I'm at home for my long-ass break between classes. I got a car wash on the way home, and it didn't get my windshield clean. It did, however, leak through my roof. I didn't particularly care enough to complain, though. All I really wanted was to clean my headlights and generally be able to tell that my car is green, not brown.
My Directing course is focusing strongly on composition, things like blocking and angles and lighting. It's interesting, in the sense that I've never really bothered to learn about these things before, and it's neat to have the vocabulary to discuss what most people understand but can't articulate. My prof says he wants to make us realize that directing is only partly about working with actors. Lately I've been defending my opinion that characters aren't complete people, and that having an actor play them, no matter how well or complexly they do so, doesn't make them complete. Reasonable extrapolations, induction, or even occasionally deduction, can be made to fill out a character, but there's still not an entire lifetime's worth of experiences there, a discrete sentience. This could be considered a vaguely classicist, old-school type of interpretation. I have no problem with fleshing out characters--everything from bone structures to gargoyles to missing moments is fine with me--but directors (and others) who ignore the rest in favour of "completing" a character make me disheartened. The relationship between character and everything else is kind of like the relationship in Minesweeper between the numbers and the bombs--there will not always be the maximum, nor minimum, number of bombs possible with the number arrangement, nor always somewhere in between, but the bombs do create the numbers, just as character is created by plot and context and the like.
Huh. I'm developping a bruise on my arm, and I have no idea what I did to it.
I almost made it through the entire first week of classes with no absences. On Friday, I went to Peter's house during my break to do work there on my computer, and when I went to leave for my French course at Fac, I realized that I had forgotten my course pack in my locker. I didn't have time to go get it without being, like, fifteen minutes late, and I knew that all we were doing was going through the course pack and finishing the "final exam" that I had finished the class before, so since the class was only an hour, instead of two like on Mondays and Wednesdays, I called Joyce up and got her to meet me at Tim Horton's for lunch. ^_^ It was a classic of my days skipping in high school. I even treated myself to a fruit explosion muffin like I used to. ^_^ We rounded the excursion off with a trip to Southgate, where I discovered that the Gilmore Girls complete series DVD boxset is now available in Canada. I want it. ^_^ HMV was charging $250, which isn't that bad for seven seasons, but I think I'll check to see if Best Buy has it for cheaper.
But, yeah, that "final exam" thing. We wrote a version of the final exam in my French class. It wasn't for marks, but instead to compare the results from the beginning of term to the results at the end of term. I think I did reasonably well except for one thing: there was a parts of speech section where we were given sentences and asked to underline and label various parts of speech. The only problem was that the names of all of these were abbreviated, and I didn't know all of the abbreviations. I couldn't remember for the life of me what a "CC" was, for instance. If they hadn't been abbreviated, then I probably would have done much better. Oh, and I couldn't remember the Passe Simple of Etre. I feel remarkably stupid about that one, actually...
But now, I think, it is time for lunch. =)
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