Reflection on the experience of FMS Live

This post is my personal reflection on the entire experience of FMS Live, an enjoyable unit based on cinema screenings and blogging. As I have already noted in my media diary reflection, I deeply enjoy watching films and I find it intriguing to be familiar enough with the art of film to be able to criticise and review it. Therefore, I found FMS Live to be considerably useful to me.

Although I would have preferred it if arthouse films -which are essential for a film student- were an option too, I still think the screenings have been a valuable opportunity. I therefore tried not to miss any of them, except for when I was ill for a week. The screenings were either films that I really wanted to see (like It follows and Kingsman: The Secret Service) or ones that I would have never watched by myself (Furious 7, Unfriended) and I am glad for watching each and every one of them, as they were all interesting in their own way.

In the seminars, I did try to take as much part as possible in the discussions about each film. I did comment on every film I saw, yet sometimes not being a fluent English speaker made it hard for me to communicate my ideas as successfully as I wanted to. Also, I did try to express my opinion in the facebook discussions about the films, but I only felt comfortable doing it when I had in mind something very specific and substantial to note.

Having a blog has also been a very interesting part of the unit. I have been using blogs for years, as I find them to be a very enjoyable way of communicating one’s thoughts to a potential public. Noel’s first lecture on blogging was hence very useful tο me. It provided me with valuable information about other blogging platforms rather than Blogger, which I have always been using, and about the way amateur bloggers turn into professionals. It would have been interesting if I had used Wordpress instead of Blogger for my FMS blog, however I decided this was not the right moment for such experimentations, as what I wanted to focus on were the posts themselves. I knew I would be writing exclusively about films, so I tried to give the blog a relevant look using references to Inception (the spinning top) and Memento (the title). I also used Inception’s spinning top to demonstrate my rating for each film, instead of the common stars, in an attempt to add something special to it.

The reason I chose to focus my blog posts strictly on films and especially on reviews is that film is perhaps the only form of media I am interested in writing about on a professional level. I may have been writing reviews for a while now, but still, this opportunity has been very useful to me. This is mainly because I had never written any reviews in English, which turned out to be quite challenging. Being used to communicating complicated thoughts about films in my mother tongue, I now had to adapt my way of thinking to the English language, with which I am obviously not equally familiar. I therefore needed to either simplify my thoughts or express them in a simpler way.

Hence, my own professional goals have been reflected in the experience of FMS Live, which has therefore been considerably valuable to me.