I had been in-front of camera for a magazine shot (but that was donkey years ago), made a documentary and also a talk show with Mediacorp, so when I was asked to do video-shoot, talking about my company's products, I thought it was going to be easy-breezy. Boy! I was so wrong!
I arrived a little passed 9 am at Henderson Road where Calibre Pics is located after beating the terrible morning traffic. Some guys were fixing up the set, so I wasn't so late after all (I was told it would start at 9 am). Soon after, I was introduced to the owner of the production studio, Jimmy Fok, and the very talented Joel Lim. Joel Lim was the winner for Elle's Photographer of the year 2012 and he had done shoots for big names like Dick Lee, Stephanie Sun and Fann Wong. WOW! Both of them were in-charge of shooting my videos, I was so honoured, but stress also crept in at the same time.
These are some of Joel's works
We sat down and briefly discussed how the videos will be shot and then it was more waiting coz the set wasn't ready. I never knew there were so many nitty-gritty details going into making a video. So I sat around and cam-whore. Hahaha...
Finally after close to two hours, we were ready to shoot. There were a total of ten videos to be shot; I hadn't think it will be that hard until I was placed in-front of the lights and the cameras. Every single word that came out of my mouth had to be pronounced very clearly and I had to be very focused and keep my eyes on nowhere else, except for the main camera (there were two cameras).
The first video was HORRENDOUS! My eyes were darting all over the place (even though I thought I was looking straight into the camera). And being such a 'proud' Singaporean and loving Singlish too much, I found myself omitting the ending sound of most of the words in my script or replacing them with 's'. Example a sentence would go something like this ".. Four(For) skins(skin) to lok(look) smoof(smooth) and radiancs(radiant), one of the key produc(product) would be Sir-lumination(Cellumination) Ass-sens(Essence).." My tongue went on strike that day and refused to enunciate the words phonically. WTF!
There were times that I really felt like giving myself a slap to wake up because I kept making the same mistake over and over. I remembered there was one scene which I had to have twelve takes just to get two bloody sentences correct. Fortunately Jimmy and Joel were really patient and gave me tons of encouragements and assurances, always reminding me that I was doing fine, just needed a little of this and that and blah. Oh, I was so grateful. If I were in their shoes, I probably vomited a bucket of blood already!
At around quarter past three, we had been shooting for more than four hours, but we were still less than half-way done. Even then, we had to stop to take a break because there were thunders and it was affecting the recording. They offered me a HUGE amount of snacks (chocolates, sweets, wafers, cookies etc), but I guessed I was too tensed to eat anything, I kept wondering if we will ever finish shooting all the videos before midnight.
Luckily, things began to pick up and I was able to minimize the amount of 'NG' at the later part of the shoot.
It was almost 7pm, when we completed filming of all ten videos! I almost jumped for joy. Then Joel went through some of the videos and he turned to me with an apologetic face. I knew it instantly that I was not going home just yet. We have to re-shoot the first video (which I mentioned earlier that it totally sucks!). *FAINT
At 7.30pm, we were finally able to call it a wrap! As I was dragging my exhausted mind and body, leaving the studio, I thought to myself, how lucky that I am not a model nor a celebrity. It's not that glam, not that fun and definitely not anything close to ego-boosting.
Still I can't wait to see how the videos will turn out to be ;)
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