Friday, May 27, 2016

Fourteen to Zero



It has been almost 5 years I working in film industry. That longer that what I expected, I set my target for study aboard within 4 years. but that ain't going to happen in short term. I started in the film industry at a generally mature age of 28, at that time, production companies were reluctant to hire me for production assistant jobs due to my age. Yet I did whatever I could to find a job related to filmmaking. I ended up in a local Chinese production house where I served as a production assistant.
In 2013, I started working as freelancer, I managed to participate in the numerous commercial and independent arthouse works of Greenlight Pictures, a company found and run by Malaysian directors Woo Ming Jin and Edmund Yeo.

I tried to recorded all my works no matter it was small as short film or big scale as feature film. The amount of projects I joined gradually grew year by year, it reached peak record that I worked on 14 projects in 2014. But for the next first half of year 2015, it dramatically reduced to none (I only noticed it when my friend Fikri interviewed me for his online Magazine CQ). And this is how the blog title came from. At the same time four of my hard discs broke down, most of my memorable pictures, artworks and memories gone with them.

Since the changes like riding a roller coaster, I realized that I have make something different on my career path, at the same time, I also realized, function for a blog actually not only write something for share, but also can be as recorder of your memory. There was a Hong Kong comedian said, if people used to wrote for themselves to read called Diary, now days people wrote for others to read we should call biography. And at the ancient time only those great peoples, we so called Legend, able to wrote their own biography, but now days everyone who can write will able to do that. So, am I going to write my biography and become a Legend?

I'm not so great. I'm just want to record the moment of my works, what I think and I don't mind to share some of it with others. It just like my Blogger title, meme (pronounce as MEEM (/'mi:m/) ), all those writing just acts as another idea that spreads around people. Since I didn't wrote anything after I got into filmmaking industry, I plan to write those projects down, choose some of it to share it, it just a reminiscence for myself, of cause it won't be chronically.

I believe most of the local filmmakers will know that most of us have to be multi-tasking. No matter your title is Production Manager, Assistant Director, DOP, Production Assistant etc, you have to able to work in different posts and handle different tasks in order to survive. That happened same for me, I used to worked as Line Producer (or Production Manager) cum with Location Manager, Casts Manager, or Assistant Director. I guess that can train myself become more better, otherwise, it bit hard to focus and master on post. Well that what brought me to become. As I realized myself have to move on after armed myself with my past experiences, I will focus more on own contents, hope there will be another road to the future.