Month: January 2018

Christina Lau who is paralysed from the neck down is a mouth artist. Which means she paints with her mouth. When she came to visit our school she talked about her background and how it encouraged her to get into art. I really wanted to hear things like how was it like when depression hit her and what inspires her landscape art. I know it may sound a bit harsh but I am just being honest. Something I found very interesting was how she was able to view things positively and with that how she recovered from her accident mentally. Nothing really stopped her, she just kept pushing.

I have never been really much of a reader or writer. I always tried to walk the other direction when it came to story writing, reading books and etc. The main reason I never really wrote much was because I didn’t know how to start what to write about. During this session, Mukul Deva showed us the fundimentals when it came to story writing and how to start for each genre.

The fundimentals of story writing:

1. Know what your plot is.
2. Where will your story be set.
3. Characters
   1. There should be a point of view character.
      1. Around 3-4 POV characters
4. What happens in your story? (Incidents)
   1. Tension, Desire, Danger and etc
5. Describe your character through a moment

And afterwards break everything into chapters.

*What story are you telling.

*How are you going to tell the story.

During the session I didn’t really have any questions besides why he doesn’t visit his companies. I know that he answered it saying because he is lazy and he trusts him employees. This session made me rethink if I should write again. Because I of his skills that he has shared with us, I could try it out again.

When I think about the talk with Danny Raven Tan, I straight away think about how honest he was with his talk. The fact that he just doesn’t care anymore makes his presentation very real and entertaining, really hooking us into his presentation. Danny is an artist who expresses his thoughts through his art. He calls himself a conceptual artist. So in 2010 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had to go through surgery and chemo therapy. His mom was also diagnosed with dementia which really hit him hard. His only way out was through art and getting it out. My big takeaway is something he said “God sends his toughest soldiers to fight the toughest wars.” which really hit me hard. And the only way to cope with it is to get himself out there by being a “Social Whore” which I found funny. He exhibits his art in his HDB flat where anyone can come by and appreciate.

Marc Nair who is a Singaporean poet recently just visited our school to talk about his work. Something which I really liked about his work is he makes poems and takes pictures of real life issues and raises awarness about them. Towards the end of his presentation, he sung to us one of his songs about cliches which to be honest was pretty good and pretty funny. Well beforethis presentation, I wasn’t really into poetry as I it just didn’t really attract my attention. Now, Marc Nair who is a spoken word poet shown me that it actually conveys a message aswell as relates to lyrics in a song. Being someone who is really into music and always has an earbud in my ear listening to music as I really relate into the lyrics the song. I love the fact that poetry can help me release some stress and get things off my mind and onto a piece of paper. If I was being honest, I was expecting a cheesy talk about deeper meanings about poems and the story about pictures but it turned out to be what I expected except something I can relate to. Something that Marc said is that when you are just starting out, you always tend to write about yourself and there is justso much to write yourself about.

One challenge on this video was doing the voiceover and how to align it with some specific parts of the video. Sometimes I got really lucky and it would just fit in. Because we already filmed everything, I couldn’t film it the way I would have done it which is why I just went with it. Making this video really helped me in understanding transpiration as at first I didn’t really get it. I would prefer making videos such as this compared to completing worksheets and teacher discussions as it is mostly independant and you get a visual of how it actually works in your own understanding. Unlike worksheets where they are very restrictive of what you do.

Just recently a famous sports interviewer named Steve Dawson came to our school to teach us about the top 5 rules for conducting an interview.

1. Ask open ended questions.
2. Set Answers free
   1. Don’t set too many parameters
3. Don’t interrupt the interviewee and let them talk.
4. Ask one question at a time. Don’t ask 2 questions in one question.
5. Listen to the answer.

Bonus: When you are interviewing someone famous, don’t be a fanboy.

My first thought about this was how am I going to use this information and how is this relevant to our current unit about writing articles. But thinking about it, If our first talk about how to interview someone would be useful as we would be interviewing other people and using those techniques to our advantage to get the information we need. At the same time, Mr. Dawson also talked about his own experiences from becoming an accountant to a journalist.

But lastly my big takeaway which I think was the best rule about interviewing is being professional and being patient. Being professional gives you the feel of respect and actually doing your job. Giving the interviewee the respect they deserve and something different compared to who they interact with everyday.