belle fin

slam showed my a few nice short clips a few days earlier. they are all by this guy called Philip Wang. he is a student at univ. of calif. san diego and he and his friends started this so called Wong Fu Production, where they created short movie clips, and music videos. the best one i saw is Jason Mraz's I'm Yours, which is a wedding gift dedicated to their friends, Invisible Children (Black Eyed Peas' Gone Going), which is dedicated to the Invisible Children organization (read the website if you had time, it's quite an eye-opener), and Yellow Fever, which is a story on why chinese guys are losing out to white guys when it's about getting gals for themselves (damn funny!). all of the links are available at Wong Fu Production's website here. well, if you are lazy, here are the YouTube links for all three clips:

I'm Yours
Invisible Children
Yellow Fever

the first one really shows his good editing skills. he made this couple to do exactly the same thing and put them side by side. it's so cute! if you're lucky enough (and invite me to your wedding of course), maybe, just maybe, i might decide to create a short film like this one for you. yes you! come everyone! don't forget! invite me to your wedding okay?

anyway, because of this one clip, slam is now addicted to Jason Mraz. both geek in the pink and i'm yours song. he's crazy. that really makes him like my godsis. she's also damn crazy about jason mraz. her blog is brimming with jason mraz (crazy girl!).

well, my main focus is on the second clip. the second clip really shows a rare trait in this guy (Philip)'s personality. how many people in the world would actually manifest their care towards children in third world countries in a tangible way? not many. i, for once, would pity them and everything. but will i actually do anything real for them? honestly, i guess not. that's why i sometime (yes, i'm not hypocritical, just sometime, and not that many times also ;)) envy these people who really could and would willingly spend money to actually go into missions overseas, in thailand, mongolia, africa and many places else. look here. how much you think these people have sacrificed? for students, it would mean sacrificing their holidays. for employees, that would mean sacrificing their pays or their leaves. they sacrifice their time! they also sacrifice their health. come on! in singapore, there aren't many contractable fatal diseases. that's not true overseas. malaria, typhoid fever, ebola, etc. even those diseases that prove to be mild in singapore might not be so mild overseas due to the fact that there aren't many medical personnels around and there is only limited availability of drugs (ever heard of wrong diagnosis? it's more rampant overseas...). you see, some of these people may not manage to come back. i know at least a few stories (some from my church) of how people and missionaries went overseas and died because of sickness. they are really selfless people.

hey, i'm not counting all of you who actually went for overseas CIP just because you need the hours and you have the money and you want to see some panoramic scenes overseas. or even worse, just because you want other people to think highly of you. if you are that kind of people, screw you!

so if you had the time, do at least watch Invisible Children. a short music video about this guy who's trying to pass around booklets (or cards) that explain about the plights of the children in uganda. the music video (with Black Eyed Peas/Jack Johnson's Gone Going playing) shows how the booklet was being passed around and at the end returned back to him. it conveys a message: to spread around the plights of these invisible children. go watch it.

oh, and not to mention, the ending baffled me. it's because of this very, very nice song he used for the closing credit. the song is freakin' nice! but, but i couldn't figure what song it was. seriously, i tried very hard to figure what song was it yesterday but couldn't. at first, i thought it was Jim Brickman's Edgewater (since that's one of the three songs written on the ending credit). i tried damn hard to acquire the mp3, only to fail big time. there's no way to find the mp3 anywhere. i was quite sad then. i mean there were only 3 songs on the ending credits and i have the other two, Gone Going and My Humps, both couldn't possibly contain such a nice, soft instrumental music (not really instrumental, but it's piano and a processed sound of a guy muttering some words repeatedly--echo technique, from my sonic arts class). anyway, i almost had a headache trying to get that song; the edgewater song i mean.

then, then... after hours of looking and stressing myself over it (i was more stressed about the song than about my exam), i gave up. only then i suddenly remembered that one of the black eyed peas song, if i weren't mistaken, contain a very contrasting ending. a soft and nice ending in contrast to their loud and bashy tunes (especially that black eyed peas' girl huh! she sings much worse than the guys lar). there and then i felt damn dumb. i mean the song is just there in front of me. it can't be gone going since i know that pretty song inside out. so it must be My Humps! goddamnit! it was My Humps! to be exact the last one minutes eighteen seconds of the song when the tone, gesture and texture of the song changed greatly: a total contrast from the first few minutes of that freakin' girl singing "my humps... my humps, my humps, my humps!" (ccb!).

that was 230am. for the next 45 minutes, i tried to extract that part alone with Sony Sound Forge. it was quite an easy job, just cut and almost done. the problematic part is the first 2 seconds of that part that i like. it overlaps with that girl singing! (another ccb goes here.) i was pretty pissed. i tried using Channel Converter to cancel out the middle. it worked but it doesn't work as well as i thought it would. her vocal is still prominently audible. i tried using EQ to minimize her vocal further. but that's also next to impossible. even when i managed to cut most of her vocal, there's some leftovers. and by then, the volume of that part would have been soften down by a lot since i removed a lot of the treble part. so i would need to normalize that part up. the problem is, normalizing that part also brought that softened voice of her into the scene again! not to mention that the two seconds didn't fit the rest of the piano as i cut off the treble, making the piano sound on that part all bassy and lost most of its texture. sigh. at the end i gave up, i cut about 1500 milliseconds out of the 2 seconds. then i use fade in to fade in that 0.5 remaining second and the first second of the okay segment. the result is not bad, although i kinda lost the first three strokes of piano (they were quite nice, otherwise i won't be bothered trying to save them). since then the song has been playing over and over again in my iTunes. it's soon going to make it on top of my iTunes playlist.

aih! it's so nice i'm melting! (err! don't act like a girl! -slap myself-)
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btw, i created a last.fm account. soon you'll be seeing my top weekly songs here in my blog. heh heh!

all right, time to start studying. see ya all! tomorrow's my second last paper! yay!
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i wanted to write about something. but the moment i open this post to edit it, it's gone to the backburner. i just couldn't recall. it's there on the tip of my brain, but i couldn't bring it out! what did i want to write? what? what?

i just changed my bedsheets. no, that's not it. definitely not.

that the song that was just being played was so nice? no, that's not it either. although Matt Nathanson's Laid (from American Wedding) is quite a funny song. i mean "My therapist said not to see you no more . . . She said you're like a disease without any cure . . . She said I'm so obsessed that I've become a bore, oh no". wth! so funny! and that's probably the most innocent part of the song. but no. i didn't want to talk about this. what was it!!!

the fact that i have exam tomorrow? already mentioned.

ahh! i just can't recall now! been spending the last fifteen minutes trying to recall, but i couldn't. sigh. well, nvm. at least i tried. all right, i'm going to cook some instant noodles for lunch. see whether i can recall what i want to write later.

before i forget about it again! let me write this word here first: rgs girl dying. okay. i'll write more while eating.

yesterday evening, while planning to exercise (which failed due to some unforeseen reason), i met with ey and grace. now grace was an ex-rgs and ex-rj girl. as our exercise plan failed, we ended up reading some newspaper. then she chanced upon this article about an ex-rgs and ex-rj girl who is dying of cancer. although i acted nonchalantly yesterday, i just wanted to confess that i pitied her a lot. the reason why i acted so nonchalantly was because i am afraid of death. and reading such articles (i believed it was quite poignant) would really affect me. sometime i could read about something and feel good/bad about it for the next few days. i kept those feelings to myself but they do affect me. like the invisible children video i posted above.

anyway, while i myself did not read the article, grace explained certain things contained within the article to me. from what she told me, i really admired this young girl. she only has a few weeks left, yet her last blog entry said something on the line of not giving up until the end. how many of us are that strong? some of us would probably just resign ourselves to death. some would even go so far to resign themselves to euthanasia. while it may be true that the pain and the medication might be unbearable, i believe that if you were still alive then, there must be something left for you to discover. (mercy-)killing yourself is not an option. imagine while you are suffering this pain, many others were suffering the same if not worse pain and died. yet many of those "many others" really clung on to life til their very ends. while you can live, live! because many others can't. there must be something left for you to discover. you might discover religion because some visiting pastors (or whatever) happens to visit your hospital (you might not have met him if you committed yourself to euthanasia just minutes or hours or days earlier). you might witness some heartwarming experience which you might just missed if you had killed yourself earlier. some long lost family member might suddenly come and visit you. your unfilial son might somehow be back and told you he loved you.

there are many small, little discoveries that you might discover in those additional few days you gain. there might even be miracles. anyway, when you are considering euthanasia, remember this girl. she is in a constant state of pain. her medication sure feels awful too! she's missing out the time of her life (university life). she discovered the true nature of some of her friends and probably losing some friends too (those who don't really care about her). she might be pained emotionally when one of her jc best friends did not show up visiting her at all, or even calling her. she missed softball (she was rj softball captain). she's missing out a greater part of her life, never able to taste adulthood. and yet she still cling on so dearly to her life. never take life for granted. for one day it shalt be taken away from thee. and try not to greet death so early. hang on. however hard life has it for you.
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i'm acting weird huh? this kind of post is a one of a kind, once in a blue moon kind of post. i rarely felt the emotion necessary to pour out such an entry. well, hope you enjoyed reading this entry. hope it might change some lives too.

your life has a beautiful ending. it's a matter whether you spot it or miss it.