Finally we're done with another semester. And it had been a rough ride because so many shoots cramped together. But overall it had been a disappointing semester because I found myself not learning very much from the Kill Bill and FLW exercises. My solo was pretty mediocre and I lost the pitch which means I'll probably never get to make a film of my own within film school.

And I found some photos, which I never posted here.






That was one of the Kill Bill exercises and the huge photo at the bottom was from FLW which is French Lieutenant's Woman.

Now I'm serving my internship on Wee Li Lin's second feature called Forever. And I'm tasked to make a behind-the-scenes video. I have no idea how I'm gonna do that to be honest. But I'll just take whatever comes my way. I got some pictures of the set too which I don't think is a good idea to be posted at the moment. But the set looks awesome aesthetically. Anyway, much of my holidays will be spent on set, during which I get to observe the camera crew and scrutinise the Red Cam. It's one of the great motivations of being on set somehow.

I had been uber, extremely, overboard upset about losing the pitch. Don't ask me why. I only knew it mattered to me so much after I didn't get selected. Even now I get pangs of disappointment and moodiness from it. But I had been assigned to write Veronica's script, so I guess it isn't that bad.

I guess I try to compensate for a failure by crewing on many projects just so I'd do something maybe. I had agreed to work with my seniors on two thesis films and will be part of 4 of my classmates' diploma films. I might be killing myself but I don't really want to pull out of any of them at all. That's like the outlook for the next few months to come.

A Time to Think

Admittedly, I was reluctant to go for the leader's retreat during the weekend. But as always, it did much good. I guess it's that time I need occasionally to sit and think about all that I'm doing, both in ministry and in pursuing my dream.

Retreat was at this resort right at the end of Singapore and I guess it was good in a way. Being totally out of the city allowed me some clarity of thought without distractions, and for once in a many weeks, I could pray without rushing.

Then I went out and wandered around as I always do. Walking is therapeutic for me. Then I decided to take out my 3.2 megapixel phone camera and snap.






Phone cameras are downright lousy. It was hard to snap any good pictures at all. So the colour was off, the exposure was hideous and the focus was non-existent. Nevertheless, walking and looking at stuff made me realise I had not admired God for a long time. Maybe that's why I can't wait to bring out my camera for a walk again. Somehow it makes me think of God and appreciate the things He created.

Unexpected

After 2 solos, finally something watchable. At least I could say I worked a little harder on this one and had been a lot more determined to keep my story against all odds. During the mid-year holidays I came up with the story and from then, racked my brains to write the script (4 drafts) and summarising it to fit a ridiculously short time of 8 minutes.



I had talked to many people about it, about how The Good Samaritan can be placed in today's context. And through observing society for a short while, there're many possibilities. Taking the train to school, I see very frequently people not giving up their seats to pregnant ladies or elderly people. What happened to kindness? I could have made a film based on something more mundane (and I had thought of doing so) but an encounter with a dying person seems more jarring.

So based on the biblical account of The Good Samaritan, 3 people from different walks of life encounter separately a dying person in a back alley and 3 of them responded differently. I guess if the duration was stretched a little more, I would have developed more concrete characters and added more meat to the bones. Then again, I guess I have to be thankful for having an impressive cast. They have half the credit of making the story more convincing.

Another summer day
Has come and gone away
In Paris and Rome
But I wanna go home

May be surrounded by
A million people I
Still feel all alone
I just wanna go home
Oh, I miss you, you know

And I’ve been keeping all the letters that I wrote to you
Each one a line or two
“I’m fine baby, how are you?”
Well I would send them but I know that it’s just not enough
My words were cold and flat
And you deserve more than that

Another aeroplane
Another sunny place
I’m lucky, I know
But I wanna go home
Mmmm, I’ve got to go home

Let me go home
I’m just too far from where you are
I wanna come home

And I feel just like I’m living someone else’s life
It’s like I just stepped outside
When everything was going right
And I know just why you could not
Come along with me
'Cause this was not your dream
But you always believed in me

Another winter day has come
And gone away
In even Paris and Rome
And I wanna go home
Let me go home

And I’m surrounded by
A million people I
Still feel all alone
Oh, let me go home
Oh, I miss you, you know

Let me go home
I’ve had my run
Baby, I’m done
I gotta go home
Let me go home
It will all be all right
I’ll be home tonight
I’m coming back home

Strange, how some of the words fit in more ways than one. It's like a crossroad and I'm feeling lost, very lost, like I'm all alone. You probably won't know how many teardrops have fell, how wrong many things are. I just.. wanna.. go home...

Oh the unending busyness and the staunch fatigue

I'm having one of those moments again. The kind of moment where the world stops and I start thinking and emo-ing about life, about what I had been through, about good and bad times in my life, feeling a moment of joy at the happy times and then moments of sadness that those times can never come again. It's one of those moments coincidentally accompanied by Michael Bublé's Home that I'm having now.

A lot and I mean A LOT happened since the last time I blogged.

Just after we were done with our Kill Bill remakes, we thought that's going to be it. But we had the French Lieutenant Woman project slapped on us amidst countless other assignments and that took up a huge amount of our time. So much work added and so much disruption to our momentum. But we should have been used to that by now. So that and those countless other assignments account for the little sleep I had been having. Now I believe I have a sleep debt of more than a hundred hours.

Despite the fatigue and hard work, it was fun and those shoots had fostered stronger bonds among us and I had made a new best friend whom I appreciate very much. Thank you for being there almost all the time. In a way the shoots were enjoyable because of the people.

I had filmed and submitted my solo as well as helped some others on their solos. Generally I'm not very happy with my final product. And there are many reasons for that. The sound was far from good and I had to design a soundscape for the outdoor scene which was not successful at all. Most of the shots were fine but I expected more. But still, I guess I should be contented with the fact that it is an improvement from my previous solos. It was hard squeezing my story into eight minutes.

Now I need to worry about the pitch for diploma film. I can still remember stepping into Lasalle last year and now we're working on out diploma films. It's just scary. I had been selected to go for a second round of pitch and my story isn't concrete. So I'm fussing a bit over it, racking my brains for ideas. And there're still assignments to be done the last three weeks of semester, stuff like my non-existent essay.

That's mostly what I had been doing. All the late nights and poor diet had weakened me. Ironically, all the physical work had toughened me up a bit and I'm getting some unwanted muscles. I had lost some weight too and my face spells fatigue.

I'm going to be involved in Wee Li Lin's next feature during the hols. But what I'm really looking forward to is some rest, going for walks with my camera, spending time chilling with great company.

Hmm.. I need to get hold of some photos from shoots to post up here...

Posting for the sake of posting

Here's some personal update.

I'm still suffering from occasional hangovers from the Kill Bill shoot last two weeks. Photos for the first one are up in flickr.. I'm currently still too lazy to put them up here. No time!!! Anyway, it's gonna look equally busy the second half of semester, with the breast cancer foundation documentary and French Lieutenant Woman projects coming up.

Next piece of news is.. I'm on Facebook! T.T I know many people are gloating at my downfall.. bleah.. I'm gonna search for long lost people, ex teachers and lecturers. Practically the whole world is on it even my parents -.- and i've succumbed to the insidiousness of FB.

My PC died. Oh well, four years is a long time. Time to upgrade ^^

Lighting

We never had this in our first year, which was a real shame. Imagine, we're second-year film students and we're clueless about lights and lighting techniques. At least this academic year, we have a lot more intensive lessons on camera, lighting and cinematography. We've had a couple of lessons and they were very useful and practical.

We were given exercises and scenarios to create. It wasn't so much of mimicking but really trying to achieve certain forms of lighting and learning what effects different lights bring.



One of the exercises was to light an object up without creating shadows. We thought it was going to be difficult but we figured the trick to doing that from experimenting and putting together different lights and filters. And the trick was to shine soft light on the object and that would create a very faint shadow or no shadow at all. So if you saw the picture on the right, we bounced light off a styrofoam board and further soften the light with a diffusers. At the end, the whole setup looked like some science experiment.

Then we were given the exercise to create sunlight. For that, many of us automatically grabbed HMIs. HMIs are lights that are made to literally produce light of similar colour temperature as the sun. To make it look like the evening sun, we added an orange gel, the proper name being Colour Temperature Orange (CTB). (Something we found out not too long ago as well.)




The following lesson was a lot more challenging. We were given commercial ads that had models posed nicely. And we had to identify the setup that was used to achieve the look. This was more of a mimic now, but it taught us pretty well, because we had to learn from experience. So we had some of us posed and then we put up the lights. Overall, we did pretty decent jobs and I can't emphasise it more; that we learnt a lot.




Then we lit up glassware, with reference to beer ads. It was pretty interesting and another challenge altogether. I remember a lesson I had last semester, about 3-point lighting and also colour temperature.

image from wikipedia

3-point lighting is almost like a standard setup. How we achieve different stuff is really based on creativity, on working around. There isn't really a hard and fast fixed method to achieving anything.

This entry would probably serve to remind me of the lessons in lighting. It was a module truly appreciated.

Yay, its the first post of the month and I'm here to lament. School starts in a day to be exact. Boohoo. Ok not that I hate school. I chose to go back to it to start with. But on first look at my timetable, its 9-6 mondays to fridays. >.> And it dawned on me that we're seniors now. =/

So holidays have ended. And I've not achieved all that I've set out to do during the hols, one of which is packing my room. I never got down to doing it. I never got down to doing a lot of things particularly because my time was given to work and spending time with people. Well I guess its time to adjust back to school life again.

We just had nice birthday dinner for dad at The Paramount. The Paramount had been around for many years. It's a restaurant under Tung Lok. People who love chinese ala carte buffets should go there. Besides, we were served by a waitress who was awesome. She was so attentive and friendly to us. Last Saturday, we met up with friends at Oosh, a semi luxurious place located at Demsey for dining and drinking. I had never heard of the place prior to last week and I thought the name sounds kind of dodgy. But it is different from what I thought it was. The place is huge with multiple dining areas both indoors and outdoors, so atmosphere and setting are wonderful. The food was pretty good but quite overpriced. I guess sometimes its the kind of people that go there too. We drove into the restaurant's private car park and saw a lambo and a porche. That makes me uneasy about that place to be honest. Anyway, no reviews for The Paramount and Oosh. If you are really curious, go check them out. These places taught me that dining isn't just about food, it's an experience. Some people call it a lifestyle. But believe it or not, I eat to live.

I'm am so going to be challenged by my resolution to keep the Sabbath holy. Because I hadn't been doing so last semester and I suffered spiritually. I guess its true that disobedience has its consequence. It's time again to look at my vision in film, an end result I'm working towards. It gets clearer and clearer what I want to do. Facing the Giants and Fireproof have been a great source of inspiration and that is where I want to go.

Cherries make my world go round

Cherries are one of my favourite fruits but I don't eat them often, particularly because it's expensive. But I found some on sale so I got them. I love cherries since I was a kid, especially the canned ones, those that you find on cakes. No prizes for guessing why. To me they were the sweetest things on earth. Anyway, when I grew up a little more, I was fed fresh cherries instead and I loved them.

On the side note, cherries contain potent antioxidants and have anti inflammatory properties. They are rich also in vitamin C. Plus one of my favourite desserts is the Cherry Jubilee, which consists of fresh cherries flambéed in liquor and served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. It's unique to a Russian restaurant, Shashlik.

I found these cherries cheap and appealing because they seem to have a perfect dark shade of red and their skins reflected a natural shine. I felt compelled to take a picture. If you look carefully enough, you may even see my reflection in the cherry.



On my way home one evening last week, I came across my favourite stray cat below my block. She had been around for a while and she's very obviously aging. I remember why I liked her. She doesn't get into fights with the other cats often. The strays in my neighbourhood gets into a fight every other day, probably because the estate is over-populated. Cats are everywhere. And they will stick around because my neighbours feed them regularly.

So that evening I sat there and played with her and watched her clean herself and took this picture. She has inspired me to go out and keep a photo journal of strays because some of them are really beautiful cats, like her. And I remember taking this picture of her some years back.

Pete's Place

It had been a while since we had a proper date so we set aside an evening to dine and talk and basically have a date. We chose Pete's Place because of its reputation and particularly because I had been there in my childhood and had never forgotten the excellent dining experience I had there when I was young.

Located at the basement of the Grand Hyatt, Pete's Place is subtly tucked away with a small entrance to the left of the hotel's main entrance. Like before, it is rustic with brick walls and wooden furniture. The walls are lined with paintings and the plates had nice rustic looking flower motifs. It's like being brought back in time.

Pete's Place serves very regular Italian food but with authenticity, from appetisers to pizzas, pastas, risottos, and delighting Italian deserts. And because we arrived there before 7pm, we were given complimentary access to the salad bar.

Deep fried seafood
Price: S$18.00 + 10% service charge + 7% GST
Rating:

It came with a much more glamorous Italian name. Just that I rely on receipts to remember complicated dish names that come in other languages >.> Whatever it is, it was awesome. I dare say they serve some of the best fried calamari rings. It wasn't battered. Instead it was lightly breaded with flour and deep fried. And not only was there calamari rings but also prawns that were similarly fried. The seafood was very light and not oily at all which made it less filling and a little guilt-free.

Spaghetti Carbonara
Price: S$24.00 + 10% service charge + 7% GST
Rating:

Not only is the restaurant rustic in its decor and ambience but also in it's food. I love particularly the large bits of bacon in the Carbonara. It seems that the quality of bacon or prosciutto used in Carbonara does affect the final outcome. However, it is a little heavy but the quantity served was just right.

Pizza Pam-Pam
Price: S$22.00 + 10% service charge + 7% GST
Rating:

I have to apologise for the bad picture. I am still lamenting about how bad the camera attached to my new mobile is. Anyway, this is one of the most interesting pizzas I've ever eaten. It is a half-calzone and half-pizza filled with mortadella, mozzarella and ricotta. On the pizza are minced sausages, cherry tomatoes, garlic, fresh red chili, more mozzarella topped with fresh basil. I was half hoping it would be a thin crust pizza but it wasn't. But on the first bite, the crust was still crisp and had the fragrance of freshly baked bread, it suddenly didn't matter whether it was thin-crust or not. The cheese was great because coincidentally, two of my favourite cheeses are in there. So simply put, I love it.

Tiramisu
Price: S$10.00 + 10% service charge + 7% GST
Rating:

I love tiramisu and it's rare that like a dessert. However, the price for this tiramisu is kind of steep. I figured maybe it's because of the quality. True enough, the fragrance of the coffee and liquor used came through every bite. I wish the portion was bigger. Can never have enough of the creamy, alcoholic, fragrant cream cheese.

Food is a hit in Pete's Place. But it wasn't just the food that impressed, their service is to be raved about. We were promptly served iced water upon being seated (something you don't see that often anymore) and the waiter took time to patiently explained whatever we had to ask about the menu. When being served, they knew we were ordering to share and gave us separate plates. After which dish, we had our plates changed.

Pete's Place certainly met beyond my expectations. I had heard good things about it and remember my experience there was I was a child. The experience there is still positive and I will return again. If you're looking for a great dining place for a romantic date or just a get-together with friends, Pete's Place accommodates all. Just remember that the dress code is smart casual.

Pete's Place
Grand Hyatt Singapore
10 Scotts Road
Basement, Grand Wing
Singapore 228211
Telephone: (+65) 6732 1234
Service rating: