BA3b: THE EXIT STRATEGY
Moving into BA3b, I was very conscious to approach my final self-initiated project with as much a professional mindset as possible. This meant, deadlining, scheduling, efficiency, and proper handling and management of multiple responsibilities at a time. When making any kind of film, whether long form or short, it is a really necessary thing to plan and schedule the different stages of the project in advance, and do your best to keep to them, I have found. I have had enough interactions with film-makers and spent enough time studying the craft of film-making through reading and examination of the behind-the-scenes process to have built a fairly solid idea of how a production company might go about planning a project, and I took it upon myself to plan my own project with that in mind.
Though I hadn’t set out to work with others on the projects that I was developing, I quickly realised that another aspect of maintain a career in the creative industry was an ability to recognise where the limits of ones abilities lie, and when it might be important to draft others in on a project to help the outcome to be as close as to the vision as possible. It has helped me realise that the ideal position for me to have on a project may well be that of a director. The most important thing in developing a professional approach this past term was my involvement on the Curation team for the Ampersand exhibition in February. I found the governing position I had taken with organising all of the work, placement, curation, and show set up a very engaging and practicing experience. Moving forward I believe that selling myself as someone who can handle a directorial position may be a very worthwhile thing to do.
In terms of the next 3 or so years, I have a good idea of how I would like to start my career in the creative arts. For one thing, I don’t think I have finished honing my craft in an educational environment yet. The array of different practices that I have dappled in, though all sharing a consistent visual flair and narrative approach, have left me a bit in the woods as to what I do best. I think that extending my creative education into an MA might well be the exact opportunity that I need to discover this. Ideally I would move to join an MA course as soon as I can coming out of my BA, but then the expense factor kicks in. To be able to fund moving back to London and pursuing an MA, which would be my port of call, I would have to spend upwards of a year earning and saving as much money as I can doing whatever I can to earn money.
The thing that worries me about this is the potential to lose focus on my career and be sidetracked by the ebb and flow of an economy I won’t really fit into yet. For this reason, I am hoping to stay in Norwich to work- where I am aware both that I can keep cost of living down (in comparison to London) and also that I can still be surrounded by a creative culture. I have been in contact with a number of other students all with a similar game plan to me and we are working towards contracting a shared studio space from the end of the summer onwards where we can work on self-initiated and (hopefully) some commissioned briefs over the course of the year at the same time as working part-time elsewhere.
Throughout the course of this last term, I have worked on putting together a list of projects I have had on the back burner for the course of my BA, that I would like to revisit and complete over the upcoming in between year. These are predominantly made up of short publishing projects, zines, writing collections, and narrative exercises, all of which are either well underway, or in the early forming stages. The first of these projects is complete (titled Sensitive Men and their Delicate Words), in terms of design and content, and I am currently looking for a printing service that I could produce a short run of editions from. Each of these publications would run initially at no more than 75-100 copies, and I would be looking to sell them mostly online, or at publication events.














