Jack Neo came for a talk in NUS for Dr. Brown’s Digital Media Production module, and here are some quotes:

• Write about what happened to your own life – Script is king
• Film industry is about cheating/convincing people, you can make 4 policemen look like 100 policemen
• Money No Enough had a lot of background noise from the old 35mm camera. And there was also a lot of noise from nearby construction sites when filming. However, a film critic from the West said the film’s sound is an authentic showcase of Singapore’s state of development with all the construction noise (unintentionally) placed in the background
• MDA should have a computer graphics (CG) fund to fund productions to make more use of CG so that our industry can grow to a newer level. Because many directors do not have the capaibility to try and experiment, and hence we will never get to grow in that area.
• Drama training is important for scriptwriters and directors to know how actors act and portray themselves

I asked a question on how local audience don’t like Singapore films…how do you reconcile the fact that you are producing for an audience who don’t watch their own films? He replied that it is hard to please everybody. But don’t give up, if you have a good script, there will definitely be an audience who watch your film(s). Jack Neo has proved that with his films’ box office takings despite the many critics around.

Two sundays ago (wow time flies), we went for a dragonboating trip with some SoC people. It started to pour as we walked from Kallang MRT to the sea sports club, and I prayed for no rain! We hid under the bridge for a while. Praise God! The rain subsided and we managed to reach the jetty.

It was very interesting, and it was not as difficult as I thought. The teamwork and sense of achievement is quite great and fun, and it was pretty cool to see the Flyer and the Singapore skyline from the sea, with the waves whoshing as your boat rocks left and right. Splashing water seems to be the norm, as everyone purposely went close to another’s boat (we had 3 boats of about 8-10 people each) and started splashing water at one another. Heck, the instructor even thought us how to splash water effectively using our oar!

Our instructor was darn good, one stroke of his oar is > 8 of us combined together. When he starts rowing, can really feel the boat going much much faster. haha. px and ed kept playing with water behind me, as they had to bail water out whenever people splashed water at us. After many strokes, your back will feel a bit strained, but somehow after the whole thing, I didn’t feel any strain in my arm or back at all. wonderful, can’t wait to try again next time if there’s chance, as we didn’t manage to get to Marina Barrage due to limited time.

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On a side note, ST-Volkswagen lucky draw is hard to win, yet there are so many participants! Went down with JG on that day. And bus 985 actually allows me to reach home from Bukit Batok/Timah faster than from NUS. Amazing.

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Last week was a week of fests. TimbreFest @ UCC was quite interesting, especially with this female rocker singer Shirley and the Unexpected. Free Tiger beer, which is the one of the lousier ones which I dislike. Over at NUSSU JamFest, it seemed pretty successful. After all, who doesn’t mind not 1, not 2 but 4 free drinks? The Japanese Asahi beer is pretty good, it is ’super dry’, hence it doesn’t give you a gassy/bloated feeling after drinking. And it was the first time I tried Singapore Sling, in its cute red bottle which some said was alcoholic Rose Syrup lol. I would say it tastes like 7up/Sprite that kind. The Japanese Sake is a bit too thick to be drank by itself though. And the drinks ran out at about 11pm already. I left early due to Film School and due to the Butter Factory music being not very fantastic. The setup was pretty good, with the Goodfellas and Jack and Rai and a few other bands performing. There were chairs and tables to sit and chill, as well as stages for people to dance on. The funny thing was, I heard the stage collapsed at the end of the event! Darn funny, caused a dent in the MPSH apparently. The lights were good, although I wonder what are the rafia strings deco for. I would say it is one of the better NUSSU event that they ever organised.

Jazz Band concert was very very good, I would say much better than both fests! lol. They sing well and play well and the music is pretty soothing. The rap song experimental piece was quite interesting, and I liked some of the dance moves and choreography. Maybe next time I should join a band. Haha!

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Film School on Saturday was a miracle. Praise God for everything went well although everything was in a rush. Moving from CFA to COM1 is not a good idea, especially when we got so much equipment with us! Luckily we took a cap instead of pushing the trolley in the hot sun. There was a minor accident while we were carrying the trolley as my hand slipped. Luckily no equipment was damaged. Also, the programme was pushed back due to people coming late etc. and also Danny’s voice was losing his voice. Fortunately there was a microphone in the seminar room. We managed to finish everything on time and rush back to UCC for the jazz concert.

Pray that all goes well at EMCC tomorrow!

After finishing NM2208 during special term, I would rate it as my favourite module so far. No exams, all graded based on assignments which were mini design projects…I wish more NUS modules could be like this! Less emphasis on examinations = less mugging and memorizing = more out of the box thinking.

FOW was good, although of course FOC was better. My group, darth vader had quite enthu group of guys but a few not so enthu girls. We had a great time at West Coast Park, and the amazing feat was that 200 over people bidding for their modules in the midst of our games at McDonalds. All thanks to Wireless@SG. Our group actually managed to win the most enthusiastic group, although I think in terms of cheering we are actually quite quiet. But they said we had good attendance and we participated in most games actively…that’s why. It was quite funny because some of the girls couldn’t even remember everyone’s names on the 2nd day and I had to keep testing them. Haha.

Food for thought: About thousand over litres of water and thousands of plastic bags were used in the name of fun. Is it worth it? Is it a wastage? Probably. Water can be sourced easily through the water cycle, although in water-scarce Singapore we are taught to save water. Plastic bags harm the environment when they are buried or burnt. Maybe someone can invent a more environmental friendly way of playing with water bombs and perhaps save the hundreds of similar camps which play water games. And earn some money.

I think the best part was when Guo Ting suggested we should go NTU for our flag day. As the saying goes, the most dangerous place is the safest place. True enough, as there were nobody else in yellow ‘competing’ for our business. Some of the people who saw the nussu on our shirts remarked: “wah NUS dare to come here collect money ah” “you have come to the wrong place” etc. Nevertheless there were still many people who donated. The most fun part was when we did two freeze flashmobs in front of their McDonalds. We stood in the shape of a heart, held our cans in front, and froze for 5mins and took a video. It certainly caught attention as many people thought it was innovative and donated money. The next one we did was not as successful, as we stood spread out and pointed at someone standing in the middle. All in all, I think flashmobs are darn fun and we should do more of them.

Our flashmob video was submitted along with another entry to represent SoC. There was an online voting and SDE was spamming it. After clarifying there are no rules, being computing students, we set up tens of laptops to spam the voting automatically using iMacro on firefox. Haha it was quite funny. In the end our votes were 6000+ against 3000+. But alas, the votes were removed from the judging criteria and SDE won the prize in the end.

Rag day was impressive. Amazingly, SoC won the least cost float, which is probably the first time we won something I think. And being least cost is certainly keeping the spirit of rag, unlike some other group which spent $x0,000 amount of money and even outsourcedk the pneumatic systems to some company.

Amidst the orientation, I had to rush off for Choices for 3 nights at ian’s and yoga’s house. It was very tiring as the camera rig was very heavy and it seems as if I have done hundreds of push-ups as my arms hurt. It was a good experience working with the actors, and my first time working on set with extensive lens and lights. It is very challenging to pull focus, and much more when most of our scenes were night scenes. Besides Yoga’s house had limited space to maneuver around. ian’s condo was very nice. We also went to Jurong Point to film, in which they were nice enough to grant us permission. The security guards were watchin us and people were staring at us as if we were from mediacorp.

After all the rarrar, school starts. I’m quite looking forward to this semester as finally I’m studying more of what I like to study except for one – math. May God’s favour be upon this semester!

My friend says my blog is getting rusty. Well haven’t updated for almost a month. So busy that I’ve to type this on the train haha, thanks to my iPhone which has now been upgraded to 3.0. Finally can forward SMS and copy and paste! However I faced some glitches while upgrading and steve jobs said “npehea” to me (some Russian language).

Last few weeks has been a wham boom bang busy time (lol). My first special term results are out, and as with all other math related subjects, I’ve got a B. However I was quite disappointed with myself as I got more than 30 mins to solve the last question and I couldn’t. Shows that my left brain isn’t working as well. My lecturer Stephane Bressan gave an interesting quotable statement: “Math is not the problem. It is like a doctor who helps you solve your problem. You don’t blame math for your problems just like how you don’t blame the doctor for your sickness. When we are faced with problems, we just have to apply the rules of Math.”. Well think I can’t apply those rules that well.

Currently my brain has switched frequency to my right brain, and I’ve been doing designs on my tablet for NM2208 Principles of Visual Communication until my butt hurts lol. Check out my design blog. I think I prefer such “right-brain” modules and the best part is there are no exams at all – everything is from weekly assignments. Which is fantastic cos means I don’t have to mug like siao. Uni life should be like this! Sometimes I think I should have studied art instead. But it’s okay I should make the best out of my opportunities now, such as scrambling to apply fo student exchange. It is noteworthy that my faculty office actually forgot my application. Luckily I decided to email them one fine day. Now praying that my module mappings can work.

In other events, there was Celebrating The Family, a four-session screening event by nuSTUDIOS of CASHLESS and In Your Own Words.. I was the moderator for 2 of the Q&A sessions. Actually I didn’t do anything much, since most of the talking was by Derek and Melinda. Nevertheless it was still a fun time especially the last night when the actor came and there was much chatter with his company colleagues. Some of my friends and Whit came too. Someone asked me when’s my turn to make one and have a screening…well maybe next time soon….

I also went to CommunicAsia/BroadcastAsia. LG and Samsung had huge booths facing each other, and the former was giving out cubes to promote their cube interface. Frankly, their icons are an iPhone rip-off, and the cube thing is just a marketing gimmick. Samsung’s Jet was a bit overhyped, but the i8910 HD running on Symbian seemed pretty good as it can record HD video at 1280×720.

Video Games Live was awesome. I especially liked Sonic, my favourite console game, as well as Super Mario. Martin Leung performed the medley blindfolded on stage, as well as the catchy Russian folk song for Tetris. You can watch a video on YouTube, his hands move super fast! (*kowtow*) There was also a cosplay competition in which someone dressed up as a Patapon along with a weapon, but couldn’t see his face, won. (At that time I do not even know what is Patapon!)

I also went to the closing event of Singapore Arts Festival: Crackers, a fireworks performance at yishun with jr and the rest. The introduction was a bit long and draggy but the fireworks was cool as they were exploding in-your-face and all around you in a circular fashion. There were also windmill and flying around kinds. Pretty cool. The ushers were quite cute too, as they wore yellow helmets and gave a safety briefing a la airline style.

Soon after was SoC Camp Castello which is the main highlight of the holidays. Somehow due to my friends preference for us to be in the same group, I was made the main OGL of Sir Kay Knights (SK9) with Steve as assistant OGL. It was a daunting task, especially when you have a weird group name and others said it’s gay. Haha. We went to buy cloth from spotlight and cut into bandannas, inspired by VJC’s. We then drew patapon-inspired K-figures on them, each with different weapons. Haha. My group turned out to be surprisingly awesome (as compared to other camps in which other groups always seemed to be better than mine). We had excellent freshies and OGLs who worked great in a team and in games and we managed to win 2nd in the ultimate race (with some people calling me colin.sg) and tailing behind the best group in most of the activities. Moreover, we even had the best male freshman in our group and we won tge best skit thanks to our creativity of merging LOTR, Batman, Patapon and L4D together. Everyone had a great laugh especially the gamers in the audience. Overall, I am very satisfied with my group and I hope my freshies are as satisfied with us for providing good welfare (such as buying ice cream and jelly pudding =p). I hope I did a good job as an OGL. Kudos to everyone!

With so many assignments to do, I am left with not much free time for myself. Combined with all the nuSTUDIOs activities and various meet ups I reckon my holidays will be over soon.

Imagine technology can Feed The World, One For One, without going through various layers of money handling. Technology will allow money donations to be made directly to the people who are hungry and poor. Each person can feed another halfway across the world with no strings attached. One meal for one meal, one for one.

This short film was an entry for the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2009 Short Film Competition by nuSTUDIOS Film Productions (a member of NUS Centre For the Arts)

Check out this talkshow nuSTUDIOS did recently:

Been busy the past two weeks of the holidays/special term doing various filming stuff in nuSTUDIOS.

(Before the filming stuff started, I went for the CFA Retreat at Chevrons. It was meant as an introduction of CFA to the new excos. It was a long workshop-filled day, and the best part was the food provided, especially the pool-side BBQ at night. We kept eating and eating! Haha.)

The first one was Microsoft Imagine Cup Short Film Competition. A month or two back, Sabrina and I decided to give it a shot and submitted a simple storyboard. We got through the first round and now we are supposed to create a 3 min short film based on our storyboard. The theme for this year’s competition is “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today”. Our story was about solving the problem of hunger, and our technology is some form of wireless transfer of money (e.g. ez link) which allows people to buy meals for someone across the world by buying a meal one-for-one.

And so, I got my cousin Dave, and my tutorial mate Siying to help me as the cast. We filmed everything all in one day last last Friday. It was also my first time using the Brevis/RedRock Micro camera rig, and I spent a few hours configuring and playing with it the day before. Took me a while to figure out how to align the lens. The results were fantastic and SLR-like quality. Not much colour correction needed! We filmed the “rich person” part in the Arts Canteen, and the “poor person” part right in our own studio room. Check out our set! :

It was a pretty fun day, and even though there were not much people helping us. However, in the studio, vic, yishu and zy managed to give us a hand in setting up the lights etc. After the filming, I came back on Saturday to edit. Added the music on Tuesday and the finishing touches on Wednesday before submitting online. Also managed to ask our friend Charles for the voice-over narrations. I’m quite happy that we managed to finish on time!

The next film project was Dr. Seet’s talkshow – An Audience with Dr. Seet. Dr. Seet is a NUS TSD Lecturer and he has this idea of doing a talkshow in the form of online short 3-5mins video cast. As he has many connections in the Theatre scene, it will be mainly about theatre and will be uploaded on fifo.sg. He kindly engaged nuSTUDIOS help in terms of filming, and we managed to get together to do a pilot shoot last Saturday. The venue was a small little room in Action Theatre. Originally, I thought we will get a black box kinda room or something, but in the end it was this little room which was quite crammed. Nevertheless, we managed to make the full use out of it and created a talkshow set inside! Sab bought a nice huge grey cloth (which is a neutral colour and acts as a good backdrop), and we got props like sofa, coffee “table”, lamp and a plant from the office upstairs. Together with the lights, the set looks pretty professional! Here’s a sneak preview:

It was a pretty long shoot, and we got to see stars like Nelson Chia, Lorretta Chen and much more. It was quite a fun process, since it’s our first time doing this. All in all, we shot 4 episodes, and look out for them to be finished and uploaded soon!

Today, with invitation cards provided by CFA, I attended the opening gala of the 19th European Union Film Festival at GV Vivocity with a few other nuSTUDIOS friends. It was a prvilege to be there as there was excellent food and entertainment. Swedish meatballs, creamy spinach and shitshake mushrooms and even sashimi! Awesome. There’s even wine served. Very high class indeed.

There were a lot of Europeans around. Originally I was thinking if there were enough people to fill up the cinema, but soon it became very crowded. We were hoping to catch some familiar faces, but not much, except for Hossan Leong. Haha. In the end, we managed to meet some people from NP’s FSV and had a quick chat before the screening started.

After some formalities and speeches, the NTU ADM’s documentary, Sacred Crane, Mortal Birds, was screened. (Everytime I think about them, I always wonder that I could be studying there now. Okay let’s not go towards that topic now.) It was done by Boo Xinying (related to Boo Junfeng?) and we managed to bump into her and her lecturer for a quick exchange after the screening. It was pretty cool as their school brought them to Tibet to do the documentaries about the birds, and the scenery there is very nice.

The next feature was Wolf, a Swedish film about the people who rear reindeers and their conflict with the law and wolves, a protected species in Sweden. It was quite a slow film, with the climax reached when one wolf was killed. However, towards the end, it showcases a bit of a father’s love and sacrifice for his son (sounds familiar) and his connection with his dog. However, the scenes of snow, mountains and reindeers were very beautiful.

An eye-opening day.

The first two weeks of school have come and past. Now that I’m in nuSTUDIOS exco, I’ve been pretty busy with AGM, meetings and projects. Recently, we are doing a collaboration project with CO, doing a Song of Kent Ridge. Hence, the past week, we’ve been going around NUS and Kent Ridge filming the environment and the scenery. Last Saturday, we went to Kent Ridge Park at 6am to video a time lapse of the sunrise at the Canopy Walk. It is an amazing sight to see the huge orangey sun popping out from behind the buildings and the horizon, but alas, the camera’s black and white viewfinder did not do justice to the colours.

The Brevis 35mm lens adapter thingy is pretty cool, just learnt how to fix up the rig. Hope I can use it in future productions.

As for this sem modules, I have 3 labs out of the 5 modules. Didn’t get all my tutorials but managed to appeal for them. CS2100 is pretty boring now with all the binary stuff, reminds me of Ms Leong. The lecturer for NM2216 Interactive Media Design isn’t very interactive at the moment. Its workload seems tough with readings and weekly reflections and projects. Take photos of sustainable transport in Singapore? Where got? NM1101E looks interesting as there are many different lecturers from all over the world. Math LT suck as there are too many people and too few seats and the tables, although more spacious, are kinda obstructing as they are placed in a row in front of the seats. As for CS1102, I find it quite stupid that we have to use command line when a GUI is available. Sure, makes us more geeky programmers, but seems like a step back in technology.

Yesterday I was at New Creation’s CNY Service, and they had a nice stage setup and an interesting play. It was inspired from Little Nonya, which I didn’t watch, and they called it Xiao Niang. lol. Actually, it’s adapted from the book of Ruth. I loved the original music they created and sang. The songs were simple and nice, especially the theme song sang between Ruth “Xiao Niang” and “Boaz”. It’s a perfect duet for a wedding, goes something like this:

This is grace
This is love
Favour smiles at me from above
This is more than i can imagine
Or ask for

I will give you my hand
I (You) will cherish you (me) till the end
We will be together forever
Yes we’ll be together forever
And we’ll be together forevermore

I will give You my hand
I will cherish You till the end
And we’ll trust in God’s love forever
Yes we’ll trust in God’s love forever
And we’ll trust in God’s love forevermore

1. Write an elliptical script (a plot with gaps), and maybe a story with no fixed ending if you like
2. Use long take, still shots without anticipating characters’ movements, along with silence
3. Use extreme close-ups of faces/objects/food?
4. Break the 180-degree rule and take odd unusual artistic camera angles
5. Include emo shots with a person talking to himself or in deep thought in some emo place with light shining through and shadows casted, along with emo music

Haha. Of course, it is much more than that. Just some of the things which I observed and learnt in my film art module.

I just watched Eric Khoo’s “My Magic”. It is a simple straightforward and touching film and makes you feel for the characters even within the short and simplistic story. It is quite heartwarming and sad at the end but also quite meaningful of a father’s love, although I expected the story to be longer. And it is interesting that most of the movie is in Tamil, and the only understandable language was the bits of Hokkien/Teochew, and today is Deepavali. Hope it gets some recognition or prize in the Oscars which Singapore is going to submit this film to it.