Projek Berjaya yang tak berjaya

Bila kita jatuh, nak bangun berdiri balik tu senang, tapi bila nak mula berlari semula, itu yang payah. Semua orang pernah jatuh, jatuh basikal, jatuh tangga, jatuh katil, jatuh cinta, jatuh bangunan. Tapi keupayaan untuk bangun dan naik semula basikal, nak tangga, naik katil, naik cinta, naik bangunan, semua bergantung kepada kekuatan diri masing-masing.

Aku pun biasa jatuh, dan nak panjat naik semula tu memang payah. Kena mengesot dulu macam pocong ngesot, lepas tu merangkak sikit sikit, kemudian baru boleh berjalan dan berlari. Tapi jatuh, pada nilai kesihatan, bagi aku adalah salah satu ujian yang banyak memberi makna tersirat dalam kehidupan. Kalau direnung kenapa wujudnya banyak sangat penyakit sampai nama pun berbelit lidah nak sebut, pasti akan muncul penjelasan tersendiri, samada berkaitan persekitaran ataupun individu itu sendiri. Wujudnya satu keadaan di sebuah negara Afrika, apabila bantuan kemanusiaan tiba dan mula memberi penduduk vitamin dan makanan tambahan terutamanya iron kerana wujudnya masalah nutrisi dalam kalangan mereka membawa kepada peningkatan kes Malaria. Pelik. Namun kadang kala kebuluran atau kurang nutrisi juga boleh membawa kebaikan dalam persekitaran tertentu.

Aku dibedah di bahagian inguinal. Mungkin satu hari nanti boleh lah kalau teringin nak cerita secara fakta penyakit yang aku lalui. Rasanya sebab keadaan penyakit tu sendiri aku malu nak bercerita, kalau tangan kaki boleh jugak terima. Merawat penyakit tu mudah, nak pulih dari rawatan tu yang susah sebenarnya. Untung juga aku tergolong dalam kategori minor, itu pun dah banyak pantang larangnya, kalau tak nanti relapse datang semula diri sendiri padan muka. Terbayang juga, adik adik di pusat onkologi tempat kuliah, hilang sudah rambut comel akibat radiasi dan chemo. Belum lagi masalah jantung atau paru-paru, perut atau usus, hati atau limpa. Bersyukur ujian Allah itu datang dalam bentuk yang kita mampu hadapi. 

jauh lagi perjalanan

Itu kisah sakit, kisah kalah jatuh tak berjaya dalam pertandingan video anjuran kumpulan Berjaya pun kira satu kejatuhan keyakinan diri yang agak dahsyat jugak. Tapi baru mula libatkan diri dalam filming dah harap nak menang empat puluh ribu memang tak dapat lah. Siap kata dulu, kalau menang ni, aku retire buat video video ni, penat. Kira takdir tak nak aku berhenti lah rasanya. Tak pun tak nak bagi makan duit shubhah sebab Berjaya groups ada syarikat sports toto. Semua perkara yang jadi ada baiknya, bukan? Jadi kalau jatuh, bangkit, sapu sapu luka dan jalan semula. Kalau boleh, lari lari sikit, mula dengan lari anak kemudian boleh lah pecut semula. Kalau sakit, ambil masa untuk pulih. Kemudian boleh mula berjalan dan pecut. Jangan terus nak panjat gunung. 

#random - Dr. Zoidberg

I've just realized how travelling 12 hours on a plane with a two year old kid wont be easy, even travelling with three hermit crabs isn't as easy as it sounds, but at least they didn't cry until the whole cabin couldn't sleep. Maybe someday when I have kids on my own, I'll just give 'em a slight dose of cough syrup just to knock the out throughout the flight, hey, I learnt this from my uncles alright, its purely legit. Or maybe not though. Ney I'm just kidding around oh my dear future loving wife, we wont do that to the kids, right?

Pulling an all-nighter before a long journey was a very bad idea. Very bad idea. I left my camera rig, I left my lab coat, I left my bags, I left some toiletries, my magic mouse, my books. All because I was falling dizzy the morning I should've been wide alert. I blame that dragging feeling of the early onset symptom of home-sickness. 

Being in class for the first time after months of zero brain usage is hard. My lecture notes end up being full of question marks, and with all this new abbreviations, it's like CML? AML? ALL? Ph chromosome? and it goes on and on. And then comes the new spirit of 'I need to go home and start to cover all this ASAP' and then I end up sleeping jetlag-ed later on. It happens every semester. 

My new target for the semester was not going to accept any video making projects of any kind. But last night I've just agreed to make a graduation video for an Egyptian school. How nice. You just cant resist the temptation cant you?

It's going to be a few more days until Berjayayouth announce the selected top ten short film, and I hope we're in the list. Not expecting much, but if we didn't get into the list, I'll cry my heart out, bang my head to the floor, all those things.

This guy above, I mean the hermit crab. He tried to run away last night. Like seriously dude, after all we went through? and you tried sneaking out from your home, and how come you never show me that you could even climb that high? you rebellious little cute crab!

One thing which is kind of scary when I got home here in Mansoura was, they were no dust on the mirror table and the book shelf, like someone had been cleaning it for the past few months. Erm, thank you?

Hye, I'm Dr. Zoidberg and I like to eat

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." - Steve Jobs

The Berjaya Project

Creating a video is hard, it's not like taking a picture where we just have to snap the shutter button and and few seconds later its done. Your hands need to be steady if you're recording a movement, you need to find ways to record a better audio because a RM1000 external dslr microphone is just out of the question for an amateur filmmaker like me (unless we win!). People will stare, at you and the person you are recording, especially in public spaces, and I'm not comfortable of being stared at, and if you're carrying a DIY camera rig which looks really weird, it worsens the situation. I've learnt a lot while making my friend's pre-wedding video, and it truly reflects on this one. The berjaya project is like something that I have to do, to remind myself that I must learn from my mistakes. Previously, the audio was horrible, with winds whooshing around, we could barely hear the dialogue, although after I enhanced it by 500% after editing. I made wrong choices in lens selection, never use a f1.4 50mm lens with autofocus on while recording a movement, it destroys everything. Do not use autofocus while recording a conversation if you are using a dslr for recording, because you'll hear the focusing motor thingy turning. Do more than 3 takes per scene, because it will not only help your actors to rehearse and practice, but it will give you a hand-full of videos you could choose during editing, just imagine that your actors nailed a scene but later you found out that you accidentally touched the microphone jack and it makes that rushhghfsshh sound. It happened to me.

It took me several long showers, unimaginable amount of caffein, and countless hours of staring at people to come up with the video concept. All I could think about is I need to create some shocking moments in this video, and I won't tell you what it is because it will just ruin the viewing experience. So I called up my friend; ilmi. I presented my storyline, he added more ideas. We put together a storyboard, a shooting schedule, he tweeted about anyone who's interested of being apart of the project, and we got our actors, very talented actors. That was it, the beginning of our journey through the Berjaya youth short film competition.

Operation: Tampal
Location: KL sentral, KLCC.

The very next day, we rendezvous with our actors at KL sentral. We were late because we got lost on our way to the sentral, my bad. I did became more nervous than the actors before we started recording in the middle of KL sentral because people will stare and have like 'what the hack are you guys doing' faces but then when we started recording, and people started to smile, I got into the rhythm. It was a fun day, and because we did actually continue the It's not over theme, we decided that each time a stranger came and asked for help, we will help. A makcik working at mcdonalds came by and started to ask if we could translate a latter into english for her relative, saying it was really important and he will loose his visa or something, I didn't really get the whole story though, but I gave her my email saying that I will try to help, but she didn't email me the latter, so what to do.  

The whole crew

Recording in public areas, especially when we started to involve people we never met, thought me one thing; smile. It makes them comfortable and you can actually ask them to wave or something, and never forget to say thank you. The only thing that ruined the day was when a security guard at KLCC park approached us and said 'sorreey dik, tak boleh pegang pegang kad ni'. Ingat orang buat rally bersih 3.0 ke apa. Being apart of the Egyptian Revolution had thought me to fight, but we didn't, it was KLCC not Tahrir square. So we improvised the last scene, we didn't use the cards. Thank you pak cik guard. We should do a story about you someday.

Operation: Budak sekolah
Location: Sekolah Alam Megah, Subang Alam.

I never knew that morning school ends at 2pm, we did actually waited outside for about 2 hours worrying if that day was a school holiday because we could't see anyone with school uniforms. Recording infront of a school went alright. My fear is that a teacher or the school's security guard will chase us away, fearing us to be peadobears or something, as our actor did really look like  school girls (this is a compliment zana and fiqah). Doing a scene along a busy street was quite dangerous, we have to wait until the road was clear and quickly take the shot and do it again and again. Credits should go to our talented actors, who never whine about the heat and such, just don't change if someday you guys made it to the A-list alright. After all scenes were successfully recorded, we went straight to upstairs, subang for our lunch/tea/dinner. Excellent food plus great company is a good way to end a day.

You can see the rig, and budak sekolah yang ilmi kidnaped 

Operation: Deliver

I just hate editing. If you're great in sony vegas or adobe premiere or any other video editing software, do give me a tweet. I rather be under the heat shooting videos than sitting on a chair editing stuff, it's time consuming, it's dreadful, it's horrible. But I have to do it, with limited editing. iMovie is great, but for future videos, I'm thinking of explosions, fire, lightsabers and all those cool stuff.

After sleepless nights, and days. We managed to put together a video. Uploaded it to their website the night of the dateline. But considering I had to compress a HD video which was 800mb into a small quality 40mb video as a requirement from the officials, I was really concerned about the quality drop. So together with ilmi, we decided to drive all the way to hartamas, well ilmi was the one driving, I happened to be a sleepy GPS beside him, we didn't get any sleep the night before, so both were quite in the air. Nearly had an accident, but we survive. 

All we can do now, is to pray that Afdlin shauki, Aniu, and Gayatri Pillai will have a soft spot towards our video and list it among the top ten list! After that, it's up to you to vote, WAJIB undi!

Will keep you guys posted on the competition, your vote means 40 000 ringgit to me.