The Final Year of Uni Begins

Hello,

For the sake of PDP and my own academic standing I shall continue my blog.

A lot has happened.

I passed the second year. I spent the summer broke and couldnt get a job to save my life but ironically managed to complete a work placement (even though it wasnt a paid one). Third year started and now I have multiple assignments and a new job working at Odeon Cinemas.

Juggling the uni work with the making-money work is quite difficult and annoying. I have to deliver a minor presentation pitch of my script Over the Hill in a few weeks (cue cards and Powerpoint-led materials included) and also have a fleshed out Dissertation Overview to accompany the genesis of my dissertation question/topic/subject area. I have to do all this research and prep whilst working four-five days a week and fitting in uni lectures at the same time. It's not easy and it's not working.

First of all, Odeon is a place that you think would be a cool place to work, but it isn't. It quite frankly sucks. It's boring and frustrating, and so are the people there. A few hot girls is a plus, but not a compensation. So, I plan on quitting after my next paycheque, to make room for my research and preperations. I seem to find it difficult walking and chewing gum at the same time, so I suck really.

Anyway, my minor piece is all about elderly residents breaking out of a retirement home and causing havoc (like The Great Escape meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the elderly and retired...). I need to block that presentation out so I summarise adequately all the details from plot synopsis, to marketing potential, to target audiences, to hypothetical casting etc. That might just end up being simple enough, on top of the development material required to complete that particular unit.

As for the dissertation, I have struggled to find a topic or subject area that excites me enough to waffle on for 10,000 words. I thought narrative was a good entry point for me to start off on but then I completely collapsed under the weight of not having a clue what to do with that. So I stopped thinking about it. Until, that is, I realised that working shifts at Odeon was beginning to force me into working on my uni projects more because I had less time to dick around now. So, in a way, the juggling of two seperate kinds of work, one financial, the other academic, somehow galvanized my on-going problem of leaving things to the last minute. So as of now I have a pretty solid Dissertation Overview worth redrafting. I have chosen to discuss the tv show 24 and the political ideologies behind the character of Jack Bauer, incorporating elements of Fox News Network's politcal bias, the torture debate, the real time narrative structure, post-911 media and the causal "Jack Bauer Effect" in the real world, and it implications. So, I'm excited about researching and writing about that subject area.I'm not sure if I have picked something too broad to cover, but fuck it, desperate times call for desperate measures, and 24 is a good way to encapsulate that phrase regarding my dissertation.

Sooooo, I am in the midst of pulling my finger out. I have met with my dissertation supervisor, who has been very helpful, and I have volunteered for recording my writing process for my major script onto an mp3, providing a series of soundbites that can accompany my final script for following years on how I wrote and developed my script. My major idea is something I have been developing for three years now, so it better turn out good, otherwise I'll feel like I wasted all that time.

It's been a strong start to the year so far in terms of my work ethic and drive to work hard, it's just this job at Odeon is beginning to distract me from more important things. But making money is still very important in itself. I have a dilemma. But somehow I'll work it out. After all, it's not a matter of life and death.