Week 3

This week in film comeday we watched a few more funny clips and learned a bit more about what makes something funny. We saw the clip "The Sprinkler Sprinkled" which I had seen before in film studies class in first year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HVj7kezK98 We see here that its funny because the butt of the joke makes the joke in the end when he chases him with the hose. There is a reversal of roles here. We also watched "Transformation of Hats, Comic View" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvY_cDdeV34 It´s suposed to show how disguise can be funny but I didn´t find this clip funny. We also watched some Charlie Chapman shorts. When I was younger I thought that Charlie Chapman was really funny but for some reason now that I am older I don´t find him funny. We watched "In the Park" and "The Champion". These types of comedy are all based on the body and most comic situations are attacks on the body. But here the violence doesn´t have any real consequences as blood kills any aspect of comedy. We also see how Charlie Chapmans character always pretends to be the perfect gentlemen but it turns out that he is quite the opposite. There are also alot of probs in these clips which add to the comic moments. I enjoyed watching these clips and learning about what makes them funny. Even if I didn´t find some of them particularly funny I understand that this was the begining of comedy. People watching these would never have seen anything like this before and they would ahve found it funny. I look forward to watching more clips in class tomorrow and hopefully in the next few weeks it will move on to more modern clips.


History of design was alot more interesting this week so I hope it keeps going in this direction. We learned about some influential designers such as William Morris (1834-1896), Architect Philip Webb, (who designed a house for William Morris that was medieval inspired) and Frederick W.Goudy who had a unique cartoon style. William Morris was the most important of these. He is best known as the leader of arts and crafts and was a British Avant Garde designer. He designed lots of books and designed his own trade mark that appeared on all of his books.

    William Morris Trademark

Other Willaim Morris designs include:

We also watched a short documentary about him and then at the end of class we had to pick one of his designs and try to draw it. I found this part difficult as I am terrible at drawing.

In effective presentations we went over the three key stages in preparing for a presentation. They are strategy, structure and style. Strategy involves tailoring your message to the specific audience. Once you know what you´re going to say you need to structure your material into a meaningful message. The audience need to know why they should be listening to you and once you have their attention you need to show them why they should care about what you are saying. the style of your presentaion involves your posture, tone, enthusiasm and ridiating confidence. We also talked about the outline of a presentation and what the opening of your presentaion should contain. This comes in the form of ABCD.

• Attention = capture your audience´s interest instantly
• Benefit = explain what they will gain from the talk
• Credibility = show them you have the authority to speak
• Direction = give them a route map of the presentation

For class this week we have to have researched a topic that we want to do our presentaion on that we will discuss in class and then have the main outline typed up for friday. I think I would like to do my presentation travelling as I have travelled to America, Canada, Thailand and now Spain. I would hope to inform the class of each of these countries resulting in them wanting to travel there.

This week myself Sinead and Emma also finished our project proposal that we will hand up tomorrow. We have decided to film a movie trailer for a horror film. We will all work together on this dividing out the roles between us and then at the end we will individually design our own posters as a way of advertising the film and then also each do a 1500 word essay on the genre of horror. I am really looking forward to starting on this project. We hand up our proposal tomorrow ad then out lecturer will let us know how many credits we will get for it.

Finally finding my way around!

I survived my first week of classes and I actually enjoyed my learning experience this week. I eventually figured out the days, times and places of all my class and made it to all of them! I had my first golden week. The week began with Spanish class which to say the least was awful. The level of the class is intermediate and I couldn´t understand a thing as I don´t even have basic Spanish. But I decided that i would give it a chance and try and learn from it so I went to my second Spanish class on thursday. After this I realised that I would not be able for this class as I spent the class with my head down praying the lecturer wouldnt ask me a question. I dont think I would have even known if she was talking to me beause I couldn´t understand a thing. The class is thought through Spanish and from my own learning experiences in the past I know that I can only learn a language if it is thought through english. So today i decided to drop the spanish class and learn the language through a tandem partner where I soeak english to them and they speak spanish to me. I also have been spending a lot of time on google translate :)

Tuesday was a better day. We had film comedy class which I really enjoyed and its the class I look forward to all week. (Our lecturer is really nice and he is going to help us work on a project in our spare time because we have limited options for classes we can attend in english.) He began the class by splitting us up into groups of people from different countries. He wanted us to understand jokes and what makes them funny. So we had to tell jokes to our group and then explain why they are funny as people from different countries have a different sense of humour. This was a really fun exercise. Once this was done he showed us cartoon clips of Tom and Gerry, Bugs Bunny and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? After each clip we dissused the factors that made it funny. These were things I never would have noticed before. Factors such as sound effects, explosions, cruelty, surprise and exaggeration. I tried posting a video here of one of the clips we watched but for some reason it won´t upload! (frustrating) So I´ll just have to post the link..
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvy_s-GfDxA

Wednesday was the first of our history of design class. I didn´t really enjoy this class. The lecturer was teaching about Ancient Greece, Rome, Persia and Egypt and telling us about how the pyramids were built. She was also teaching about the evolution of humans from monkeys. Maybe it´s just me but I don´t see the relevance of this. Because myself, Emma and Sinead are the only ones in her class from Audio Visual Communications she expected us to know everything because we have studied design before. It was very embarrising when she kept asking us questions that we didn´t know the answer to. I had to eventually just tell her that we don´t know this stuff as we have never studied it before. We would´nt be doing a class if we had studied all the stuff before. I hope that this class will improve and that she is just getting the boring stuff out of the way first.

The other class i really enjoyed was effective presentations. I think that I can really benefit. We have this class on a wednesday and friday. I think this will be helpful beacuse I am missing out on so many presentaions at home this semester so hopefully this will help me keep on top of my presenting skills and also help build my confidence for presenting the group project in third year. The lecturer has really good english so he is easy to understand and we are the only native english speakers in the class so I feel like we have an advantage. We were given notes on overcoming stage fright which were really helpful. At the end of the semester we have to do a presentation by ourselves on any topic we like so until then we´re going to work on the best way to approach it and outline it and how to keep your audience interested. He is also preparing us by getting us to read out things in class so we won´t be shy when presenting which i feel like is an effective approach!

I am really looking forward to see what this semester abroad will bring in terms of learning. I have to spend this week making up a project proposal for my film comedy lecturer so he can allocate credits to it and also work a bit more on my spanish by hopefully getting a tandem partner. I´m excited about getting stuck into the work! My film comedy class in the morning should be fun! :)

First Impressions! (Erasmus,Gandia,Spain)

I arrived to Gandia, Spain two weeks ago on erasmus and my first impressions are not the best. I loved the area and the weather when I first got here but five days into it our apartment got broken into.

We headed out on the wednesday night to an erasmus bar called Varadero. This place is very different to what I am used to at home. Most people here are also erasmus students but they speak very little English so it´s difficult to communicate with people making it harder to meet new friends. Especially in an environment with loud music when you can barely hear yourself talk never mind anyone else. Eventhough I am not a smoker I found myself in the smoking area for most of the night because that was the only place you could actually talk to people. It´s very different from going out with your frineds at home.

We arrived home to the apartment afterwards to discover it had been broken into while we were out. The kitchen and the sitting room were the same as we left them and the door had still been locked so we didn´t notice anything until we went down to the bedrooms. My clothes from my drawer were on my bed and my wardrobe doors and drawers were all open. I got such a shock. I looked under my bed then and noticed my laptop and iphone gone. Also my nintendo ds was gone from my drawer. My friend Sinead´s laptop was also gone and Emma´s rent money. We were really freaked out. We called the police but it took us a while to get through to anyone who could speak English. The police finally arrived and they didn´t do much for us. They looked round the apartment and took our passport details. Four of them came but only one could speak little English. We were then told to go down to the police station the next day to make a statement.

Before we could make a statement the next day we had to find a translator because none of them speak English. It´s very frustrating bein in a country where you don´t speak the language and very few people speak your language. I would have presumed that everyone in Spain could speak English.

Our first week in college was another disaster. We were expected to just go on the internet and find timetables and then find our classes. But this was impossible as all the timetables were in Spanish. We found that no one could help us with this. We met other erasmus students from Norway who were the same as us. We eventually figured out that we had to enroll online and that told you the time and day that the class was on but not where! We just had to arrive at the college in time for our class and hopefully meet people in the same class who knew where we were going. Because of this we only made it to a few classes in our first week. We missed some but we think we know where to go next week so hopefully next week will be better.

Today also, a week after the robbery, we got someone who could come to the police station with us and translate. My Spanish mentor came with us and without her we would be lost (even more lost then we already are). We finally got our statements done and made it through our first week of college. Tomorrow night there is an erasmus welcoming dinner and drinks party so I´m hoping that will be a good night. So now I´m going to put the past two weeks behind me and try not to dwell on it and look forward to whats to come. The erasmus union seems to have lots of fun things planned for us! Hopefully my next post will be a bit more cheerful after we´ve gotten over all this.

On the bright side the weather is lovely, clear blues skies, cold at times but better then the wind and rain at home. Our apartment is right in the middle of the beach and the college and there´s a beautiful view of the beach from our balcony. If I could make one recommendation to anyone after my first two weeks here it would be to not come to a country on erasmus if they don´t speak English and you don´t speak their language. It´s very frustrating and makes things a lot more difficult.