Power Grads
Tamsin Sharp
Well, my name’s Tamsin Sharp and I’m a freelance filmmaker and media artist and I’m based in Melbourne at the moment but I was living in Adelaide for eight years and before that I lived in Port Augusta. I left Port Augusta to go to university and study Communication Studies at the University of South Australia.
My sub-major when studying at university was Media Production, because that’s where my passion was and I put a lot of my time and energy into that, which paid off because when I left I continued on in that area. But all of the other things I studied there in many ways helped me get an overview of the various industries that I could head into.
Since graduating from university, I’ve gone on to achieve a number of things. I guess, making short films with my friend, Shalom Almond. We made several short films and a few of those ended up winning a lot of awards.
The course was focussed but wasn’t so focussed that it didn’t give me options when I left university to sort of find where I wanted to go. So, I’ve always found that it gave me an interesting perspective to sort of see things through as I’ve moved in and between all the different roles that I’ve played. So, I mean, like in today’s current working environment nothing’s stable, so that’s been my experience and I think the university, the Communication School was a good grounding for just the basic theory that I needed to actually understand some of the worlds that I moved into.
I went on to work in communities doing film projects and media art projects and that took me to Seattle and to Northern Ireland to work with various community groups and artists, and then took me to Melbourne to do more work here in that field. So, working a lot as a media artist and filmmaker with different community groups. In the last few years I’ve worked predominantly with the Horn of Africa communities in Melbourne.
I wanted to be a filmmaker but I didn’t really want to just go down the filmmaking path, because I was only seventeen, so maybe I didn’t really know yet. I’m sort of glad I did because although I’m a filmmaker, I’ve got all these other skills that allow me to be independent in that, like my administrative skills or my producing and production skills. So yeah, it’s got a focus, but it’s broad enough for you to sort of find your own path after you graduate.