As I am writing this I am also thinking of ways to efficiently clean my cabin. We are just finishing up our work weekend at the WtS retreat. I had a fun time, but the best part wasn’t in the fun but that I got to learn so much about storytelling. I learned a lot about how certain ideas and strategies in film can affect an audiences notion of a film, and I worked a lot so I think it greatly improved my work ethic in general. hopefully this echoes in school and other aspects of life too. I also got to learn a lot about cameras and actual filming, like the two thirds rule. I knew about the two thirds rule for graphic design but never thought about how it might be used in film. Its interesting what different attributes of storytelling you can pull from other arts, and vice versa. It seems they are more similar than one might think. One thing I struggled with was keeping up with the homework assigned by my school over the weekend. Although it is a lot, I am confident I am managing my time well enough that I can do my school work and work for WtS. Over the weekend they fed us really well; with donuts, ice cream, chips, brownies and apple crisp. these aren’t even mentioning the actual meals we had, Just in this 28 something hours period of time. This has been a huge highlight but also a bigger struggle. It has been crazy difficult not to eat most anything and everything I have seen here.

I settled into a group with Oliver, Kate and Sam. We Have decided on a time to meet each week and are zooming in on living sustainably in a rural area as our topic. We are going through this topic with a open thoughts and a growth mindset to learn along with the audience. Kind of a treasure/answer at the end of the rainbow type of situation it seems, where we come to some sort of conclusion about living sustainably. It was a struggle to come to this topic but once proposed we all agreed it was the route we wanted to take the film. Oliver ,Sam and I are all very close and this was a concern for keeping us in a group, mainly because main purpose of the program is to branch out. But the program has helped us all to Branch out still outside of the groups through other activities and acts of sharing information. A big theme of this weekend was unplugging from technology and really getting back to our own base ideas and connecting with each other. so before I put this on a blog, I wrote it in a notebook. And as this is progressing I am realizing more and more how bad my handwriting is as I grapple to read.

In preparation for the next overnight I think our team will shoot a lot of B role, to capture the Fall which has almost already gone. It always seems to leave, so quick and so subtly like a ghost. We will meet more to discuss the film and will probably mess around with the cameras. Who knows, maybe by November 23rd we will have compiled a mini film from day to day filming, of queries about the world and people and their stories. I hope we continue to pull on those strings.