The Ultimate Selfie from DTVM Awards / grad night
If I try, I can still remember quite vividly how I felt when I first met my classmates. Unlike most of them, I did not attend majority parts of the Freshmen Orientation Programme because I went for a mehmeh chalet instead. So, it felt kind of intimidating meeting them for the first time, especially since right from the beginning, it was pretty obvious that they're not the kind of people I was used to.

The image is still pretty clear in my head: We were sitting in a circle (of course...) and eating SP-provided food in Sentosa. While everyone else went to try out some free attraction, the unenthusiastic bunch of us just sat there quietly. And I was trying to convince myself, "okay, this is my new so-called family".

And to be honest, it didn't start out too beautifully. A lot of dramas, a lot of intensity, a lot of people crying and fighting, and a lot of unwillingness to open up to one another. But time quickly flew by and then we were in year 3, tackling our final year project, making our final short film, thrown into Penang to make a short documentary, brought to Melbourne for a creative writing trip, and so on.

By then, we've gotten so close, went through so much (just for the sake of it, I shall copy and paste what I wrote some time ago)...

As for the whole DTVM, there were a lot of painful times, honest. But there were a lot of great memories. Filming, discussing stuffs, watching one another panic before a major pitch, creating a haunted house together, torturing our main characters together, preparing for skits, celebrating, eating, playing catching on Marina Barrage, Christmas celebration, going for LEAP camp, and so on. I built memories with most of my classmates.

I'm going to miss them so much.

Like my course manager, Ms Gamar, says, we're a bunch of weird people who belong together because we're weird.

DTVM has changed me so much. I remember when I first entered, I was the very anti-social, super anxious, super stubborn, super irritated, super irritating guy who chose the word 'emotional' to represent myself when asked for. Now, I guess I'm less of those things and I start to see things differently.

My lecturers, my classmates, my internship, and maybe my own efforts have changed me. After my internship, I feel different. There's this sort of intimacy and optimism that my colleagues had transmitted to me. And then my classmates taught me to accept myself, although they probably didn't realise it. They also taught me to accept others, to have trust in them, and -it took me too long, but- they also taught me about faith, not the religion kind, but the humanly kind.

And I just want to briefly mention how each lecturer impacted me:

Mr Chee Teng - He made me realise that I may actually have a talent for videography, and that encouraged me and made me like film.
Ms Gamar - One of the things she said to me affects me quite a lot. Yesterday, she told me "I'm proud of you", and that matters to me.
Ms Stella - Although no one likes getting their ideas rejected 80% of the time, she taught me to be creative. And more importantly, she made me realise logic in the midst of creativity.
Ms Mary - She selected my group's transmedia project, Grave Business, to win the category in DTVM Awards, and that earned us Ah Huats! And it's also thanks to her that we get such fluid internships, Penang filming trip, etc.


Ah Huat and a book
Mr Mark - I find it very hard to call him Mr Mark, because he looks so much like a classmate instead. He's generally encouraging, with his comments on our museum script and the fact that he bought the shirt I painted for me!
Mr Esman - He is the embodiment of independent learning. For his modules, he pushed us to take learning to a personal level.
Ms Swee Lin - She somehow managed to make me feel good about my fantasy story, and reminded me why I loved that genre so much when she analysed the four elements for my story.
Ms May Lin - Although she only taught us for one module, she has transferred a tonne of unwordable wisdom to us, or to me. As I've said, they are unwordable.

And there are many other lecturers, like Ms Chong Li Min, Ms Mabeline, Mr Josh Hong, Ms Wai Leng, Mr Roy, and Ms Fei Wan who taught us some theory and stuff. Oh, and just to mention, Ms Wai Leng's constant probbing with her whys and hows still helps.

I would love to talk about all my friends individually, but that's too many people to mention, plus I'm not exactly going to stop being with them.

Anyway, the whole chunk above is a very lengthy introduction to say that the whole of our DTVM experience is wrapped up last night by a grad night/show / awards ceremony which they call DTVM Awards.

So each class has to prepare an item to perform, but my class chose to break the rule and made a video instead, because we were all traumatised by our two years of failure :'D

So MJ, CX, Annzy and I met up last Monday to discuss an idea, and we chose to produce the simplest, easiest one: A video to gossip about one another. What's new, right?

But the writing and filming process was pretty fun. Got to meet most of my classmates on an individual level, which is kind of a nice wrap-up for the whole thing.

So the days before DTVM Awards was spent working on the video. Got our formal clothes...


stood at our booths to "pitch" our work, and ate a nice dinner.

And then the award giving/performances start. So partly thanks to the people who followed us on Twitter and liked our Facebook posts and stuff, we managed to get Ah Huats, hand-made by Ms Stella, as our "medal".

And then there were entertaining performances by each class.

Y1/01 - Skit about our lecturers in the same school
Y1/02 - A video about what we've learned, but all screwed up
Y2/01 - Some sponsorship commercial skit
Y2/02 - A Minute to Win It DTVM edition. Thanks lecturers for giving us the winning prize although they won :'D
Y3/01 - Quiz show about DTVM. Winter is coming.
Y3/02 - Our class, as explained above.

And there's the video collage of our journey in the course, as like every year, and then the lecturers played again a video from CASS Commencement dinner where they made fun of themselves.

After that is a burst of selfie angst in which we (or at least some of us) went around taking selfies with everyone.

Which concludes the night, although a bunch of them went for an after-party which I chose not to go.

Oh, and this being my blog, it's mandatory for me to list down a list of things that happened in my life recently:

• Went bowling with Guang Yi, Zi Xing, and Wei Jian, and watched "everything is awesome~" aka Lego movie again.
• Went to Ikea with Guang Yi and Zi Xing to get A3 photo frames for Zi Xing's gigantic selfies.
• Had a picnic with my Melbourne clique - Colin, King, Cheryl, Hira, Joanne, Jez, Elijah, CX - except that Elijah is not there.
• Watched 500 with Jt.
• Filmed an Earth Hour video for a competition with Matin, King, Mj, Kylie, Rebecca, Bo Mun, Hanissah, and Nat.
• Got Dark Souls 2.
• Finished discussing our Taiwan trip. Going next week~

Labels: dtvm, reflection, reliving those days, things that happened