Inspiration
If you follow my Tweets on the side of my blog entries, you may have noticed that the other day I was reasonably frustrated over a wasted four hours spent filming a video for the Bureau of Education. I’m still not quite sure what this video is being used for, only that most of the ETAs had to write scripts/be in the video in some way, and that the film crew came back to San Min on Friday to film little kids running around the track.
Originally, we were told (well, my administration told me) that I had to make a video that was like English Village, only using the pharmacy and the MRT because that was what my principal wanted. So I sat down, wrote up two scripts, recorded the dialogues for the students who were filming it with me so they could memorize it, and we spent four hours one Tuesday afternoon filming these two scenes.
Well, apparently the principal wasn’t at all impressed (insert eyeroll here) because of stupid things, like the kids weren’t acting excited (listen, I’m celebrating the fact that they understand their lines and don’t speak in a monotone. Expressiveness is asking a bit much), and not making eye contact with me. The real kicker though, was that she wanted ‘a story’ for both scenarios.
Which of course meant that the old footage was completely unusable and I had to start from square one again.
Can you blame me for being more than a little ticked off? It would have been nice to know this the first time round to avoid wasting everyone’s time (mine, the kids, the film crew), but what can you do.
So I sat down to think.
How could I have a story in a five minute segment featuring six kids that took place on an MRT? Luckily, that story presented itself relatively quickly (i.e. once I had cooled down from hearing the news from Lucy). The pharmacy, however, was a bigger sticking point. How the hell was I going to come up with a story for the doctor’s office? The problem with public places like doctor’s offices and MRTs (and post offices, in Gered/Kate’s case), is that you do not generally have exciting story lines happening in these places in real life. A restaurant? Sure! A shopping excursion? Naturally. But not a doctor’s office.
And then, at 1:30 a.m., inspiration struck. I would write a script that had a group of friends who had stayed at a hotel and four of them had fallen sick. In short, I ripped off our lovely experience post-Kenting, when Rebekah, Shana, Kate, Dan, Dani and I (with Amanda) spent several hours in a hospital in varying states of nausea and digestive discomfort. Who would’ve thought that a really unpleasant (yet humorous in some ways) evening would turn out to have a practical purpose? Added bonus: the kids get to use material they’ve actually learned because I ask them what they had to eat and drink. I am very proud of myself right now.
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