As with its sibling Media Studies field, Film Studies is a discipline that is very set in its ways. It struggles to grapple with new technologies and the new ways of being they create for the spectator and spectacle. I, however, have adopted the Media Studies 2.0 approach and now study film from a constructive, experimental and open-source perspective.

Film has always been a major fascination for me, it’s why I studied a BA (Hons) in Film and Screen Studies and this module picks up where my undergraduate studies left off.

A major influence of my progressive approach towards studying film in this module was David Thomson’s book, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us. Like myself, Thomson has a burning belief that the discipline is in desperate need of reform and that it should never have been broken off from Media Studies.

Granted, I am still studying Media Studies and Film Studies as separate modules in my MTA Portfolio, but I view them more so as being a combined immersion under my larger Multimedia Studies and Creative Technologies concentration.

I think this is the way forward, I think these two fields can only be successfully and relevantly studied when they are combined back together under a much larger, constructive, experimental and opensource Multimedia Studies discipline.

When you are talking about film and our relationship to it, you are talking about a larger media landscape, one that our increasingly interconnected world is making increasingly obvious… but also increasingly confusing.

The classical disciplinary obsession of performing a textual analysis of a film text in isolation is a good place to start in understanding our relationship with film spectacles, but it will only get you so far.

As I discovered towards the end of my Bachelor’s degree when I was doing practical filmmaking alongside my theoretical studies, you have to get your hands dirty, immerse yourself in emerging technologies and experiment with the medium, if you really want to understand what film is, how it functions and how we relate to it.

Even with this module and my larger multimedia studies, I continued to experiment. I played around with an unfinished mocumentary that developed out of The Miracle of Crowdfunding project (was one of the progenitors for my MTA Portfolio).

I also did a 365 project in 2015 where I filmed and an assembled a short clip each day that I envisioned adding up to an overall film narrative of my year, I never edited the whole thing together, but each clip can still be viewed in isolation.

There were also twelve short cameo documentary films I made that focused on minute happenings in my life, my personal favourite was the one about my self-made standing desk.

My only regret is that I could not devote more time to experimenting with film in my MTA Portfolio, but this module is far from being my final word on the subject.