I woke up this morning with high hopes. I’ve been living in the Bay Area for a few months now, poking and prodding at the different options and avenues I could take to lead to a successful film career. My search brought me to BDFI. I applied, I got accepted: fast forward to today.

Day one.
Now, until this point, I’ve always equated the first day of school with nervousness, awkward silences and sweaty palms. Everyone’s always feeling out everybody else, trying to see inside to find, A) a weakness, or B) something to confide in. We all do it. You walk into a room of people you don’t know and almost subconsciously we walk to a person or a group that looks hospitable. Cool. Every school I’ve attended has had this on day one. I’ve always called it “Darwin Day,” because generally
you see who’s going to make it and who’s not. Survival of the fittest. May the strongest win, but there’s strength in numbers.

BDFI was different, though. As I walked in and sat down, other students trickled in after me and each and every person was outgoing and friendly. Twelve students in all, Patrick sat down and we all went
through the process of introducing ourselves.

After a short first day lesson, we were invited to schmooze with the senior students. Fantastic! A few snacks were put on the table, and we were given the liberty of walking around talking to current students. All of the current students seemed elated to be attending BDFI, which
raises my confidence incredibly.

I hear we’ll be handling cameras while going over cinematography tomorrow. I’m thoroughly excited.

Wow what a first day of school. It was such a great day with cool people. What made it great was learning about everyone and meeting the upper class students at the end of the day.

The first project was brought up and what we are supposed to do for it. I can’t wait to start working on it. It will be very interesting to see what other people think of mine. I have great feeling about my classmates and that we all will get along very well and be able to work with each other no matter the age gap.

What I liked the best was that the ten of us went to the cafe to have lunch after meeting the upper
class students. We got to know each other more and relax with each other. I hope we can do it again some day. I can’t wait to learn more from my classmates in working with them or knowing them as people.

We started up classes about a month ago and it’s been a blast as usual. Last week we had Jim Capobianco, the screenwriter for Pixar’s, Ratatouille he came and visited with us. That was really interested to hear the difference between film production and animation. It definitely made me want to learn more about animation and try to incorporate animation into my films.

This week we had a cinematography class taught by Patrick. I requested to learn more about rack focusing and focus pulling, because I am going to be using a lot of that in my next project. So we spent the whole class learning about the different focus settings and space of depth of field around each point of focus. It was extremely helpful and I’m looking forward to using it on my next project now that I know how to apply it to the look I’m going for.

We did a movie trailer for Sharrif’s editing class which was a lot of fun ( as his projects usually are.) I did a film trailer for Baraka. It was a great project to work on because the visuals are amazing. I added some music from my friend’s band called Monkey C. They make Indonesian music mixed with blues and rock. Good stuff!