Have you watched X-men 3? No? Well lucky you. Dont watch it. The story left me empty. Instead of caring for any of the good guys, i cared for Magneto.



One day i came in for Cam and Lighting class and was handed my first assignment for the semester.

The ass looked good; frame composition and the use of lighting to convery certain moods. Basically we had to plan shots that fit certain themes such as love, hate, romance, etc etc etc.

Well i knew there would be plenty of people who would be making shots of their subject in the middle of nowhere/corner of a room/isloted to convey "loneliness" so i tried to stay away from the cliches as far as possible.

You know.. some of my classmates, i kid you not, plan of making a heart shape out of two light sources that shine onto their subject, who's hugging another one of it';s kind, no less. I mean... WWHHHAATT??? three more people in class has the same idea as you and you still think you can pull something out of this?!?!?

"oh i will be using red gel..."

spare the teacher....



I let myself lose and wandered around the deeper ends of my imaginary world. No matter how twisted an idea is, i just let it in and tried to sraighten them out with an unplugged iron.

so i drew stuff....


Not exactly the best art piece in the world... but it'll do since i have 15 more to go.

Our focus of the day.

Typical of me, i'd always add in some hidden agenda behind my school assignments.

Like the NVAU shoot that went bust, i used that as a reason to rent all those huge film equipments... i had fun using them. noone else did so what does that say?

This time round i wanted to explore the uses of..... DRY ICE.

The Singapore Dry Ice.



Dry ice everybody! it even says on a website that dry ice has many uses..... such as.. for camping, drinking, parties, weddings, film special effects.....


the only use i've ever seen coming out from dry ice is burning irritating children's hands when they stick their's in the bubbling pot of carbon dioxide at weddings.

Die, children!



For the first part, i did some naughty things.

It was about 2 in the morning. Maybe three. My mum was sleeping. My sis was dead. and i had a line of plastic water bottles in my kitchen.
I took some dry ice, marvelling at the cool vapours sinking onto my legs. A hammer did easy in crushing them into smaller pieces that could fit through the mouth of the bottle.
Pretty soon the white vapour started spilling out of the bottle. And here's where i got the idea; biology and chemistry and physics has thought me that gases are larger in volume... which means if confined into a small space, pressure gets built up easily. And when pressure gets built up, the container gets unhappy. And just like the analogy of a class being thought by crack teachers, students will eventually BURST by the unneeded stress put on them. Like for example, O levels were EASY. But our tecahers kept making us think it was a matter of life, death, and government reception.
So in went the warm water. And out went the bottle immedietely. I watched as the bottle went thud thud thud on the pavement below.... and..... and......
.... nothing.

Damn.. bloody science theories.


PIAOAKKAAKKKAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


there was this LOUD BANG. like.. i dunno... POW! liek a freaking MG!

I looked down and the bottle was in pieces. A few of the resdent's lights went on, a couple of car alarms went off, everything was a MESS!
I bent down and crawled to my room, hiding.

A few people started to come around the area below.. a couple of policemen were around.. awesome awesome sight. Like the explosion was...... BOW! PANG! beep beep beep beep beep beep....... sweet.

JIAHUI... i think i found out what we need for explosions.... bury these sick puppies under the ground and boom!

... on second thought nvm... those anals in school probably would be paranoid with stuff that go louder than their handphone ringtone.

Moving on to things that are less hurtful.... i looked again at the shot that i wanted to do.

The second drawing, with confusion as the theme, had my little doll peeking through frm all the ruckess that's my war memorabilia.
I used the famous overcoat as my backdrop, the 25 dollar helmet i bought from Kuching that looks like a WW2 German dickhead helmet and the Vietnam helmet.
And of course the British arty shell.

At first it looked like this.



I had one key light (just a normal table lamp) shing fomr a direction. I think the position was too straight on and made the picture look like somehting taken with flash. Naturally, ugly. (dont use flash, people. Unless you're a bimbo or in a club.) But i didnt see this coming since i was lying on the floor and could see the lcd screen clearly.

in any case, here came the dry ice.


and things started to get foggy....


...and then it became too foggy... (P.S. Pls rate which picture stuck to the theme more closely. Thanks)

...and it decipated... (P.S. I'm serious.)

I ordered five kilos. When i saw my order at Queenstown, i quickly SMS-ed Don and went,"So i realised i ordered four hundred percent more dry ice than i needed..... wanna see what a special effects set looks like?"

I got it open late at night where the atmposphere was cooler... but didnt really make a difference anyways since Singapore's so hot from the concrete and.... concrete.

Dry ice is HARD.. no doubt about that. I used the knife and started bending it here and there and my fear of the knife suddenly snapping and stabbing me in the eye began to surface.

In the end i got the first 1 kg slab off with an iron rod.

and back to my room... add in some warm water.. and tada.... holy smokes that got into every nook and cranny of my electrical switches.



These few shots are my final ones. I took, in total, twnety over shots for this set up. It was a bit difficult to direct the vapourto get what i wanted.

i loaded it up on the computer and went....

. . . . . . . . . . .AUDI
. . . . . . . . .(satisfied)
. . . .Wow.... that's some serious shit.

Cleaned up my room for a bit.... then went to sleep. Who cares about the commotion below? Police? So what? Terrorist attack? I blame the government.

The next morning....


INT. AUDI'S ROOM - DAY

Audi wakes up in his sun-drenched room and stretches. He lazes around for a while before staggering to his computer which he left, switched on, overnight. The screen flickers, clicks and fades to life. Audi stares at his photos.

. .AUDI
. . Wow...
. .(beat)
. . this really is shit.

Looks like it's gona be another long night for me today. I stil have a few more sets to carry out.

Bloody hell.... complacency and me goes back a long way. I cant believe i ever thought of such corny ideas.