hollaback_
Monday, July 18, 2005
there's something very intimidating about the blank, empty and white box that appears everytime i want to create a new post. there's so much power within it, and yet it really is nothing at all, a willing vessel waiting for me to fill it with my world.
i feel fucking tired, i haven't done any of my homework and it's already so late. but at least for once it's not because i was lazy, and i can say for once in my life that "i had competition".
was at sph over the whole weekend, taking part in the
24-hour script writing competition organised by theatreworks. quite a novel experience, although i think i entered the toilet like 20 times during the whole duration, because of all the coffee i drank. i suspect most of the men there were sexually deviant. and it was so weird to enter a cubicle and discover that someone's wanking in the left one and someone's smoking in the right one. oh well. arty farty playwright people.
anyway, that's not the point. the company was quite interesting, there was wooch and his classmate michelle, this jennani-lookalike next to me, plenty of GGs who couldn't write for nuts and were yakking away nonstop instead of typing, this cute boy caleb who looks 17 but's actually 14, fat funny malay women, indian girls who wrote their scripts by hand, pang meiyu's doppelganger, this girl from bern's neighbouring class in hwach humans, and ah. ms ng e-ching's brother. the legendary yisheng! who was pretty pro in my opinion, he appeared to be writing a musical in rhyming verse or sth; he brought a rhyming dictionary along.
located in SPH, the goal was to create a play of 12-30 pages within the alloted time. the best thing about it was that the time allocation was totally up to oneself to decide. i think it was pretty fun, and i wouldn't mind doing it again really. the worst part was really the stimulus that was given to us at regular intervals. we were forced to incorporate them in that very order, either as part of a speech or as a prop or whatever as long as it contributed to the storyline-
1. top story
2. looking back
3. time is running out
4. rooftop
5. typewriter and a penknife
it was really quite wtf, especially the last 2. totally nonplussed after receiving them. haha and there were some people who totally restarted after the last one was given at 9am, 7 hours before the deadline. it was damn hard since we were restricted to setting the play within a 3-room HDB flat. so most people ended up talking about suicide, i think. there was this weird boy from HC i think who was smugly announcing that all the stimuli were falling into place neatly into his preconceived story of a suicide. (heh, reminds me of virgin suicides. talking of which raymond ong fucking stole my "virgin suicides" book when he was not supposed to take it to begin with and he has yet to return me bloody fucking hell. anyway.) especially the last one whereby the guy writes a suicide note on the typewriter and kills himself with the penknife. michelle innocently asked him how that could be possible since the guy already killed himself by jumping off the rooftop, cf stimulus4. and he replied "oh i can just kill another character". like WTF. ok nvm.
the way they pre-empted and presented the stimulus was not bad though. although slightly contrived. for stimulus 1, they made us watch a press conference amongst the chief editor and the head editors of the various other sections of the straits times. so we kinda knew sunday's headlines on saturday. and for the 2nd one we visited the library and archives of SPH where they had old newspapers and really cool reference books for journalistic purposes. the 3rd one saw us going to the printing press where they did imaging and stuff like that. then after that it got really retarded. the 4th stimulus was given to us after they brought us onto the rooftop garden where the place was crawling with bugs at 3am in the morning. i absolutely could not type then and neither could i after going back to the auditorium at 4. i felt itchy and disgusting for a whole hour after returning. the last one was just dumb when they brought this clunky antique typewriter in a box and used a penknife to open it.
ah well. i obviously hope i win something but i think my script ended up part
Sunday (as in,
Friday, Saturday and what comes next then? sorry only some ri/rj guys would get this) and part channel8 drama serial. i think i'd be happy to even win a merit award. or maybe third place. hrrm. oh and chua enlai was the emcee for the whole competition, he was pretty funny. am amazed to find out that he's a pretty prolific actor!
i cannot blog properly anymore.
mike just took up your time at
12:54 am
th time!