By Ellie Daghlian

A little bit of lip sync. 

Music videos take time and also a bit of your soul. Walking through 39 meters of thick orange fog makes everything better. Life drawing is the closest thing to mindfulness you can tolerate. Until you compare your drawing to someone else’s. Music videos look better with a little bit of lip-sync. 

Merge an RGB pattern with a gradient and liquify. That’s a holographic texture, b*tch. Anxiety slows your brain down so far you can’t imagine how you were ever smart enough to think you belong here. You do. Take a nap. Running with the first idea you have is fun. It isn’t smart. 

Football is really complicated. Sometimes London rain is louder than the city. The street lights glow in it. It’s beautiful. It’s very wet. Football chants are impossible to write. Football players have lots of names and none of them rhyme with Finnegan. Trains sound like thunder when you shelter under their bridges. Photoshop puppet warp is incredible. SCA is exhausting. And it hasn’t even really started yet. 

Brixton market does an amazing falafel wrap. You can plan your day down to every 30 minutes but there really isn’t any point. You can’t know what you’ll end up doing when you wake up in the morning. Sometimes fire on the Victoria line only lasts an hour. You can get the overground. It takes 7 minutes from Victoria to Brixton. 

Your waterproof is not waterproof even if it’s pretty. Pete Cain is hilarious and will kill your babies. When they’re not your babies it’s particularly handy to ask him over. Wear waterproof shoes. You can’t always control everything. Let it go. Charcoal sticks snap easily. Sometimes life models only show their backs. Command ‘ gets rid of those grids Ian loves. 

Brockwell Park has a gorgeous BMX park. You can’t film there while people are riding bikes. Working in the evening is good. Binge watching The Handmaid’s Tale is also good. Sending premier pro files from computer to computer is a terrible idea. The school has a tiny, hidden recording studio. It’s cute. Gender neutral bathrooms are awesome until cis straight men use them. Maybe we need a straight men bathroom and an ‘everybody else’ bathroom. 

Drinking in Dubai is illegal but every hotel sells you alcohol. It’s 32 degrees there in the middle of the night. You can cut paper with a knife. The studio gets loud when everyone is working. Five hundred words is longer than you thought. Long enough to write five hundred instead of 500. 

When you’re working 12 hour days there isn’t time to think of interesting things to write about. Week 3 is less ‘express yourself on a mug’ and more ‘make cool stuff’. I kind of love it. Making gifs can cause more stress than a dissertation. Change is possible. Hope is power. Thank you for coming to my brain splurge.