It’s the REEL Deal- “A Cloudy Thought in the Sunny Tropics”

Author’s note– Since this is a segment that’s not entirely film related and a bit personal, I thought this should be called “It’s the REEL Deal“, or something as bad and cringy as that. 

The 26th of November to the 2nd of December, 2016, was an interesting time for me. It was the week after high school, or school, in general, was over for me.

Graduation snuck upon us incredibly quickly, exams were finally over, and formal, one of the most enjoyable times I had relating to school in recent memory, came and went in a flash. All I really had left of school at that time was a cloud that followed me, which left a constant reminder of whether or not my ATAR was high enough to get into university.

But, for a brief moment in time, that week almost made me forget about the continuation of my education as I was off celebrating my series finale of school with my parents in Port Douglas rather than competing in a weekend of alcohol poisoning and bad decisions at schoolies.

The week consisted of markets, rainforests, trees, driving, turkeys, dogs, parasailing, and flying around in an ultralight. Also, swimming around in a little thing called The Great Barrier Reef. Might’ve heard of it.

Now, the week wasn’t just being a tourist, my main priority was to run around with my dad’s camcorder and tiny waterproof camera to film a majority of the trip with the intention of editing it together and releasing it on YouTube. Oh, wait, that’s still describing a tourist… Nevermind.

I was inspired by a friend of mine who was making really great travel videos, link here, and thought it could be a good practice to film and edit a project like that since I have never done anything like that, in completion, and it also gave me something new to do, distracting me from the reality of if I would end up being in university.

Despite the length and not being able to use the music I wanted to avoid copyright, it’s a video that I am quite proud of as I managed to put together what has been described as a video that “Puts you right there” despite doing handheld camera work and being my first time properly using the editing program.

Six months later, I get to write about the trip for one of my classes in my university course. Very meta, right?