A listing so that I can remember the year.

In Paris for the Snow City international premiere and became well-acquainted with the Georges Pompidou Centre . It opened in 1977, 35 years ago, and it is still so contemporary. To have the guts of a building all hanging out, smack in the middle of belle epoque Beaubourg…This building has to be experienced first hand. And of course Paris, the most beautiful city in the world

I went with the Singapore Heritage Society to visit Colonial Perak, Malaysia. While admiring the town planning of Taiping city centre on a blazing hot day, we stumbled upon the best Chendol in the world.

It was also wonderful to be acquainted with Ng Sek San’s architecture in Ipoh in Sekeping Kong Heng, a house within a house. I loved the tension between the rough unfinished quality and the deliberate designy feel of the space. It is as if every part of the building process was re-examined, then re-invented, even the electrical wiring methods.I would hate to be his contractor.

Saw Ian Woo’s drawings for the first time at the Singapore Art Museum’s Panorama – Recent Art from Contemporary Asia show. He presented a series of paintings which combined thick brush strokes with fine, yet deliberate pencil markings. The contrast works very well.

Green Zheng’s Chinese School Lessons Show at Chan Hampe Gallery. He essentialised the May 13 Generation into a few slogans and words (Malaya, bersatu, Where do you live, what is your name) and painted them over the Chung Cheng High School uniform. If you, like me have been immersed in that era for work, to see his interpretation of their experience as an art work found in faux-colonial Raffles Hotel gallery was sweet irony. You can view the works in the catalog here

Charles Lim’s Evil Disappears Show at FuturePerfect. David Teh curated a strand of Charles’ work focusing on the fluidity of borders. I have been following Charles work and have enjoyed his explorations. Do get your hands on the catalog containing David’s essay.

Attended the 25th anniversary of Operation Spectrum, a day in 1987 where 22 activists were detained for being Marxist Conspirators. Yes, Marxist Conspirators. The organisers were very surprised that several hundred people turned up to commemorate the event. There was an exhibition on the ISA that showed a mock up of a detention cell.

Freedom Film Festival (Singapore edition). I facilitated the Q&A for two films from this Malaysian film festival with the young Malaysian directors in attendance. They were so articulate and passionate that our normally sedate Singapore audience found themselves actually asking many questions. We over-ran and everyone had to be chased out of The Substation auditorium.

Hayward Gallery – the Art of Change: New Directions from China. I had only half a day to myself while in London and torn between the Tate Modern’s newly opened Tanks and this, I went for this. So much of Chinese art is cartoonised or Ai Wei Wei-ised with the aura or dissidence, that nothing else seems to get through. This exhibition seeks to address the dark hole. What I found impressive was the documentation of the exhibtion. The website, only accessible in situ, cross referenced the artists’ work with the events (political as well as cultural) of the day as well as their relationship with each other. Particularly memorable was Xu Zhen’s suspended lady and Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s dogs chained to running machines.

I wasn’t sure if my upcoming film, an experimental documentary called Hinterland was pitchable, but we threw our lot into it and gave it our best try. Glad the selection committee chose it as one of 8 projects. Thank you everyone who worked to shoot the trailer, design the collateral and read the drafts. Read about the other awardees here. Sindie interviews me about Hinterland here

The pitch poster is designed by KKO. As you can see, I have a soft spot for mosquito foggers and NPCC cadets.

The Media Development Authority has recently re-started a Talent Assistance Scheme where media practitioners can apply for partial funding to attend media courses. Where the course is not taught in Singapore, funding can be sought for overseas courses conducted up to a limit of SGD15000/person/year. I applied for and received funding to attend the Observational Filming Short Course (5 days) at the National Film & TV School, UK (NFTS), I felt I needed a refresher for the Cinema Verite or fly-on-the-wall style of shooting that is the backbone of many indie documentaries. I found the quality of teaching and professionalism at NFTS very high. My course itself, conducted about 1-2 times a year and taught by Zillah Bowes is highly recommended.

Here is some information about the NFTS short courses offered. The wonderful thing is the range. There are industry focused courses like courses on focus pulling, there are also DIY shoot-from-the-hip kind of courses like “filmmaking on a microbudget”. The Australian Film, Television and Radio School, modeled on the NFTS also offers a similar range of short courses which are just as rigourous. Sydney is of course nearer to Singapore and less of trial to get to. The Singapore equivalent is the Singapore Media Academy. Some of the courses here are well conducted but course selection is less deep and wide-ranging.

I am reproducing my MDA Trip Report. Its detailed and let’s on what the syllabus covers.

“This course was very useful for those who are interested in the telling stories using the “verite”, “observational” or “fly on the wall” style of documentary filmmaking. It is the kind of documentary where the actions and speech of the protagonists is a main feature of the documentary, a style which relies less on voiceovers to make dramatic points.

The five-day course focused on
-How to construct a scene, in terms of what shots to take, what audio to record, what questions to ask during action.
-How to mic up the speaker
-How the camera should follow dialogue in a scene, where to place the camera
-How to pan correctly
-How to move the camera seamlessly so the edit is seamless
-How to shoot for editing

Every day we had to shoot exercises that built up towards the final project. The exercises included: how to shoot “continuous action” which is something repetitive and unchanging, say a chef kneading dough, how to shoot an unpredictable exchange between two people. The final exercise was shooting a scene with people interacting, set in a locale of our choosing.

What I learnt
Watching our exercises which we also had to edit ourselves (a good pedagogical tool to teach shooting I found! Nothing like having to edit around one’s mistakes), I felt that most of my classmates including myself don’t hold shots long enough for dramatic effect, we usually feel impatient and zoom in or cut too early. Shooting time and watching time feel different, so most people need to make a deliberate and counter-intuitive act to hold a shot longer than we normally would.

Also, when following someone, it is important to let them leave the shot, so that that can be a cut point. This is obvious, but it is easily forgotten. In a conversation, we need to shoot cut away reactions of people, so that there are edit points for dialogue. The trick is to let the audio recording continue even while we are adjusting a shot so that the audio conversation is still usable.

Other stuff covered
1 Panning/Tilting: start with the end position so we don’t have to contort ourselves
2 How to balance the camera’s weight: keep knees bent, strengthen core through yoga (!)
3 How to walk and shoot: keeping footsteps in phase with protagonists
4 Focus on faces, less on actions.
5 Heavier cameras are more stable.
6 The need to familiarise ourselves with the camera so that we know which direction to turn the rings if we want to close the aperture/zoom in or out, these should be second nature and mastered.

One of the strong points about this course is that it historicises this style of shooting. We were shown examples from the pioneers, Maysles like Don’t Look Now, Primary and Salesmen. Kim Longinotto’s Sisters-in-Law and Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go were used as current gold standard examples.

News cameraperson or cameraperson or directors wanting to shoot more verite-styled documentaries will find this course useful because of the emphasis on story-telling through the drama within the scenes. The cameraperson has to pay particular attention to what is said and direct the camera accordingly. Also it focuses on the shots needed to set up a scene.

The quality of the NFTS’ teaching is very high. Class size was small, six. The tutors were very experienced and thought carefully how to structure the course for it to make sense to us. Equipment, facilities as well as the library are also very comprehensive. At GBP700, it is very good value. Though it touches on some basics, there is enough for an experience cameraperson/director to take something away from the course too.

A demonstration on how to climb stairs smoothly while shooting

Using the eyepiece to steady the camera while shooting handheld

Critiquing each other’s work after shooting exercise

Editing our own work for the final exercise

Screening our final projects in widescreen!

Postcard from Atlanta Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand, where In the Mood for Love was filmed. I stayed there and it was horribly haunted. Worth the experience nonetheless

Singapore Heritage Society organised a five day tour to Colonial Perak, Malaysia led by Dr Lai Chee Kien. It was an intense trip to places I would have never otherwise gone myself. I found myself photographing not so much the sights themselves but Singaporeans seeing this Malaysia for the first time. The very colonial Padangs, five footways and Istanas. Every thing was familiar yet unfamiliar. The photo below sees us examining the first rubber tree that was planted in Malaysia by Henry Ridley in Kuala Kangsar. The same Ridley who headed Singapore’s first Botanic Gardens. Later, I watched Amir Muhammad’s The Last Communist again, and saw the same locations and people including Taiping historian Lee Eng Kew and my beloved charcoal factory in Kuala Sepetang featured from the MCP’s point of view! Love it!

Two new films of mine are launched online for the first time. The first is an animation, its my first animation, though I would also call it a dance performance. The other, about a set of graffiti found at the infamous Yangtze Cinema in Singapore. Click on the links below to view.
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REMEMBER
A dance featuring a cast of words inspired by a thesaurus, 6 min
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YANGTZE SCRIBBLER
A set of grafitti is found at Yangtze Cinema, 6 min
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Watch it big by clicking on the expand button, play it loud.
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These films are commissioned by the Singapore Memory Project. an ambitious project which aims to collect, tag and showcase Singapore memories.
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Review
Making memories, S’pore-style
Singapore Memory Project aims to collect, record and preserve five million personal memories of Singapore from Singaporeans.
Tay Yek Keak, mypaper
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Wed, Apr 25, 2012
In the light of the debate over the preservation of the Bukit Brown cemetery, here are three timely short films – made by two top female Singaporean directors – which remind us of the importance of not forgetting about a thing called Memory.
The films are part of the Singapore Memory Project run by the National Library Board, which aims to collect, record and preserve five million personal memories of Singapore from Singaporeans by 2015 for future generations.
In the march of time, things get erased, misplaced, waylaid or simply unceremoniously forgotten. That is why memories are important, as the late American writer Saul Bellow reasoned, to “keep the wolf of insignificance from the door”.
Here’s what to expect.
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Yangtze Scribbler
Director: Tan Pin Pin
www.singaporememory.sg/showcases/20/contents
This fascinating video appeals to your inner snoop, and will give you a taste of The Da Vinci Code in Singapore.
Okay, checking out the graffiti in a dingy stairwell of Chinatown’s Pearl Centre where Yangtze Cinema – that quaintly cool bastion of sleaze house-art house – used to sit isn’t exactly the stuff of books or movies.
But repeatedly scrawled on the walls there is a mysterious combination of numbers and stick figures.
Could they be gang messages or alien symbols? Or, maybe they were simply the work of some pervert recording how many dirty movies he’d seen.
The narrator of this docu-sleuthing is Debbie Ding, somebody who has been archiving signs and symbols in Singapore.
I have to confess that I’m a big fan of director Tan Pin Pin (Singapore GaGa, Invisible City). She is a premier observer of details and the invisible patterns that link them.
In Yangtze Scribbler, she stirs your curiosity enough to make you think. That’s the first step in the path to creating a memory. You’ll never forget when something intrigues you. And this short surely does.
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remember
Director: Tan Pin Pin
www.singaporememory.sg/showcases/21/contents
The first time I saw this clever experimental clip which features words leading into more words on a starkly white background, I thought it was a student work done by a dictionary fan.
But Tan’s six-minute video, dubbed a “visual thesaurus”, imprints essential cautionary directions onto your mind the way you’d never forget a letter from a divorce lawyer.
Starting from the key opposing words of “remember” and “forget”, the trail leads off to a web of ancillary words that adds more and more meaning and purpose – and finally, danger! – to the one before.
Remember, regain, record, retrieve, observe, witness, discovery, cure, heal, unify, improve; and, conversely, forget, block, bury, erase, leave – each word is connected by moving lines which grow and evolve like a living organism.
If you’re some kind of Scrabble freak, you’re in for a hypnotic word fest. Just remember to remember the word “remember”.
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Singapore Country
Director: Wee Li Lin
www.singaporememory.sg/showcases/22/contents
Matthew Tan is Singapore’s very own home-grown cowboy who went to Nashville, Tennessee (home of country music), in 1975 with the intention of creating a FSS (famous Singapore song).
In this short, he tells interviewer Adrian Pang that in a motel there, he and a motel employee, Bristow Hopper, came up with Singapore Cowboy, Tan’s lonesome ode to local sons in distant lands.
Director Wee Li Lin’s (Gone Shopping, Forever) approach is predictable, using yesteryear photos of cheesy hair and clothes to pile on the nostalgia.
The bit before a sit-down interview with Adrian Pang, though, is playfully cheeky as a throng of good ol’ gals line- dance, with Tan singing onstage.
It is an articulate Tan who nails down his strange affinity for all things country.
“I lived in Upper Serangoon which was a very ulu place with attap houses,” he reveals. “You cannot be any more country than that.”

You can download the PDF HERE.
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This 3rd issue features writings by Philip Cheah and Jasmine Nadua Trice on the state of SE Asian film archiving and a piece by Ho Rui Ann too. The publication is edited by Vinita Ramani Mohan. It features an interview with me on page 55. I’d like to thank National Museum’s team for the thoroughness and utter professionalism they approached this email interview.
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EXCERPT
For the last decade Tan Pin Pin has used the documentary form to make visible aspects of daily life in Singapore that are selectively ignored or conveniently forgotten. Her films seek out fascinating characters with stories to tell, objects that trigger memories and traditional practices that have to be continually modified to make way for an efficient and hyper-modernised way of life. A careful observer, Pin Pin’s filmmaking shows sensitivity to a city in a perpetual state of flux, as well as a keen eye for the fatalism and dark wit that typifies Singaporean humour. In this
e-mail interview with the Cinémathèque Quarterly, she discusses her filmic beginnings, the processes behind many of her works, and why it’s important to keep asking the right questions.
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What was the initial trigger that made you want to be a filmmaker?
While I was an undergraduate studying to be a lawyer, I was introduced to photography as I was browsing through the art section of the University library. I was influenced by photographers Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand and Diane Arbus. They championed a personal way of seeing and an independent way of working, both themeswhich I still subscribe to. I started out as a photographer and moved to the moving image a few years later when technology became more affordable. I wanted my images to talk and move. At that time, filmmaking was a very exotic and expensive sounding activity, but I sensed that things were about to change.
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What was your very first film and did it contain within it, a hint of the themes that would come to preoccupy you?
My first film was Moving House, the 1997 version (which was an earlier version of the one most people have seen that won the Student Academy Award). This was shot in 1995 with Jasmine Ng’s help. I borrowed a 16mm Bolex and a Betacam video camera from Ngee Ann Polytechnic. This film was like a home movie because it featured my family. I filmed my family overseeing the exhumation of my great-grandfather and moving his remains to Mandai Columbarium. I wanted to make a memoriam for the first “Tan” who came to Singapore in the late 1890s from Fujian, China, and spawned four generations. It was thus a story of Singapore. I am interested in beginnings.
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Was your interest in filmmaking furthered through film school and if not, how has the fact of being self-taught aided your creative process?
These were the pre-Internet days. I read voraciously at the library and was a fervent attendee at all Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) and Singapore Film Society (SFS) events but there is only so much you can do as an autodidact with no equipment. I decided to work at Mediacorp in the drama department to learn the ropes of production. I was an assistant director in the series Triple Nine and VR Man. To this day, continuity is second nature to me because of the training from that period. When I won a scholarship to attend Northwestern University’s MFA film programme 2 years later, I found I had to unlearn everything to re-learn the language of art! I am still learning.
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Do you think it is more difficult being a film-maker in Singapore, as compared to elsewhere in Asia, or beyond?
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Read more? Download PDF HERE
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I have always wanted to find out how my fellow filmmakers addressed this fragile state of archving of their films and rushes. Its an outstanding issue, for me especially since I (and 8 other Singapore directors) withdrew our films from the Asian Film Archive in 2010. So I thought to put this workshop together. It was well attended by about 20 filmmakers.
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“filmcommunitysg workshop
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HD Failure, Tape Mould and Other Catastrophies
Seminar on workflow management and archiving for indie filmmakers

How do we to protect our projects and rushes from HD failure, tape mould and other catastrophies – and organise them for easy retrieval and future screenings. Some filmcommunitysg members will share tips on how they manage their material and they will provide usable tips you can use for your own projects.

Date: Mon, 2nd April, 7pm sharp
Venue: Sinema Studio, Old School 11b Mt Sophia (thanks Sinema)
Free. Open to the public: but pls register email filmcommunitysg@gmail.com by 30 March so that we can get a sense of numbers (limited spaces)
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SPEAKERS

David Liu
“How I had to learned the hard way. (ie. lost data several times) how I’ve gone from stupidly using just one hard drive for all my data and backing that up, to assigning a hard drive for every project and setting up working hard drives for every year. I will talk briefly and how I shelve each hard drive and ensure that they are read every year when a certain movie needs to be screened or watched. Will also cover cloud processes, like dropbox to archive working project files.”
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Nicholas Chee
“My workflow defines each process and role from pre-pro all the way to delivery for the budget constrained indie filmmaker without sacrificing quality and security”
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Chai Yee Wei
“I will explain the philosophy behind the approach I use to archive my files on harddrives and how to set up the HD RAID for media protection. All these while considering the costs that will be incurred”
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Dustin Lau (who will be out of town)
Will read highlight his slides “Where old tapes and hard disks go to die”: What indies can learn from the ESPN experience
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Tan Pin Pin
Findings on mouldy tapes and dry cabinets
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Martyn See
Youtube as archive
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This is part of a series of presentations from members to others in the community. Previous presentations have included DSLR rigs, The Film Act, Camera demos. Everyone, even those not in filmcommunitysg are welcome to these sessions. We start at 7pm sharp

Two new works will be launched soon

1 A live video recording of a performance inspired by a thesaurus
2 A documentary about the Yangtze Scribbler, inspired by Debbie Ding’s flickr set of photos
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Both were commissioned by the National Library Board for the Singapore Memory Project and both are scored by Bani Haykal. Looking forward to showing them to you