In this blog I will be discussing 2020 so far and the plans that I have for the remaining months of the year.
2020 started strong for me personally, new-years was fun with the family back in The Netherlands.I was mostly up to date on my assignments and I was finishing the script for my short film. In the news they were talking about a virus that was going on in Wuhan, China. A few Dutch people were stuck but it did not seem like a big deal. Little did I know that everything was about to change really quickly.
When I arrived back in Newcastle upon Tyne in mid January I was finishing my assignments at the last minute like I always do. But the virus was starting to spread around the world slowly. In February we started working on the productions of our creative projects. We had five weeks to film and edit our projects. In the first week I helped Esther with her commercial. It was a fun project to work on and quite light-hearted. It was refreshing to work on a project again, it had been a while for me since I worked on a set and it got me in the mood to start my project, which was scheduled to start filming in the third week. In between Esther’s project and mine I worked on Viggo’s music video and Tyra’s documentary. I started to worry for my own project because a lot of actors were cancelling on me because of the Covid-19 virus that was now a global pandemic.
In the week that was supposed to start filming the college decided to close their doors for the foreseeable future (College Closed, 2020). Me, Viggo, Esther and Robin decided we had to move back to The Netherlands, Covid-19 was now a serious threat and there was a good chance that we would not be able to go back home in the summer. This decision was made three days before the last ferry left from Newcastle to Amsterdam. We packed all our stuff and went back home. This meant that my project never came to fruition.
Back home I hit a personal blockade, I was depressed that I had to leave the friends that I made in Newcastle behind without being able to say our farewells. I lost all motivation to do assignments. Motivation has always been a problem of mine so to lose the little motivation that I had was devastating. I started working on my assignments on the day of the deadline, I had to hand in an older project of mine and indefinitely postpone my short film. This lasted until the end of April.
In April I had some talks with my family about my future plans. I started to feel the stress about what I could do after I was done with my course at Newcastle College. I decided that I was going to apply to the Pre-master Cultural Economy and Entrepreneurship at Erasmus University Rotterdam, this would give me more job opportunities in the future, and I would be able to ride out the recession that was bound to happen after the ”intelligent” lock-down in The Netherlands. At time of writing I am still waiting on a reaction from Erasmus University. My back-up plan is to get a job at a local e-commerce company to do content creation for them.
My life goal is still to become a film Director, I have made the choice to apply to a pre-master that is broader than just the film industry because I want to be have more job security. But only time can tell what the year can bring me, so far 2020 has been a roller-coaster of emotions and big events happening all around the world, and the next big change can be just around the corner.
References
ncl-coll.ac.uk. 2020. College Closed. [online] Available at: <https://www.ncl-coll.ac.uk/the-college/remote-learning> [Accessed 28 May 2020].