SCABs

Explaining SCA to Helena’s Grandparents – By @helenapelsmae

By Helena Pelsmaekers

 

 

Explaining SCA to Helena’s Grandparents

One year of film production + 3 years of graphic design + half a year of internship + half a year of a little bit of everything, and I still have that feeling of knowing nothing (there is a little Jon Snow in me). I certainly won’t be the youngest in our group next year. And they say knowledge comes with age, but with my 22 winters (my 23rd winter is coming -sorry, no more GOT references) I can honestly say I don’t feel particularly knowledgy.

So here I am, preparing for another extra year. I find it very hard to explain to people what I’m planning on doing next year. I usually say it’s a sort of prep year for the career I want to pursue later on in my life, a school where you don’t have to follow classes but still have mentors. That’s where it gets tricky. “So you’re paying for a year working but not working and getting paid?” I usually give up explaining. My grandparents are the hardest to explain it to. I don’t think they even know what I was studying for in the previous years. I could say I study law and they still would go along with it. They always pretend like the only jobs that they knew of back then were working in the mine and not working in the mine (housewives).

I’ll probably have to get used to the fact that we have to write SCABs during the year. It will help reflect our work and progress, but right now it feels like an awkward dialogue I’m having with myself, and google translate. I wrote my first SCAB drafts on the back of a train ticket, the one I can’t find back today. I do make sure I always have a pen with me, but having a permanent notebook is still a struggle. I can’t commit to one. Technically I have a notebook, it’s just spread all over the bottom of my bag. Not that it’s a great loss to the world, the first draft. Most of the time I hate what I wrote the next day. That’s why I’ll hand in my SCABs on the very same day I wrote them, otherwise they won’t receive any from me.

It’s like writing down ideas from those in-between-being-awake-and-sleep moments. When you think you came up with something great, that turns out to be utter shit the next morning. Must be an amazing sight; seeing me talking to myself in the middle of the night, hanging out my bed, drooling like one of those wrinkled boarhound dogs, writing with my eyes partly closed. I once filmed myself sleeping and to be woken up several times a night by a stone-marten on our attic. It was for a school project, it isn’t something I regularly do in my free time to be clear. And not exactly relevant in terms of this SCAB but quite an interesting project it was. What kind of strange school did you go to, you’re probably thinking. Quite a normal art school. It were the teachers that often asked me in what kind of place I was. Got a 17 though.

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