文书点评：电影制作人（Filmmaker）

Filmmaker

At the age of twelve, I was deported to Ireland -- by my mother. She thought the change of scenery, and some time spent with her side of the family, would be good for my overly inquisitive nature. I quickly translated her act of banishment into my own deliberate act of self-exile. In my stubborn twelve-year-old mind, this seemed more dramatic somehow. At that age, I had little wisdom and what some would call a fairly banal Irish Catholic upbringing: my father was a gifted horseman, a raging alcoholic, and a crisis-fomenting tyrant. Needless to say, home was a place I didn’t mind leaving.

I spent the next year and a half living and working on a rural farm in the Irish countryside. I studied French and Irish at St. Aloysious College, but I chose to focus on mechanical drawing, a subject that allowed me to represent a construct of my vast twelve-year-old universe. I had been seriously drawing on my own since the age of nine, and in Ireland I seized the opportunity to study drawing techniques in school, along with the complementary subjects of math and physics.

My migration from a large family in the United States to an austere and isolated farm spurred my independent, internal creative life. My aunt and uncle had no TV, no phone, and no records post-1970. Without television or neighbors for the first time in my life, I was solely responsible for my own adventures: cycling the countryside, sketching farm animals, and applying my mechanical drawing skills to restoration sketches of the family farm.

When I was away from the farm, I spent time with a large collection of cousins; almost all were involved in local theatre. Watching rehearsals for their plays, I became skilled in the art of listening and observing. I discovered an Irish imagination, imbued with a complexity of poetry, politics, humor, and history, which pervaded the works they performed on the stage. I was fascinated by the nimble play of the language, the intricacies of character, and the timing of proper silences as an element of sound. Intrigued by the "persona" of a character -- the essential qualities that made a person unique -- I started drawing charcoal sketches of local characters’ portraits, and I even wrote character skits and improvisations.

After I returned from my exile in Ireland, I finished high school, then earned a six-year "degree" in the national competitive cycling scene. My week-long races around the US on Greyhound’s $49.00 student fares led me to settle in Utah. There, high in the Wasatch Mountains, I retired from bicycle racing and studied painting, drawing, and printmaking (woodcut and lithography) in college. At home, I continued my oil paintings with a series of portraits. Working with friends and borrowed equipment, I wrote a short absurdist critique of the network TV coverage of the Albertville Winter Olympics. After a deluge of unforecasted snow ruined our original script, I wrote a new one in just one night. We shot our video in Park City, Utah, during the following two days of the storm, and it later won two awards in a local film festival.

After college graduation, the curiosity fueled by my childhood experiences in Ireland compelled me to travel, so I joined the Peace Corps ten days after commencement. I arrived in Morocco, where I had the opportunity to design the English program at the FSTM, a brand-new science and technology university. The students there came from a language-study background of translating and transcribing. They knew perfectly well how to conjugate verbs, but they would fall silent when asked for the time of day. With no available textbooks or traditional teaching aids, I created a series of courses using theater, video, drama, and debate as in an experimental approach to teaching English.

Outside of teaching, Peace Corps volunteers are required to create "secondary projects." When the Peace Corps Washington selected a script that I had written for a safety training video, I was chosen for the lead role. My success in this project led to another work opportunity, this time with the Moroccan Educational Institute for Radio and Television. Over a year and a half, we wrote and developed an eight-minute pilot episode for a series using English-language TV time as a means to address current issues in Morocco. We worked with Japanese technicians in French, an Iranian director in Arabic, and an English-speaking writing staff to produce a pilot that would pass strict censorship standards and still remain entertaining to our viewers. Later on, other projects brought me back to the drawing board -- literally -- illustrating USAID-funded health manuals for Peace Corps Volunteer projects.

Before finishing my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco, I wrote a series of staged events that I planned to examine in a video essay, or mock-umentary. My objective, at the time, was to exploit the naiveté of Americans overseas, those gullible new volunteers who were willing to swallow a sword just to scratch their stomachs. On the surface, the resulting film was a humorous and caustic treatise on American values and group identity. But the summer-long exercise of setting up, shooting, exhibiting, and discussing the video spurred me to explore my own roles as project creator, actor, and outside commentator.

Once I had completed my Peace Corps service, I headed north to a teaching post in Paris. As fate would have it, my office was two blocks from the Cinematheque francaise. Here, I spent the majority of my first wet winter days, mingling with a group of young video-makers who were exploring similar questions of identity. I began work on a series of large format portraits, using 35mm prints on canvas. I completed my first commissioned photo in 1998.

Since 1999 I’ve been working a day job in Kafkaesque environs, writing appeals and legal petitions. Meanwhile, I’ve begun another project, a portrait of a unique and gifted man, James Donaldson. I wanted to create a video narrative that would address serious social issues in an indirect and poetic manner. As the subject of my current investigation into character and truth, James’ life and music have forced me, as a storyteller, to confront my own technical limitations. James spent his youth in American juvenile orphanages after witnessing, at the age of five, his own father brutally murdering his mother. Thirteen years later, he met his father again, both men prisoners in the same penitentiary. James rose to fame and prominence as a Billboard recording artist with Chess Records, and, now, at age sixty-two, he fights a battle with homelessness.

This project, which has consumed my life for the last three years, has enabled me to develop my own voice and to explore my role as the storyteller of my own work -- whether the story is about a town or another man. Ever since my early childhood encounters with farm animals and Irish theatrical characters, I have looked for places to store the lives of the people I meet. I think of my drawings and photographs as the preliminary sketches for my films and videos, which are, essentially, concerned with truth. Not reality or even facts, necessarily, but the kind of truth that only art seems to address, truth that connects with the essentials of human experience. At UCLA’s MFA program in film production, I will develop a palette of techniques and refined skills vital to a professional, independent storyteller. For this is, in fact, what I am. I examine social issues through investigation of identity and community, adding texture to my own life as an active participant in the collaborative imagination of my generation.

While my desire to study film at UCLA is quite specific, my motivation comes from a wide spectrum of creative and social experiences, including my travels to Morocco, Paris, Ireland, and the United States. UCLA, with its production and documentary program, including the Marina Goldovskaya Documentary Salon Series, is a school that will nurture my diverse experiences and my single-minded creative visions, while also rigorously challenging me to grow as a technical filmmaker and creative thinker.

点评：

1.本文从童年讲起，来一步一步的写作者的经历。
2.语言优美，简洁。
3.思路，结构清晰。
4.实习经历，工作经历都有详细的叙述。但都是平平的叙述，没有什么激情的地方，在叙述经历的过程中，要是改变一下风格，就更好了。

翻译：

电影制作人

在我12岁的时候，我被我母亲放逐到了爱尔兰。我妈妈认为环境的改变，相处的时间多一点，可以有益于我过度好奇的本性。我很快把妈妈这种放逐的行为解释成了我自己深思熟虑的自我放逐。在我12岁固执的想法中，这似乎很有戏剧性。在那个年龄，我有一点智慧和可以被称为一个平凡的爱尔兰天主教徒的抚养：我的父亲是一个天才的骑师，一个疯狂的酗酒者和一个助长危机的暴君。可想而知，家是一个我想离开的地方。

我花费一年半的时间，生活和工作在爱尔兰乡下的农场里。我在St. Aloysious 学院学习了法语和爱尔兰语，但是我把学习的重心放在了机械图，这个学科可以让我描绘出我12岁的世界。自从我9岁开始，我就可以认真的画画。 在爱尔兰，随着数学和物理的学习，我抓住了学习绘画技术的机会。
 
我从美国一个大家庭移民到一个简朴的、与世隔绝的农场，这种改变激励了我独立自主、创新的个性。我阿姨和叔叔的家里没有电视、没有电话、没有收音机1970。在我的生活当中，第一次没有电视和邻居，我独自地负责我自己的冒险:在乡下骑脚踏车兜风,描绘家禽，而且应用我掌握的机械图技术修补家庭农场的素描

当我不在农场的时候，我和我的兄弟姐妹玩在一起，大部分时间我们是在当地的电影院里度过的。通过看他们彩排，我对艺术的评价有了自己的见解。我发现爱尔兰人的想象力是把诗，政治，幽默和历史融合在一起的，贯穿于他们的表演当中。我着迷于语言的简练、人物的错综复杂，在适当的时候保持适当的安静。角色所塑造的阴谋的特点—一个人独特的本质特点—我开始画人物肖像的素描，写人物的讽刺短文和即兴创作。

我从爱尔兰放逐回来以后，我完成了我的高中教育，然后在国家的自行车比赛中，赢得了好成绩。我每周一次的比赛要花费49美金的公共汽车费而导致我定居在犹他州。在那里有名的Wasatch Mountains，我从自行车比赛中退役了，在大学里开始了绘画，素描和版画复制。在家里，我画了一系列的肖像人物。我和我的朋友利用借来的设备，我写了Albertville冬奥会的网络电视报道的一篇短的荒诞主义者的评论。突然下的暴雪毁坏了我们写的原稿，我仅仅用了一个晚上的时间，就又写了个新的出来。在暴风雪的第二天，我们在帕克城市，犹他州拍摄了录象，不久便在当地的电影节中获得了两个奖项。

本科毕业以后，由于童年在爱尔兰的这段经历促使我想要旅行，所以在毕业典礼以后，我参加了和平军团十日游。我到达了摩洛哥，在FSTM我有机会学习英语课程，这是一所崭新的理工大学。这个学校的学生都有翻译和转录的语言背景。他们知道如何完美的应用动词，但是问他们一天的时间做什么，他们却保持沉默。没有教科书和传统的教学方法，我利用戏院，录象，戏剧和辩论来制造出一系列的英语教学课程。

在教学以外，和平军团的志愿者还被要求去写“中级计划书”。当华盛顿和平军团选择了我为安全培训录象写的剧本时，我也被选为了领导角色。这次计划的成功也提供给我在摩洛哥无线电视教育协会工作的机会。一年半以后，我们为英语电视节目时间制作了一系列的八分钟飞行员的插曲来说摩洛哥当前的问题。我们用法语和日本技师沟通，用阿拉伯语和伊朗主管沟通，和说英语的全体职员共同创造了一个可以通过严格审查机构标准的，有可以给观众带来欢乐的飞行员。不久以后，其他的项目有让我重新回到了绘画板-也就是说-说明USAID-为和平军团志愿者工程赞助健康手册。

在摩洛哥，我作为和平军团志愿者在完成服务以前，写了一系列的表演活动，我打算把他们制作成录象短片或者记录片来审查自己。在那时，我的目标就是剥削天真的海外美国的、易受骗的志愿者，他们受了委屈也愿意往肚子里吞的人。表面上，电影是以幽默和讽刺来评论美国的价值观。但是，暑假里长期的对设立、拍摄、展出、评论电视的训练，让我找到了我在项目策划者、演员、评论员的任务。
 
当我完成我在和平军团的服务，我就到巴黎去上班了。很巧的是，我办公室和法国的影片储藏室离的很近。在那里，我花费了大部分的时间和一群年轻的、探索相似问题的同一性的电视制作人混在一起。我开始在帆布上，用35厘米的规格制作了一系列的人物肖像。在1998年，我完成了第一幅有佣金的照片。

从1999年开始，我就在Kafkaesque的郊区工作，工作的内容是写上诉书和诉状。同时，我也开始了另一项事业，画独一无二、天才的詹姆士-唐纳德的肖像。我想以诗歌的风格来制作一个叙述当前严重的社会问题的叙述性短片。作为作家，我对我主题的特性和事实做了调查，詹姆士人生和音乐强迫我去面对我技术上的局限性。詹姆士他5岁的时候，目睹了他的父亲残忍的杀害了他的母亲，从那以后，他生活在美国青少年孤儿院。13年后，他和他的父亲在监狱相见了。他作为一个唱片艺人有很高的知名度，现在，他62岁了，是一个到处打架而无家可归的人

在这个项目的最后三年的时候，我才可以阐述自己的观点，知道作为一个作家应该有的责任，无论这个故事是关于城镇还是人。自从我的童年时代遇到了农场里的家禽和了解爱尔兰人戏剧性的性格特点，我就开始留意我遇到人的生活。我认为我的素描和照片是我制作电影和电视的初步草图，它们本质上都是关注事实的。不管是真实还是现实，必要的，这是艺术要表现真理的形式，真理是人类经历的精髓。在UCLA大学的MFA专业的电影作品中，我会锻炼我的技术，使我变成一个专业的、有独特见解的作家。事实上，为了这个，我做了很多的事情。我通过调查社会的统一性来审视社会问题，通过想象把它加在我的生活当中。

我想要在UCLA学习电影的动机来自于我的创造力和社会经验，包括我在摩洛哥、巴黎、爱尔兰和美国的旅行。UCLA的艺术作品和记录片课程，包括了Marina Goldovskaya Documentary Salon Series，它可以增长我的阅历和视野，当然，作为电影制作者和创造力的思想者也将面临严格的考验。