By ‘Eck Not By ‘Arf

I am bone deep hands down exhausted… and it’s all my own fault.
I wish I could report that I only had 2.5 hours sleep because I was having lots of lovely fun, (whatever form that may take) but instead I am a victim of my unwavering compulsion to push my deadlines to the last minute and my impossible need to shoot for the moon.
In this case the last minute has been all week this week and the shooting for the moon has been at the behest of one word in my assignment.
Artistic.
The assessment read as follows “Students will select one of the following writers, artists and/or performers and deliver a biographical presentation in artistic form in tutorial sessions.
Now… it was a long time before I ever felt confident calling myself creative (and even less so, artistic), in fact it took acceptance to performing arts school and a 3 year advanced diploma in performing arts before I actually began to believe it. And even in light of that I am a bit bemused by my flight of fancy which was the result of being assigned this task.
Given that I have lovely tools and an apparently creative bent, this week I took my first foray into iMovie. My subject was Aretha Franklin and as there are a whole plethora of resources online I was able to compile a whole lot of them, story board them and narrate them into my very own Aretha Franklin mini documentary. All 12:47 minutes of it… (and as Flick my old flatty is a film editor I now have the utmost respect for what she does… have you any idea what it takes to find enough content for a 12:47 video? Yeah… it’s a total nightmare)
Unfortunately, as the end result is of questionable ‘fair use’ and is basically a shameless abuse of any number of copyrights I’m reluctant to make it public… not to mention the fact that it’s too long for youtube… so I’m sorry, you’ll have to trust me that I did a good job.
A good job that resulted in less than 3 hours sleep.
Here’s the thing. Of the group of us who took their turn to deliver their assignment to the class today ,mine was the only presentation that actually answered the call for an artistic presentation… I don’t get it… we are presented with the perfect opportunity to do something really fun and total creativity of the other 4 presentations we listened extended either to a brief drawing or a video clip… or a recitation of a cleverly remembered discography.
I’m not meaning to be critical of my fellow classmates, I trust you’ll understand that I’m merely observing my own behaviour (particularly if you happen to be one of those fellow students)… my question is this, why can’t I settle for second best – a half done job? I know I didn’t extend myself much for my last two rush job assignments a couple of weeks back… (and I passed them both with a 60% and a 74% sheesh, imagine how I’d have gone if I really tried!). What made this assignment (one that’s actually only worth 30% of the total course) so different?
it’s all in that little word.
rtistic.
Guess that means I am a creative soul after all…