We Must Be Over The Rainbow

This is the first in a new series of posts I've been working on recently and I wanted to write a quick introduction to explain why and give you a quick background into my love of Film.

If you don't already know I studied Film as part of my Media and French degree in college. I have loved film my entire life and some of my favourite memories growing up are those involving watching films with my friends and family and attending the cinema. The first film I saw in the cinema was The Little Mermaid, I was probably about 4 years old and from then on every year I would wait impatiently for the latest animated Disney feature to be released. My sister and I would spend hours re-watched our VHS tapes of The Goonies, Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, The Land Before Time and Little Women (the Winona Ryder one of course) and later we would do the same with American Beauty, The Usual Suspects, Gattaca and Leon. 

I never knew what I wanted to be when I was younger and so when it came time to choose what college course to apply for, I decided to go for something I knew would interest me, even if it was something I may never have a career in. I chose to study Media Arts with French and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made because it gave me a new found appreciation and understanding of cinema as a form of art and entertainment and it introduced me to so many wonderful films, directors and writers I had never heard of before. 

Film is such a big part of my life and one of my biggest passions and I felt like I should share that here. I've never wanted to categorise this blog, I've always wanted it to represent the things that I love and so I wanted to start a series of posts about my favourite films, beginning with The Wizard of Oz. 

First off, I want to warn you that these posts will probably be quite long and may contain information about the plot as well as images so if you haven't seen the films yet you may not want to read the full posts. I'll write a little bit about each film after the screenshots but it will mostly be about why I love it rather than production details because you can look all of that up if you want to later. So let's get started...

I can't remember when I first saw The Wizard of Oz. I must have been very young because my mam said I used to sing Somewhere Over The Rainbow in front of my relatives when I was little and I think I would have to have been quite young to be able to do that and not have been shy about it. It still makes me cry, scanning through the scenes for screenshots even made my cry. It makes me so happy, the music, the costumes, the sets, Judy Garland and how incredibly wonderful she is at such a young age, I always wanted to be Dorothy. In fourth year in school we put on a production of the original play of The Wizard of Oz and I was heartbroken that I didn't have the nerve or the ability to audition to play Dorothy. Instead I painted the sets and made the props which was close enough. 

For some reason I never really think about it as being a musical, maybe because I love the story so much. I've always been able to identify with the sentiment of the story, "if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again I won't look any further than my own back yard".  You don't realise what you have until you are faced with the possibility of losing it.

It's a lesson I think we all need to learn several times in our lives to appreciate what we have, even if it's not much. 

I want to write one of these posts a month and I'm already excited to share the next one. Have you seen The Wizard of Oz? What does it mean to you?

Emma x

PS. You may have noticed I've made some changes to the look of the blog, this will be a continuous process over the coming months as I want to add some new bits and pieces to the layout. It also means bigger photos! 

***All screen shots were taken by Donnacha and I, if you want to use any of them please feel free to do so but please link back to this post or my flickr. Thank you!