i decided that i was to take '
Media Studies' as a topic. From there this man taught me for nearly 4 years in tandem with another teacher, but this man was the catalyst that began it all. I went from kowing barely anything at all to knowing way more about the basics than i should ever have to know, but it was drilled in to me the importance of knowing how to make your visuals and sound look and work effectively when working on a simple project. A B O U T
"Even the biggest budget productions are let down by poor sound."
- Lyndon Ives
Then after four years of having the same two brilliant men teaching me how to effectively make small Social Realism productions, i had to make the conscious decision whether to carry on my education somewhere else or take a year out, considering i wasn't accepted to the University i applied for. So i decided it was in my best interests to keep moving forward with my education as i didn't want to lose the passion i had for film after studying it nearly everyday of my life for four years. When arriving for the first day, i was intimidated by the initial project, because it effectively removed most of my creative control of the whole project. This college was where i learnt what it really was to have creative control over your project and also how to get really 'creative' and be intuitive with my film making. It was also here that i studied world film and alternative cinema, bundled in with various cinematic movements thoughout cinema's history. I also was told the quote you can see above by one of my lecturers, and oh my lord is it true. It is possible to have the visuals to 100% the best of what they can be with the resources you have but if you have terrible sound, well no one is going to sit through your film. That's harsh reality and one of the best lessons i learnt from this first year in college. When compared to the relatively childish attempts i made in GCSE and A-Level at doing some form of sound i tried to pay high attention to it with my productions in this first year and more so in the second. This i believe was extremely benficial for me as it allowed me to decide on what techniques and ideas i liked from these different areas of fiilmic production, and then tailor these to suit my own individual style of film making. "A film is made up of lots of different elements but cannot be watched as separate entities, they have to blend and mesh together as one to be enjoyed properly."
- Lyndon Ives
The second year i sent in college was for my HND qualification. This year was mainly focused on some of the more in depth side of production, how to make sure your visuals are aesthetically correct for the type of film you want to create, for example; using tight and canted camera shots and angles respectively to create a tense moment for genres such as horror and thriller. Furthermore it went on to focus on how sound design could be used effectively to create mood and feeling within the project. For example my most recent film 'Where The WInd Speaks' i decided i wanted it to look like an old black and white film. This cased me to use angles and ideas from the Film Noir movement using film's such as 'Metropolis' and 'Psycho' as inspirations for my films aesthetics but i also decided to subvert the genre and it's stylistic qualities by using a soundscape and having this and intertitle cards instead of speech. My third year and possibly my final year of studying and creating before moving in to the actual paid sector of Media Production lies ahead of me in Kingston. I'm looking forward to creating more and more projects to be seen and enjoyed by all. But that's all for now, i'm signing off.
- Joe Cross
