#statement of intention

Over the next 12 months, I hope to polish my script writing skills, adding video game writing to my repertoire. I hope to channel my focus and ideas properly through the storyboarding course so that I am not as scatterbrained when it comes to displaying my ideas properly. I hope to combine the knowledge that I have with writing a script for television with the knowledge that I will gain with writing a script for a video game. I also hope to achieve the ability to flesh out my characters better than what I do now, especially on a deadline as it can take me months now. During the Episodic and Serial Writing course, I will achieve more control and conciseness with my outline and finished projects. For the Script Analysis and Criticism course, I hope to fully scrutinize my own script and edit it properly without bias because it is mine.

I would also like to market myself more and the skills that I have that go beyond the skills I have currently. I also want to start my brand properly with the proper social media outlets and posting more frequently as I currently just have personal pages. During my free time, I plan on learning how to code or at least add in items when I need to. I also plan to learn the basics of Adobe Premier during my free time as well as I do have hobbies that I want to pursue and I need certain skills in order to pursue them. At the end of the program, I believe that I will be able to accurately write the scripts and other relevant writings to the best of my ability due to the knowledge that I have gained. Also at the end of the program, I hope to have several finished and edited projects that I can perhaps shop around to further get my proverbial foot in the door.

Reference

Very recently I've started scribbling in a little blue book that has spaces to write in one memory for each day over a 5 year span.  Although I've been sporadic in its upkeep I find this book useful, and even imperative, for remembering the big and little moments of my day-to-day life.

My memory has never been stellar, and despite the book, I'm terrified of forgetting things.  I have a trick I use to remember when something really special is happening- I squeeze my eyes shut tightly and visualize everything about the moment in my mind. Smells, colors, music, whatever, I intentionally burn it into my memory bank for the future, safely engraved there the next time I have a hankering to muse on something nostalgic. My internal voice admonishes "REMEMBER THIS ONE!" 

Unfortunately, I can't use my trick for everything.  Another problem- the minute details are all there, but the bigger ones don't seem to stick.  I'll remember the way the sunlight fractured through the blinds in my childhood bedroom in summer, or how the Christmas lights looked like Gremlin eyes behind them in the winter, but I'll have no idea of the date, my age, my mood at the time, and so forth.

One of the reasons I want to start a blog, this blog, is to expand on this task of record keeping.  Big things are on the horizon right now.  Poised on the tail-end of 26, I have marriage in my future, babies, a career, family milestones, funerals, new homes, an eternity of bad days and a lifetime of good ones.  I want to claim them.

          As part of my reflection on “Issues in English Teaching in the 21st Century”, I chose to focus on the issues of relevance and engagement in English for students, presented as a series of posts on a Tumblr blog. This broad over-arching theme allowed me to touch on a number of sub-topics which could be categorised under “relevance to students”, such as representations of diversity and usage of ICT, each of which was given its own smaller post within the overall site. As a fairly short assignment, the contents are written in a relatively informal manner, and are designed for an audience of young teacher candidates – student teachers such as myself, who are relatively new to these ideas. The aim of this presentation is to be entertaining and interesting, first and foremost, as a link to the content of the assignment itself: as teachers we must work, first and foremost, to ensure that students actually care about the work they are doing within English. In giving a demonstration of more targeted teaching and presentation of information, it reiterates and hopefully reinforces the premise of the content – that modern English classes should try to provide teaching and content that is targeted towards the needs and wishes of the students rather than those of teachers.

     Tumblr was chosen as the format for presentation as it is a reasonably recent blogging system that allows for the compilation of information from a variety of sources, and even using the free sign-up only section, allows for a diverse range of layouts, which I selected and tweaked for ease of access. From my personal experiences it is a social networking medium that is relatively popular with the teen and early 20s age groups, making it something that would also be appropriate and relevant to my desired audience. The posting system allowed me to separate my over-all thoughts into a number of different subtopics, while also allow space to include other information (such as videos), which were collected for the purpose of aesthetics and demonstrating the usefulness of the format. (As well as making my Tumblr come off as more “natural” – like one actually in common use.)