Thursday

today was quite a sad day for us. one of our cast members had to leave us forever, and it was all sholleh's fault.

in the morning, wei hon, one of the PID graduates, helped transport us and the equipment over to mt.vernon. aloysious and hazel couldn't join us in the morning, so we had to wait quite abit before we were able to shoot. the day before, we had brought the birds over to andrea's house and we made a makeshift cage to hold them. when we got to mt vernon, we tied their legs to the tent with a fishing line and let them roam around.

it was during the time of our waiting that something tragic happened. sholleh sat on hazel.

ok, not the girl actress. we named the birds after our characters, one called jayden and the other called hazel, as the girl was referred to as "the girl" in our script, and we couldn't call it that. but yeah, sholleh sat on the bird.

at first, we didn't realise what happened, until we saw that the bird was lying on the spot where sholleh's butt had been, and its neck seemed bent in the wrong way. few minutes later, and it died. when we saw hazel in the distance walking towards us, we quickly got JY to dispose of the bird, and told her that we had set it free, which technically is true, just that we didn't mention the state it was in when it was set free. we didn't want our young actress to be traumatized at the start of the day.

andrea and JY had went to set up the swing before the actors came. we already had to the rope and wooden board, but we still needed to get them tied to a overhead tree branch. they did it by throwing the rope over, then coiled it walking in a big circle, each of them holding each end of the rope, and turned many many circles before tieing it to the board to secure it, then doing the same for the other side of the swing. the result looked nice, better than what any of us imagined.

so we did quite a few shots that, although throughout we were plagued by dying batteries that we had to charge for a few minutes at the parlour, before the other one died and switched the batteries, and did this over and over again. the day ended when both batteries died at around evening, and we called it a day.

R.I.P - Hazel, 18th March 2009 - 19th March 2009

-Betty