Memories: A Project, A Dream, A Succession

Within a short hour, it was all over. 11th July 2005. The 29th Students' Council of Anglo-Chinese Junior College was extalled. There was handshakes, fiery embraces. There were glimmering tears and gushing flow of cries. Within a short hour, it was all over.
A year's journey came to a subtle but conclusive destination. The same emotions that broken me down during June Camp started to weather upon me. I was ready, but not ready enough. It is not touching, it is not "sad", it is simply overwhelming. But THAT is not why I am here to blog about.
Today, is also the premiere of the long awaited 'Memory Project'. After 2 months of filming and another of editting and cutting, the 2-hours long movie was finally ready for its debut. In an attempt to dramatise the situation, the team decided to fake a postponement (its completion after the prelims), which was bought by most people. with so, the 29ths were at Karen's house::

Grace Chew :: "Hey guys, anyone wants to watch 'Mr. and Mrs Smith?"
Zhic :: "wait... Hey Yang-Shen, do you have any suggestions?"
YS :: "Yeah, err... how about the Memory Project?"

It took a while before everyone registered the implications. :-)

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The Memory Project began as a dream. There were talks of 'oh'.. what if we actually had a movie that showed our year's progress? It began as words and jokes; yeah, (what if we ACTUALLY had a movie?)
But then, during our Final GM (After the showcase of the Orientaion 02 video), YS approached me with the proposal of a massive movie project. I guess it really was the significance of the O2 video marking our complete independence from outside filming asistance that really spurred us on.
Initially, I was daunted, intimidated. I had done plenty of movie projects, but they never exceeded 5 minutes each. (Where is the Love music video of Orientation 02 was already the stretch of my limits) Yet, a quiet voice told me, 'go ahead'. I knew that we (With God's help) could accomplish this impossible task. no more questions, we just went ahead.

The next 2 months were filled with interviews. YS and I interviewed every single councillor literally, all 40 of them. Endless days of staying back in school till 7 pm, sometimes even seeing how the school looked asleep. Upon my return home, I still had to upload all of the recordings into the computer before further processing. In other words, watching the interviews all over again. Here's the maths on average::

(40 councillors X 1/2 hour) X 2

Then came the june holidays and the last stetch. Quang, YS , Fionna and I bunked ourselves in the counci room for a 3 day marathon to complete the project. the end result was the most massive movie project I have seen in my life, too massive for even the laptops we were using to render. Then MRC's Jiamin offered his help. the MRC's treasured SUPER computer (customed designed for movie editting with the capability the play DOTA, CS some more games at the same time) was ours for the rendering. Despite this, we did the impossible. We hung the computer. Dishearted, we took a rest before breaking the hour long footage into chapters before buring it as a DVD with Zhic's help. Technical difficulties such as misallocated dubbings were solved slowly and patiently. Meanwhile, Daniel designed 2 covers both of which were somewhat inappropiate. He then merged the 2 together to show a 13-houred clock.

With teary eyes, I looked at he DVD late last night. Our legacy, our memories was a dream. It became a project and now a Succesion. It was not a handover, this extallation. It was a succession.Thank You everyone for making this possible.