Today was probably the best experience I had at encounters.

I'm glad that we were able to get some interesting advice and experience from the sound designer of The Pianist Dean Humphries. It was very insightful to learn that the most key important part of the film is to make sure that the dialogue is clean and heard well and not nessiarily the background noise. The next sequence we watched was a more experimental style series of films that featured heavy amounts of archive footage to put across their points. I did overall find this quite boring, espiecially the middle section because it was very unengaging, however the finale was very very simple yet incredibly charming and enjoyable to watch, a flurry of photographs of farm animals at a German meat farm, accompanied to some minimalist music. Lastly we got to watch a series of Ishort movies made by people breaking into the industry. What was great was that this was the only sequence where I was not bored by any of the movies, and really found it engaging. All of the films felt unique and thought provoking and gave me some great ideas and direction for my films to come. What this also made me think about was the selection process for encounters, the final segment that we watched was done via people being told to make their own good films and then collect them together, however for all the other segments they were grouped into theme catagories, such as Nostalgia and Nature. I think this is what let down many of the films at the festival, being chosen via a common theme and run time as opposed to whether they were actually really good and deserving, because the final segment of films definately worked better.

Overall I've really enjoyed my time at encounters and have learned a lot, although at the same time I do think they have a lot more to improve upon in terms of quality content (Brazilian Art House films) and perhaps not as many workshops as I would have hoped for, it would have been great to have seen the movie projector, or to handle some equipment and meet some more directors face to face.