i'm lovin' it

Exactly one week and twelve hours ago, the facilitators of BRATs camp dropped 40 of us youngsters at an unknown street in Kajang.

Behind us was Plaza Metro Kajang. Walk further down the street and we'd have ended up at Pasar Kajang.

Mission: To gather enough material for an article/soundslide/video on Kajang.

Duration: One hour.

As you can expect, none of the seniors encouraged us to write about Satay Kajang, so we ran around the small town like headless chickens. Well, not really. Half of my group went off to see an Abbex Aunty, while Jern Ian, Kah Mun and I went ahead to Pasar Kajang.

The thing is, we weren't given a specific topic to write or talk about. Which is tougher than it seems when Kajang presents itself to be like any other town in Malaysia.

Tough. Tough. Tough.

The pictures which we and other groups took were criticized (constructively!) by the official photographer, Chan, and another facilitator.

If you think you're a great amatuer photographer, think again.

Even the pictures which seem averagely okay to most of us mortals could not stand with the slightest bit of pride under the gaze and scrutiny of The Star photographers.

"Needs cropping."
"Too much head space!"
"Not full enough,"
"What's the subject?"
"Now, if you move the frame to the left a bit..."

Expected la, since they're in the business...

And you got to watch out for the soundtrack which you plan to include in your video/soundslide.
It has to fit the mood of the video and cannot infringe on copyright materials (though every other group did this). So the only type of music you could use were royalty-free music.

Thank God for free WiFi! Kah Mun found a minus one version of Here In My Home, which we used for the soundslide below. (Karaoke version of songs are considered non-copyrighted)

Every group was expected to churn out an article a day. For the article:
We cannot write about Satay Kajang.
We have to include quotes by interviewees to make the article more interesting.

The information needed to quote someone are:
-interviewees' (full!)name
-interviewees' age
-interviewees' occupation
Which is not as easy as it seems. Sometimes you just want to go up to an interviewee and talk to that person, instead of getting his or her particulars. But of course, as a journalist, one has to be polite and professional while talking to the public...

That's basically half of what we learnt.
Here's the soundslide:



-soundslide credits to all members of umbrella 08.
-all pictures in this post taken by me. wanna use please relink/credit.