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It's finished.
17th November 2004, 12.20pm

All finished. Edited, submitted, assessed and the marks handed back. I passed. And the film's pretty good. I can still watch it and not cringe too much. It was a reasonably typical final two weeks, filled with doubt, stress, joy, frustration, hard-drive crashes, late nights, that buzz you get from seeing something you built with your own brain taking shape, shortcuts, additional scenes being drawn at the last minute and the fun of assembling a closing credits sequence. So there it is. I'm not a multimedia student anymore. Two years of my life have whipped past and I've a handful of shonky-but-cute cartoons to show for it. Ahead lies the summer of all-the-things-I've-been-holding-off-on-because-of-school, which will hopefully be filled with zinemaking, tweaky Flash programming, comic making, short-story writing and (omfg) actually getting back to writing my ever-lovin' novel. I have a big, freshly-written list on my desktop and I'm determined to cross off everything on it by Christmas.

Where I am right now reminds me of where I was when I finally finished my degree in 1993. I'd spent three years studying, with the combined backmonkeys of protestant work ethic and general feelings of guilt stopping me from avoiding study too much, and once the obligations of my course were fulfilled I went sick and started doing a million things at once - writing for the street press, doing community radio, writing heaps of poetry and performing it in pubs, going out every night of the week... it was great. It was like the previous three years had been a coiled spring storing potential energy, and when I finally graduated, the spring was released, transferring its energy and momentum into me. That's kind of how it feels now, after two years of holding off on various creative projects so that I could do justice to my studies. The spring has been released, and I'm looking forward to putting two years of potential energy to use.

But back to the film. There's a graduate exhibition on in early December at the Trades Hall Ballroom, which is naturally inside Trades Hall, which is on the corner of Lygon and Victoria Streets in Carlton. Big grey stone building. Kind of imposing. You can't miss it. The opening is on Thursday the 2nd of December from 6-8pm, and the exhibition is open from 12-6pm on Friday the 3rd and Saturday the 4th. I should point out that it'll only be the 30-second preview for my film that'll be screening on those days - with as many students as are in my graduating year, you'd be there for at least nine hours to get through everyone's final assignment. As it is, even with only thirty seconds per student, it's still a two-hour show.

I'm thinking of putting together some kind of screening of my own early next year, but first I want to have a bit of a play and try to fix up some of the things that my lecturers suggested need work. For now I've put a wee section of the film up here for you to check out. As teeny as it is, it's still a kinda biggish file, so I wouldn't advise watching it unless you're on some kind of ADSL/Cable deal or have some time to kill waiting for the download. Click on the image below to watch, if you dare.

The Battle of Clarendon Street - sample
(0:14 - 3.3Mb)

And when I say "teeny", I mean it not only in file-size and screen dimensions, I mean it in the computery way that indicates that this wee movie has been compressed to the shithouse, which means when you think "hey Adam your movie's all faded and blurry you crap animator wannabe you", then I go, "that's not me, that's the holy Internet that's made them look like that - in real life it's proper shmick as, so nyah". In the nicest possible way, of course.

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