... at least that's what the certificate says. If you remove certain words.

My time at the NFTS culminated in 3 days of graduation screenings at the British Film Institute on the South Bank in London. Wednesday and Thursday were industry days - where various members of the film and television industry were invited to see the graduation films and some other selected films from the two year course, and then we could discuss them over drinks afterwards.

Of course, this also means that we got to see each other's films for the first times in many cases - when the films were shorter in the first year with more regular deadlines, we used to all attend reviews and screenings to give feedback and see what everyone else was doing with their brief. But in the second year we all got a bit too busy and had our own films to be concentrating on, and the tradition lapsed - but it was great to see how they'd all turned out after hearing varying amounts during the filming and editing processes.

In addition to the four graduation films, I had two other films which I'd edited in my first year (a fiction - Brixton 85, and a documentary - Davey's Last Order) screened at the industry days, which gave me a new audience reaction to notice and a chance to evaluate the editing decisions I'd made over a year ago... which was both illuminating and painful in certain respects, as self-examination tends to be!

The graduation films themselves all went extremely well - the animation Cherry on the Cake had laughs and 'aww's in all the right places and looked fantastic on a huge screen. The Love Bureau went down extremely well with the right humour - and perhaps in retrospect an overabundance of cats... although it was fairly representative of the rushes! Park Close again went down very well in front of a new audience, although I was double-booked with the screening of   TV or not TV which was unfortunate as the cast and writers were also in attendance and I thought it would be more useful to get the fresh audience reaction there.

Friday was the friends and family day and the actual graduation itself - which may have been more nerve-racking in many respects! Although in true NFTS tradition it was all rather informal... we corrected Nik's (the director of the school) speech en masse, got called scruffy by Michael Kuhn, had official photos taken with the stage party, and given sparkly certificates.

So on with the search for further employment! Whilst waiting for the less official 'wrap' party...