During my time at university I often bit off more than I could chew when it came to my projects. I attended what is now Western Sydney University at the burgeoning media campus. It was still coming together at an institutional level, so there was an element of getting away with murder when it came to how we went about completing our work; taking cameras for far longer than allowed, going crazy with them and going far beyond the scope of what we were meant to be doing.

We were pretty obsessive about grabbing equipment and going nuts. Thankfully my parents were hugely supportive and bought me a 1440 x 1080 interlaced high definition Sony hard drive handycam with a manual focus ring. At uni we had first-generation 1080i V-series Sony — still operating on DV.

I was one of the first students to shoot in high definition, which I did twice 2007. With Premiere in an appalling state that year I had to transcode everything to standard definition to edit. What filth AVCHD was. The next year I worked on my MacBook Pro in delicious High Definition.

I did a project with gunshots and muzzle flashes. I did one entirely on green screen. We made a 40-minute ‘war drama’ that culminated in the storming of a machine gun nest. I think we shot that with some multi-camera setups, too. A lot of After Effects. [Side note: I’ll cover my action obsession in full another time, but you can pop to this post for some initial background].

We finished off with a four part web series we uploaded to Facebook. In 2009 this was fresh turf. I hadn’t experienced that enthusiasm and endless energy before. I feasted on university — it was the lowest risk place I could imagine. I wasn’t going to fail anything, so I could do whatever I wanted and as long as I grew my skills everything would be fine.

I took three vital life lessons away from university.
One : anyone can make films.
Two : you have to surround yourself with passionate, trustworthy people.
Three : to grow you have to work to your ambitions.

The latter I call the ten per cent rule. Whatever you take on, it should be 10% beyond your current abilities. If you succeed you’ll be ten per cent better at whatever you focused on.

In those early years I’d work on projects with the express purpose of developing a single skill. It was a time for learning the value of short-form projects.

I think it’s vital to have a safe place to fail when you’re exploring your career ambitions. As you go out and work on your own projects it’s important to not ever look at failures as anything other than lesson. Always think, ah! Now I know not what to do! This is the importance of the project post-mortem. Open up the guts of your project and see what went wrong. Never look at it as I’m such an idiot! It’s a waste of time and energy, when what’s really staring you in the face is another morsel of education.

The failures you’ll experience will make you a stronger creative, and in turn a better resource for your clients and industry, who need to trust you with their brands, money, reputation and everything in-between.

Joshua Lundberg is a Writer and Director at Barking Mouse®, and co-Founder along with Producer Georgia Woodward. Together they create films, web series as well as commercial and corporate content for clients.