WHERE TO START

Sorry I haven’t been blogging lately.

Today I am going to talk about jobs, since Katherine mentioned in her post a conversation I participated in on Saturday night with her and a number of others who, unlike me, were actually employed by the Projector all year and for that reason, were at the party.

Everyone was, in some way or the other, concerned. 

To me it makes sense why everyone would be so concerned about potentially not having a job after school is over. One of my classmates says he already asked the restaurant he works at to make him full time again, because he does not know for sure if he will gain employment elsewhere (meaning in our chosen field), but “you have to pay the rent somehow.” 

There are few jobs in this industry available now, or so it seems. Journalism, as I often like to rant about, is simply not the amazing thing it once was. It’s still amazing, but it’s not a time anymore where quality is more important than speed and people expect news in the paper tomorrow morning, rather than immediately when it happens, told through social media. These things are, of course, dependent on the media outlet, however.

As for me, I have been trying to take one day at a time and I am still figuring out who I even want to be in the world and in the writing world and all of that stuff, but I know if I contemplate this forever without taking a leap onto something then I will end up being nothing. So I need to get a job, too. 

I am taking some basic courses at the University of Manitoba in the fall in the film department. I definitely want to make documentary films. I have never found something I love as much as documentaries. 

But I am troubled because after next year, what do I do? I used to have a romantic idea about starting off directly in documentary filmmaking, but now I don’t think that anymore. When I think about docs, I break them down into stories told through narration, character, visual, and sound. I feel as though I need to develop my storytelling skills through the first medium I ever did it through, and the one I will probably continue to love most for the rest of my life: writing.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is I want to start somewhere. Print journalism is calling my name lately, because I’ve grown throughout the last year in CreComm and I realize that even though it’s not everything it used to be, it’s importance remains the same and that is the way I can get my foot in the door - even if not in the doc making door immediately - and continue to learn what components to include when telling a story; learning what it means to tell a comprehensive, fair story. 

So no, I don’t know where I will be, or what I am going to do for a job, but I am starting to know where to start.