ONE YEAR LATER - Parte UNO

 

A trending subject on facebook for my friends and I is that it has been a full year since we officially graduated from school. (Even though we hadn't yet done our final exams o_O)

So, I thought this would be a great time to review the year from my perspective.

To start the list, exams.

I got my mock exam results in the 2nd week of April, the results were not fantastic, in fact, and I have forgotten them completely. It's not that I didn't care; it’s just that I needed to accept the past and move forward. (A very prominent topic for my last year in school). As soon as the exam results came out, I buried myself in studies. I did, really. I had my quirks, like being unable to wake up at 6:30 and study, leading to me falling asleep at the table and subsequently getting a sound thrashing (well deserved, all thing considered). Finally, I got down to work, I wrote essays for economics, studied my definitions, did differentiation and integration like there was no tomorrow and made sure that if I was to edit national Geographic’s the next day I would be able to do a kick ass job.

The month of exams arrived and somewhere along the road of confrontation, in the heat of battle with exams, I blinked.

I blinked and with that one blink, I lost my focus, I don't know if it was overconfidence about some good papers or the fact that I was not pacing myself, leading to my hand cramping up like crazy in the second half of the day. (For those of you who don't know, I tore my right wrists cartilage, in 2007 :/ It still hasn't healed, and it hurts like anything when it is over-exerted).

So, exams finished, general mood about it on my side was happiness, I felt that I had done really well and that I would never have to worry about these subjects.

Immediately, I realised that the vanishing of the problem of exams meant that a new problem would fill the large expanse. This problem was what we do after the exams, as a class.

I suggested that since there were some people who would be finishing before the majority of the class, we should meet for lunch or dinner, the idea was to accommodate the fact that people did have their circle of friends that they wanted to be with post-exams.

The plan was that we would all go our separate way after the exams and then meets for dinner in the evening.

Idle hands are the Devil's playthings

Before the last exam came, the movie Robin Hood spun into theatres; it looked so cool so I immediately told my friends that we should go for that. So naturally, when they were asked "what are you doing after the exams?" the response was "we’re going to see Robin Hood." I asked around, what the plan was and didn’t get much response, and I felt that I had made it clear that I was going for a movie to most people.

So we’re leaving for the movie and all of the sudden, a plan is made, in typical spontaneous fashion, to go to our local dhaba for lunch, as the exam had finished at like 1:30 or so. It’s a guy thing usually, so naturally my friends and I were expected to come. But we had plans, plans that would start in 45 minutes so not enough time to do both. We made a decision and left.

10 minutes into the journey, I get a call from a friend who informs me that the other guys are a little pissed at the fact that they weren’t invited to the movie...

I asked my friend to apologise to them and tell them that they could still make it for the movie, and also that I had no idea that they didn’t know.

Then I began to get calls from the pissed off classmates, which eventually killed my phone by 8:30 in the evening.

The end of exams, wasn’t exactly putting me on my best foot for the year ahead.

You are now leaving the first half.

The above reference is to my father’s 50^th birthday weekend.

Yes, I said weekend.

To celebrate his 50^th, we planned a huge party in Goa, none the less, and we were going to drive there. By now I was really into making montages and I decided that I would make a video for him, this gave me some creative space by letting me conceptualise the video, get the source material and sneak around my father’s back for something good :P

The video had a lot of interesting things for me, as it was to one song, and the struggle to find a way to start it made me think back to an original concept for my grad video which involved a reboot, switching around a few thing, I made it that after the intro, it would dive into a rewind segment where it would reverse through his life and then hit the play button.

The video was in my opinion, awesome! But on hindsight, yeah the pictures were too fast...

So we were to leave for Goa by road on the 13^th, the day that my results were to be coming out, no pressure right? I mean I had done well, I had no need to worry myself. Before we got to the hotel, we stopped on the coast to just check out the waves, etc. Leaving me with 10 minutes to call school.

I did, and I got my results, C, C, C, D. Not the marks I expected at all.

I spent the rest of the day in depression, I mean, how the hell was I supposed to tell my parents? They’ve taken a holiday after so long for something as special as this, no way in hell I was going to ruin it with this nonsense. I decided after much persuasion from others to share that it would be simply more effective to enjoy the weekend and just ruin everyone’s life when we got back, no biggie.

You are about to embark on a journey...

So, I told my dad and mom, they weren’t all that pleased, blah, blah, blah, no one wants to hear about the next 3 months except that I went to Bombay, started studying for my A-levels again in my aunt and uncle’s house. Who are by far the nicest people ever for letting me just work how I wanted to, and coping with all the last minute shit of mine.

I returned more confident than ever to address those pests of  subject’s economics and geography.

END OF PART ONE

I don’t know how interested you were, but I’ve written 1,141 words in one hour and it’s now 4 o’clock and I need to wake up tomorrow so... Until tomorrow, I mean today, ugh, you get the idea...

Mum, really don’t call me and ask me why I’m sleeping at this time. It’s a Sunday.

I tend to live in the past...

...because most of my life is there

So, today, I was cleaning up my hard drive, which as some people might know doesn't require much attention, instead, you spend more time looking through old files and realising why they were in a folder with a big fat star.

So today, I watched my first works in the field of mass media and film editing. My graduation video.

Almost one year has passed since I worked on these videos, setting aside sleep, food and life itself to balance the work on these videos and my studies.

RECAP!

I was one of my classes’ student council members, and when I made my speech on why I should be elected, I focused on new beginnings and change. I started off with some line referring to my perpetual nature of sleeping on the bus and how I had had my eyes closed to everything and how today, the day of the election, I was now awake, I didn’t sleep on the bus. I linked this into my speech and ensured the class that I was taking this responsibility and that I was not going to make false promises like, get us days off and shit, but that I would do anything for them, as long as they wanted it, and I swore to them that I would give them the BEST graduation I could.

As the year progressed, I realized that it was a harder job than I had imagined, but the rewards were all the motivation I needed, Not that the rewards were like immunity from getting into trouble or something like that, but the (and I know this sounds corny…) sight of seeing my classmates happy was the greatest driving force.

So when it came to exam schedules and stuff I was the one who ran to check with teachers while my counter-part made sure that the class didn’t riot and burn down the school (they could have…)

We all had to choose internships for one week, by some roll of the dice, when I rolled for photography and journalism, I got film editing. Inspired by the glory that is FCP, I made the declaration that I knew and my class already knew; that I was going to make the grad video.

As soon as November hit, I began researching, through my library, songs that would work, I asked the masses with some amusing responses like amplifier and other songs which had me laughing when I heard them (if you suggested them seriously, them I’m so sorry about the laughing but really?)

Then there was photos, my class were the ushers and general assistants for our seniors graduation, and the one thing I noticed was that the grad videos were full of images of the classes from the last few weeks of school, that’s not fun, cause the whole point is to capture the essence of the time that you had with them, you can’t get that in one or two weeks.

In order to get my classes’ tomfoolery and general insanity on video and film, I snuck my camera out to school and began taking photos and videos. I wasn’t surprised when people began to turn on me, telling me to stop taking photos and to generally piss off, but I knew that every shot would be worth something. By March, I had amassed a total of 10 GB of photos of my classmates, and their antics. Weird you say? Well, let’s just say that my class was up to something hilarious every single day. I mean it, EVERY SINGLE DAY!

The end result was the video below…….

All I can say is that the joy that I got was unbelievable, when I was making the video, I was on such a high, and it was unrealistic. My mind was finally being used for something that I wanted it to be used on. Hell, math only requires 60% concentration, this required 100%, I was constantly thinking about the video.

Alas, here is where this piece will get controversial, not hugely, but it will be. See, in the weeks before graduation, I got an email from HKUST saying that they wanted me to come in for an interview, while I was excited, it also meant that I would be unable to present it to my liberal-exept-for-certain-things-that-will-be-blown-out-of-proportion school administration. There were some images in the video that I knew they would ask me to cut out. While most of them were just for the hell of it, there were others that I knew I would have to fight for.

I was to leave at like 5:30 and I was to sleep, and yet, 1:30 I was up finishing as much as I could and forwarding it to my back-up team who would present it and make subsequent changes.

The interview went great and I was happy cause I felt that I was in the 3 good things phase (you know, bad things happen in 3’s and good things happen in 3’s)

1-Exams went well*

2- Interview went well* 

3- Graduation video was going have some small things changed, meh no big deal.

Imagine my horror when I landed that the school had removed so many key sections of the video that I was so angry at the back-up team, they were the ones whom I had entrusted this to and for me, anything less than the best that I could give with the resources I had was a failure on my side.

I arrived late for graduation; people actually thought I wasn’t going to make it.

------------------------------End of recap------------------------------

Wow, that was a long recap?

Anyway, so I’ve been interning for the last 7 weeks at a film studio called Squirkle (the name is Square+Circle, I don’t get it either) and really been able to see how to use Final cut pro and how to make an edit and to time picture changes and music changes. So now, when I looked back at this I was like, wow, this is a piece of shit. Not from content, but execution. Last year, I had movie maker, this year I have FCP, the software that they edit feature-length movies on.

I really enjoyed the making of the video and............

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I’ve lost my train of thought.....

Basically, it took me a video that I made one whole year to realise that the best moment of my entire life, forget the Cricket world cup finals, or when I got an SLR, nothing comes close to the moment when the video was playing, with everyone; friends, and their families watching and laughing exactly, like on the millisecond that I planned them too, having them laugh at the right parts and having people congratulate me for the video and tell me how I kept my promise, wow, the feeling, it is un-friken-believable.

So, I guess, the title will always be true, with just a bit of a fixer

I tend  will always live in the past because most  all my life is there.

Happy Graduation 12 AICE batch of 2010, hope you’ve had an awesome year.

*I didn’t do well in the mock exams and I didn’t get into that college, I guess, it’s true that life, no matter how tangled it gets, tends to work itself out.