Anna Maria Papaoikonomou is one of the participants on our ninth BFI Film Academy (2020). Having finished course, we asked her about her experience…
HOME’s BFI Film Academy has been an amazing experience to me, showing me how interested I actually am in the film industry and all the different areas I could participate in career-wise. It has influenced me into pursuing a higher education around film and I could not thank them enough for helping me find my passion.
The Shoot
We were meeting at HOME at 10:00am on a Tuesday. I was beyond excited since I have never been involved in any sort of filmmaking before. However, I always thought that I would not be interested in any aspects of the technical skills in filmmaking. I knew that I had an interest in watching films, contributing to ideas in order to create a film, or even writing reviews about them, but I never knew I would develop such an interest around making them.
We started looking at the aspects of lightning, sound and camera and what I found incredibly interesting were all the different settings when using a camera and how you could apply them to fit your own aesthetic. When I used the camera to film our last interviewee in our documentary it was so exciting seeing all the ways I could fit the camera’s settings into my own creative eye.
This experience made me see how filmmaking actually is and how interesting it is to learn the different areas of it. Meeting different people and hearing their stories was significantly eye opening.