Maid Punya Cerita

Okay, here goes the first catch-up-on-lost-time post:

This semester, one of the paper I'm taking requires us to do a video about interpreting cultural elements. It's a group work thing, so I teamed up with two of the wackiest people I know in my class.

At the beginning of the semester, our lecturer showed us the videos our seniors made the previous year. Some of them were awesome, and some were rather bland aka B-O-R-I-N-G (no offense guys. At least I'm honest right?) And the awesome ones had one thing in common: it had comedy in it.

So we got to thinking of situations where we could make things funny but still put a bit of interpreting elements in our video. And we came up with Maid Punya Cerita. It's basically the story of a Chinese girl who couldn't tidy up after herself to save her own life, getting an Indonesian maid to work for her.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: where's the comedy in that?

After all, plenty of people hire Indonesian maids and nothing funny every happens. In anything, it's always abuse, abuse, abuse that happens, whether it's done to the maid or by the maid.

Here's where our love for all things funny came in handy.

We decided to twist the story into a series of misadventures involving the Chinese girl and the Indonesian maid. We made the characters monolingual so there'd be miscommunication between them.

It took us 3 hours (roughly) to finish shooting the video, but man, who ever thinks editing and adding subtitles was easy should be shot in the head. It took us a whole blasted 10 hours to finish adding the subtitles, transitions, background music and what not. Then there was the scare when the whole subtitle ran and we had to re-adjust them. God only knows how pissed off I was at the time.

But you know, it was well worth it. The whole class loved it, the lecturer loved it, we loved it! It was really amazing how we managed to pull the whole thing off since we didn't really do a thorough preparation. We barely wrote a storyline; just discussed it in passing and jotted a few things down. It was a last minute effort, we only prepared our props the day of the shooting, and to top it all off there were no scripts either! The whole thing was done spontaneously and thank God we had a speck of natural acting skills and quick wit or it would've flopped. Ultimately, I think what really helped to make the video work was exactly that: our sense of humour. Aren't I glad we have it in great supply!

Of course, most of the credit goes to Pau Lee, for her awesome ideas and Kok, who made A LOT of sacrifices for the video. I love you both!!!

To tell the storyline here would be taking the comedy and fun out of whole thing. So I'm gonna post the video instead. I'm hoping everyone will enjoy it, especially after a long, long day. After all, laughter is the best medicine, eh?

Note however that the quality isn't so good cause I had to compress it in order to get it to upload here. All the same,

ENJOY!

***DUE TO PROTEST FROM ONE OF THE ACTORS IN THE VIDEO, I AM FORCED TO REMOVE THE LINK FROM THIS BLOG. SORRY FOLKS!