Two Years in Review

It has already been 2 years since I started this blog and 1 year since I first did a Year In Review. On the 13^th of February in 2017, I decided that it was a good idea to start a blog, so I did, and two years later, this is the result. Let’s take a look at what’s happened between now, and when I first looked back on the year that came before.

Last year I ended my post hoping to be able to upload at least one post once a week for the coming year, and to my surprise, I nearly succeeded in doing so. It wasn’t until the last week of December, that I failed to upload something, though this was due to me not being able to prepare any posts for my exam period. For the majority of the year, I always had a few posts written in advance so that I always had a few buffer weeks and that I didn’t have to worry about writing a post if I were to go on holiday or if the exam season started. However, in September I started going to university and as it turns out, it’s quite a time-consuming thing. So from September out, I constantly posted what I’d just finished writing, and because of this, I didn’t have the buffer weeks I used to have before, which eventually led to me not having anything to upload during my exams, which lasted for about four weeks. Now that these exams have ended, I’m finally able to post once a week again, though I’m not quite sure for how long I’ll be able to keep on doing this.

However, let’s not forget the time that I did manage to upload something once a week 😊. During the period from February 13^th until December, I uploaded around 60 posts. My first post after the anniversary of my blog was a review for The Shape of Water, which quickly became my most liked post and it remained to be so, even till this day. A week later, I hit 100 followers, which I celebrated by making a post existing out of 100 words, where every word linked to a blog that followed me.

In March, I posted my Oscar predictions, and to no one’s surprise, I was quite off. I mostly got the big categories right, though failed in the smaller ones. But trust me, I’ll perform even worse this year around. This year’s Oscar nominations are really odd and I have no clue how it’s going to go down.  That month I also reviewed the really disappointing Mute and the not-so-disappointing Last Flag Flying.

The following month, writing in advance paid off, as we went to Italy with my school. Before we went on the trip, I had seen Annihilation. A film that was on the list of the top 5 things I was looking forward to in 2018, and I ended up enjoying quite a lot. The post where I reviewed the film went up while I was away, and the week thereafter, I posted my interpretation of the film. At the end of April, I also uploaded my interpretation of Phantom Thread, which, while it didn’t gain a noteworthy amount of likes, became one of my most viewed posts of the year, that I had also uploaded in that year, all thanks to a post I made on Reddit.

If we skip a month ahead, we end up in June. All of the posts uploaded in this month were written in advance so that I could focus on my exams, unlike during my latest exam period, where I didn’t manage to prepare anything. It’s also from this month out, that the number of likes I got started to dwindle. Up until that point I got at least more than 10 likes per post, though, during this month, it was a struggle to get above that number. My full on review for A Quiet Place only barely got 10 likes, while otherwise, Opinion-articles garnished the most likes on average. My next post, a Shorties where I reviewed five short films, only got 8 likes, though that was more understandable, as people generally aren’t that interested in short films. The post after my Shorties, however, performed surprisingly well. In it, I talked about my love for film.

In June, I also applied to film school. I didn’t get accepted to the school, though understandably so. People who wanted to enter the school had to go through quite a lot of stages. In April, I believe it was, I had to have a conversation with a handful of teachers, where I had to explain my motivations as to why I chose their school and why I wanted to study film. Then, if you passed the “conversation test”, which I did, you were called back for an entire week to do exercises. On the Monday of that week, we had to write a character description and go around Brussels to make a tiny film, consisting out of 8 different types of shots and present it to a judge at the end of a day. The short film could not be edited, it had to be shot chronologically. It was with that exercise that I already fucked up. I had a few ideas, but they all failed. My first idea was to make a tiny documentary about the garbage men in Brussels, though when I finally wanted to shoot, they were gone. My second idea was to do a tiny documentary about children in Brussels, though no one wanted to be filmed, so I had to scrap that idea as well. By that point, there was barely any time left so I just quickly improvised and took 8 shots of garbage in Brussels, and the film that I presented to the judge was equally as big of a piece of garbage as the things I filmed. I did still try to talk my way out of it by giving a reason as to why I filmed garbage, but I mean, by that point I already knew I was screwed. The other exercises went better, but I think that it’s because of how bad my first exercise went, that I didn’t pass.

July continued the trend of not getting a lot of likes on my posts, as I started the month off with a post where I praised a new little show that I liked called The Good Place, which didn’t particularly perform well. Same goes for my post about 13 Reasons Why which I uploaded in August. I guess you don’t like it when I talk about tv-shows haha. Also, just so you know, I don’t really mind not getting a lot of likes, it’s just something that I’ve noticed after May and I don’t really know why. At the end of July, I started a new series, called Here’s a Cool Shot, where I talk a bit about a shot I liked. The first article in this series was one about a shot of The Spectacular Now. It’s also a series where I’d gladly let anyone else talk about a shot that they like. So if you’re interested in doing so, you can always contact me via mail (film4fan.wordpress@gmail.com).

From the end of July to the end of September, I was able to upload two times a week, and during Mission Impossible week, I even uploaded 4 articles. It had been a while since I’d done a ____-week, and the release of Mission Impossible: Fallout gave me the perfect excuse to do one once more. In preparation, I re-watched all the previous installments and really found my love for the franchise, which probably shone through in the four articles I uploaded that week. It took a lot of preparation to get everything done in time, but I had a lot of fun doing so. Luckily, Mission Impossible: Fallout turned out to be fantastic, otherwise, all the work I’d put into the week would’ve been a bit disappointing.

At the end of August, I was able to see Under The Silver Lake, which I reviewed on my blog on the 8^th  of September. Three days earlier, it had been my birthday. For my birthday I had gotten a box-set of Alfred Hitchcock films, so I thought that It’d be fitting to do a Movie History! article about him. On the 19^th of September, I uploaded something new; an animated review. For some reason, I thought that it’d be a fun idea to animate a shorties, and it turned out to be quite an enjoyable process to make one. The end result wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be, but I had fun making it nonetheless.

On the 24^th of September, university started, and from this point on, I lost the advantage of having some posts written in advance. Instead of going to film school, I now studied “Language and literature in English, with Theater, Film, and Literary sciences” (this is the best translation I can offer). One of my courses was Film History, which turned out to be quite a handy course for my blog, as I was able to pull a lot of inspiration from the things that we were taught, as seen in my post about Hell’s Hinges, among others. At the start of October, I uploaded an edited translation of my philosophy thesis about A Ghost Story, a film that I deeply love and that also ended up being my favorite film of 2017. On the 24^th of October, I posted my second animated review, this time for Netflix’s Apostle. I put quite a lot more time into this one than I did in my animated review for The Thing, which resulted in it having more than twice the amount of frames.

For Halloween, I wrote something about Nosferatu, a horror film from 1922 that we saw in class. In November, I also reached 1000 likes, though instead of writing 1000 words, I wrote 100 and included 1000 stars in the thumbnail. This was also the month where I realized that you don’t particularly enjoy reading about older films, as these posts tend to perform worse than my other ones. Though since I enjoy writing about them, I continued posting them 😊.

Then December came around, where I uploaded a piece about Sound in Film and City Lights. City Lights was one of the best films I’d seen in 2018, and I really wanted to share what we learned about it in class. The last post of 2018 that I uploaded was another Shorties. After the 19^th of December, I had to take a month long break, as I wanted to focus on my exams.

On the 19^th of January, I returned, with a short post. The post served more as a way of letting you know that I’d still continue to upload on my blog and that I’d not yet died, but it also depicted an image which shorty described my 2018 in film. On the 23^rd, I uploaded my top 5 films of 2017. Back in December, I had already started to prepare for this post, by practically only watching smaller, more independent films that I’d be able to recommend to you. Eventually, I compiled a short list of films that had less than 10000 votes on IMDb and added them as an extra segment to my post.

And now, we’re here. In February. If you’re reading it on the day I upload this, it’s the 13^th of February. 2 entire years have passed since the creation of this blog, and more than 100 posts have been uploaded in the meantime. I’ve gathered more than 1000 likes, and 180 followers in these two years, and that’s quite crazy to me. That’s why I’d really like to thank everyone who’s been reading the garbage that I post. I really appreciate it. I’d never have thought that I’d garner any following whatsoever, so it’s pretty cool to know that there are some people out there who decided that what I upload is interesting enough to give me a follow, or who thought that I’d follow them back if they’d follow me. Thanks to those who left a kind comment, I truly appreciate it, I can’t stress it enough. Thanks for a nice year of blogging, and onto another year, where I’ll (hopefully) continue to upload once a week. Thanks.