Questions With... Amy Tomlinson

M: "Can you introduce yourself?

A: "My name is Amy Tomlinson, I'm currently a second year media student specialising in photography. I'm currently working as part of the photography and blog team for the media showcase Northern Song."

Amy being a kool kid.

M: "Who is your favourite artist?"

A: "I currently like an artist called Furry Little Peach, she’s called Sha’an d’Anthes. She’s an illustrator from Australia, and she does a lot of online work. It’s really nice and colourful. Her illustrations are quite childlike, they’re quite fun and calming. She also does YouTube videos as well."

WACOM: Keep Calm, Let Loose by Sha'an d'Anthes

M: "Who is your favourite musical artist?"

A: "I don’t really have a favourite one, I’ll listen to anything. I like Carly Rae Jepson, she’s good, she’s always very poppy. I like Girl In Red, I like Cavetown, I like Don Broco, Devin Townsend as well. He does of mix of metal, opera and pop, and he blends it all together, it’s pretty cool. I think that’s about it, I’ll pretty much listen to anything."

M: "What are your favourite TV shows?"

A: "I like Brooklyn 99, what else do I like? I like Hyori’s Bed And Breakfast, which is a reality show in Korea. It’s just about a couple who are famous in Korea, and then they open a bed and breakfast. It’s the most calming thing you can ever watch, it’s just very lovely. I will watch really bad stuff purposely, really cheesy, awful TV shows, like dramas. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, I like that one, it’s really funny. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show that I loved, so good, so good. I think that’s all the shows I watch at the moment."

M: "Favourite films?"

A: "A Series Of Unfortunate Events, the one with Jim Carrey."

M: "That is a good film."

A: "It’s a really good film! It’s underrated! I like Spirited Away, anything by Studio Ghibli, or Studio Ponoc - it’s now changed. I love animated films. Again, notoriously bad ones are always enjoyable, awful ones that are really badly written and funny. I like horrors, again, bad horrors are the greatest genre ever. Baby Driver, the way the edited the music alone was amazing.A Roman Holiday as well, that is a good one."

Scene from Mary and the Witch's Flower

M: "Do you have a particular favourite bad movie?"

A: "Yes. There’s one I watched that was on, I can’t remember what it was called but me and my friend watched it, a horror film [the 2003 film Identity with John Cusack]. It originally started with people being killed off in a motel, so it was like a serial killer, and then it changed to the hotel being on an Indian burial site, so it was ghosts, and then it changed again. It turned out that it was all in one person’s head and all the different characters were his different personas, and it ended with him being left with the final persona. This really big guy that supposedly killed all these people, and they wanted to prove that the personalities that killed all the people wasn’t dead, because he’d been killing them all off, which is why they all died. He gets left with the personality of a woman from Southern Georgia, so he talks like that! The end of the film finishes with him talking like that. Me and my friend just thought, “It’s not going to end with him having that personality”, because it just doesn’t fit his face, he can’t be left with it. We were watching it thinking, “It can’t get any worse”, but it did! It was so bad."

M: "Do you have a worse film ever?"

A: "That’s got to be the worst film that I watched."

M: "That’s the worst film?"

A: "Yeah, yeah, I’m going to say that’s the worst film I’ve ever watched. Other than that I’ll pretty much watch films regardless if they’re bad, because if it gets to half an hour, I’m hooked. I need to know how it ends."

Amy Clare Photography

M: "Funniest comic?"

A: "John Mulaney, I really like his stuff at the moment. I’ve only recently discovered him, and there’s a show on Netflix with him and his friend where they do a stand up show as old men. It’s just very funny. There’s also a podcast called The Dollop as well, which is two American comedians (Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds) who do podcasts on American history which has really bizarre things. One tells the other about a historical thing that happened in America, and it’s their response, which is very funny. They did one on the tank chase in America - the guy who stole a tank and drove it, but also about the lead up of how he stole the tank. I’m pretty sure at one point he starts a mine in his back garden to dig for gold, before he steals the tank. But I think my favourite episode has got to be either American Vampire Panic or The Egg Nog Riot "

M: "What is your favourite curry?"

A: "A madras. Chicken madras."

M: "Chicken madras, solid choice."

A: "Bit of naan bread, it’s very good."

M: "Do you remember the first time you heard The Dark Side Of The Moon?"

A: "The truth or a lie?"

M: "Might as well go for the truth."

A: "I was seventeen, I heard it at my friend’s house, because she had way better music tastes than I did. She taught me a lot of things, about Led Zeppelin, Guns & Roses. She also played me Pink Floyd. She had a record of it, and she found out I’d never listened to it before, so she played it for me. We weren’t drinking anything underage, we weren’t sharing a bottle of whiskey between us!"

Amy Clare Photography

M: "When was the last time you were drunk, and what were you drinking?"

A: "I’m a lightweight! I was in Chester, I think about a month ago. I thought that drinking a lot of whiskey would be a good idea on an empty stomach was a good idea and it wasn’t. I was in this pub, playing Cards Against Humanity, with all these different people. Yeah, it was whiskey, it was Jack Daniels. I had two with coke, then I started drinking it straight. We were playing Cards Against Humanity with this group of students that we met, and I was stood on the street, talking to my friends about really in-depth conversations. I can’t even remember what I was talking about, but every time I walk down that street now, I’m just like, “That’s where I had my little breakdown”.

M: "What research are you working on at the moment?"

A: "I’m doing this! I’m doing research for Northern Song, I guess, for a blog and photography, so I’m trying to look at photographers and artwork to put on the blog that fits in with the theme that the advertising team have come up with - a kind of grunge, Doc Martins aesthetic, I guess you can call it. Like artistic, but with a mix of industrial, I think is what I got from it."

M: "Best thing anyone has said to you?"

A: "Funny of prolific?"

M: "I guess whatever you consider the best - [the] most memorable?"

A: "The best advice I’ve ever been given is ‘If it’s fit for purpose, then it’s good enough’. Nobody else knows your mistakes, nobody else knows what’s gone on in your head. They’ll just see what you’ve made and think it’s great, but only you will know that it didn’t come out the way you intended. The weirdest thing anyone ever told me - there’s a few things. I used to work in a charity shop, and a woman came up to me and she was just started telling me about all these old actresses that I look like. She was like, “You look like a mix between Bette Davis and Jean Simmons”. All that came into my mind was Gene Simmons from Kiss, she meant a different one. She was great, she told me about bizarre things she made, and she was like, “Ah yes, I often do this around people”, and she just started doing it to random people who were in the shop as well."

M: "Where do you stand on Brexit?"

A: "I’m tired of it now, I kind of just want something to happen, actually happen. But I guess I’m not informed enough to make a good enough stance. I wish we could stay, I like it, I like being part of the EU, I like not having to go through customs, and go through the big line at security in the airports. I would like to keep that, ideally."

Amy Clare Photography

M: "What hobbies do you have?"

A: "I draw, I do some watercolours, and am trying to get better at them. I’ll do little doodles, mainly cartoons. I’m not very good at drawing real people. I knit, it’s a very lame hobby but I do, I knit. I do photography, obviously, which is part of my course. What else do I do? Oh, I randomly drive places with my cousin. I guess, is that a hobby? I don’t really know what that is. If it’s like what he said, ways to de-stress, I’ll just go in my car and sit with my cousin and be like, “Pick a direction, left or right”. We do that for about eight hours, we’ve been to some weird places."

M: "What is the most expensive object you have ever bought, and how much was it?"

A: "The most expensive thing I’ve ever bought for myself was a jukebox CD player. I just spend, impulsively. It’s a really tiny one which lights up, you can have an aux cord. It was really expensive, and I just randomly bought it! That’s the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought myself, yeah."

M: "Fair enough."

To see more of Amy's photography, you can click here for her Instagram, as well as her YouTube channel and own website.

[MU]