VIDEO: Review of the Year 2017 – 11 January 2017
Like the post-Christmas disappointment of a cold turkey sandwich, here’s one final leftover from New Year’s Eve: my REVIEW2017 film.
Though they have become an annual tradition, this year’s seemed especially important to produce: my blog’s content has been regrettably lacking this year, due largely to increased university and client work. Without this film, there’d be little record of my activity over the last year.
And, as I say in the film, what a year it was: trips to Iceland with Scouts and Poland with my housemates, plus holidays across the UK to Symonds Yat, the Scottish Highlands, North Yorkshire, and Devon. Kristen and I go from strength to strength, having both marked our 21st birthdays in 2017. My journalism studies continue, now in my final year at university, with a significant amount of work experience gained over the summer. My brother Matthew’s wedding to Clare features towards the end of the video – truly a grand conclusion to the year.
As usual, there are wider news events featured, but I’ve tried to tweak the balance a bit as I felt last year’s effort was a little too heavy on this front. A word about how those ‘stories’ are chosen: there’s no rhyme or reason, and no exact formula to determine inclusion. Of course there are major stories missing — perhaps the most obvious, the countless terror attacks in the Middle-East and the plight of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. This, then, is more a record of the ‘biggest news stories’ as registered by Western, specifically British, audiences throughout the year.
Why Marlow, for its setting? Well, there’s no visual metaphor this year (as in “dramatic” in Stratford, “monumental” at The Monument, and “hugely changed” at the village flooded to create the Derwent Reservoir). But I just thought it was nice, given All Saints Church in Marlow is where it all began, to wrap up 2017 there.
As with last year’s, this year’s film has come out later than I had hoped, for which I apologise. I cannily filmed the Marlow PTCs on 28 December, knowing the remaining days before New Year’s Eve were scheduled for rain. But my video was foiled by a computer problem which prevented my iMac from even booting up. Before the edit can begin, I have to first sort through the tens of thousands of photographs we took during the last twelve months. As my iMac is the only computer on which Lightroom, the image-organisation software, is installed, I could not begin work until a full dismantling of the machine had taken place.
A special thanks, then, to those that helped me to get it done with encouraging comments: Loz Marchant, Julie Nagiel, and Josh Kaplan.
And to everyone else – if it’s not quite too late to say it – a very happy New Year.
