NFTS Residential- Day 6

Another great day today! We spent today looking at key skills to help give us more successful careers and learnt to build on these skills in various forms. For example, we had to 'pitch' each other to various leaders from the Academy, trying to persuade them to 'hire' us- which helped us to appreciate various different methods of communication and presentation skills. We also created a timeline of our lives, looking at what events had led us up to this point and learning how we can channel these things to direct our futures.
Besides this we also got to speak to Shola, the alumni officer at the Academy individually, discussing with him potential future career and work experience opportunities in order to get ourselves actively out there in the film industry.
We also looked at giving advice to future applicants to the Film Academy, looking at various examples of good and bad applications. One of the major things that we noticed everyone here had was a wide selection of other skills, meaning everyone was more well-rounded outside of film; the big hobbies seemed to be music and drama. Another piece of advice we came up with was to come across as more of a sociable, friendly person who's prepared to network with others (which is pretty much the whole point of the Residential). Another piece of advice was not to say "I'm really passionate about film"; the NFTS know that! The key thing was to be more specific as to why this was.
After another brief production meeting, we got to go to the first screening of first years MA Cinematography, Production Design and Animation NFTS students' short films, which used stop motion- but with real people! They made the films over the last week, creating full-sized sets in a day on the main soundstage and shooting/editing over the rest of the week. They were really interesting (and funny) to watch and gave a great idea of what to expect during a first year there.
Overall, it was a really good day- can't wait for tomorrow, when we begin shooting "French Cricket" on location!