Second opinion


SuaveStar

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Well, I'm filling out my personal statement for UCAS, and I filled it in already about a month ago, and just recently updated it.

I need some second opinion on this, people I've asked said it looked fine, the first one, and my lecturer asked me to add things to it. So I'm posting both the one I just made and the original here. Most of the second half is the same for both, I just wondered what people thought is the better statement. I'm not trying to cheat with my statement, it's just the people I usually ask for second opinion are away on holiday and I need to finish this today, to send it off to my lecturer.

Original:

Whenever I sit down to write, I always feel a joy seeing the words and sentences jump out onto the page. There is just something about reading something that someone else has wrote and being transported to the world they created all the way to creating my own ideas in my own part of the world. I learned that when I was studying my NQ in acting, I my strong point wasn't performing, it was writing the material for others to perform, the feeling that I got when I saw people become the characters I created and seeing others around me become immersed in my work was amazing.

While doing this, I found out about night classes in stand up comedy. These classes taught me how to write material for stand up and how to be able to go through my life and see things that I could make funny and see the world in a different light. Through my stand up class I was able to perform one minute comedy set on BBC Scotland during a lunchtime broadcast in front of an audience. What I had to do for this was come up with material which would be suitable for a lunchtime show with very little advance time. Doing the show raised my personal confidence in writing material and also helping me work to time bound goals.

My influences are Christopher Nolan for his belief that realism is where the story really starts, if the audience believes that what you are doing can happen, and then you already have their interest. I take this to heart whenever I sit down to write something, I do not follow the method that I should throw things down on paper that I think can be just random, I like the idea that what I write could happen in the real world. My other main influences is Glaswegian comic book writer Grant Morrison, who when writing seems to be able to take the most absurd ideas possible and be able to make you think it could happen.

Taking things that I learn from these people and others, using what I have learned from these two different creators, I was able to understand that I have to believe in what is being written, or else there is no point in writing.

In the future, I hope to be able to write a series of films, books or plays with characters that develop and evolve naturally into something that completely different from where they were in the first place. I do not like having ideas where your antagonist is revealed at the end of your product out of nowhere, I prefer the idea of your antagonist being in plain sight audience, but it is just not in plain sight, but if you look closely, you can see the seedlings coming alive and forming something that you did not expect at the time.

One of the ideas I have been playing with for a long time, is the idea of imagination and how if you truly wanted to, you could find a way to live in your own mind forever. This has been something I've been playing with for years, ever since a friend told me of how he used to make a room in his mind, to escape stress. When I heard this, I started to ask myself if we could achieve so much with the mind could we create a sanctuary for ourselves, and if you could, would you. One day I know I will write something that will stand the test of time, and the next step in the journey towards that is right in front of me right now.

Hopefully when the day comes, I am able to inspire the experiences in others, that I have felt myself.

This is the one I just put together:

Whenever I sit down to write, I always feel a joy seeing the words and sentences jump out onto the page. There is just something about reading something that someone else has wrote and being transported to the world they created all the way to creating my own ideas in my own part of the world. I learned that when I was studying my NQ in acting, I my strong point wasn't performing, it was writing the material for others to perform, the feeling that I got when I saw people become the characters I created and seeing others around me become immersed in my work was amazing.

While doing this, I found out about night classes in stand up comedy. These classes taught me how to write material for stand up and how to be able to go through my life and see things that I could make funny and see the world in a different light. Through my stand up class I was able to perform one minute comedy set on BBC Scotland during a lunchtime broadcast in front of an audience. What I had to do for this was come up with material which would be suitable for a lunchtime show with very little advance time. Doing the show raised my personal confidence in writing material and also helping me work to time bound goals.

When I started my HND in communication with media, one of the main issues I had was with my graded unit, the graded unit could be on anything media related I wanted to do, so I decided to write three scripts, one for radio, one for stage and one for screen. As I went further along with this project, I found out that in the timeframe I had set myself, I had not realised how much work I was doing, by the tenth week of the eighteen week time frame I had set myself for all three projects, I had only worked on one project, that being the film script, there would be no way in eight weeks, I could hand three scripts, so I had to cut back to two, later when I realised that writing two scripts would be too much, I finished up with just one feature script filled out with character bios and a scene by scene analysis and treatment. Doing this truly showed me what the limits are to a project and how you need to sometimes be realistic with yourself and not take on too much all at once, if I was able to work out how much time was needed for each project realistically at the start, I could have focused all my attention on the one script from the start, but I didnt and I feel my project suffered because of that. But as a wise man once said, Sometimes half the fun is failing, picking yourself up and saying Ok world, here I am, back again, and I dont want to get my ass kicked like yesterday the man who said that was Paul Heyman. I may have failed in handing in three scripts for my Year 1 graded unit, but I know now my strengths and weaknesses and now, a few years later, Im less willing to fail at doing a project. For this second year of my HND, I am doing three journalistic articles, that I can alter to fit a news radio broadcast, this will not be easy by any stretch, but with the knowledge of what I have achieved in my first year, and with the help of classes I am studying right now, I can achieve this, and this year, finish the project fully and achieve what has to be done.

My influences are Christopher Nolan for his belief that realism is where the story really starts, if the audience believes that what you are doing can happen, and then you already have their interest. I take this to heart whenever I sit down to write something, I do not follow the method that I should throw things down on paper that I think can be just random, I like the idea that what I write could happen in the real world. My other main influences is Glaswegian comic book writer Grant Morrison, who when writing seems to be able to take the most absurd ideas possible and be able to make you think it could happen.

Taking things that I learn from these people and others, using what I have learned from these two different creators, I was able to understand that if I do not believe in what I am doing before others can believe in me.

One of the ideas I have been playing with for a long time, is the idea of imagination and how if you truly wanted to, you could find a way to live in your own mind forever. This has been something I've been playing with for years, ever since a friend told me of how he used to make a room in his mind, to escape stress. When I heard this, I started to ask myself if we could achieve so much with the mind could we create a sanctuary for ourselves, and if you could, would you. One day I know I will write something that will stand the test of time, and the next step in the journey towards that is right in front of me right now.

Hopefully when the day comes, I am able to inspire the experiences in others, that I have felt myself.

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