Wherein I Find Delightful Gems And Film Legs

Oh the sweet little gems you find when you look. I borrowed a CD player from my sister(well, took) so that I could listen to my CDs without having to waste precious memory and CPU cycles on Windows Media Player. Inside the player was a CD, obviously burnt by mysester judging from the surreptitious label of "Rock" and the smiley face beside it. If it had been me the audio CD would have a list of at least the titles on the face(I can't stand surprise singers), and if my brother nothing. So it had to have been my sister's doing.

Now, I love my sister as any other brother might, but I hardly trust her taste in music. After all, she used to like.. the Spice Girls and other assorted girly singers. Of course, since she's six years younger than me she has the prerogative to idolize singers a lot younger than me. I dislike intensely singers younger than myself.

So this compilation, after identification as my sister's doing, was discarded by me to a corner of the table, in favour of Yuko Yamaguchi.

But you can only take so much of YY(how can you not like a singer whose name alliterates?). So I changed to good old Tori, but on seeing the sad little pirated CD lying there, all alone and dusty I decided to give it a try anyways.

And it turned out to be pretty good. I was rather pleasantly surprised to hear mostly Third Eye Blind, Matchbox 20, and Hoobastank. All rather commercial rock, but probably as alternative as my sister can take. And about as mainstream as I like, so I have been spending much of the evening listening to it and finding the lyrics to every song and arranging them all into a nice little webpage and listing all the songs...

Yeah. I like order. And I can't listen to music without doing anything else.

And after I'd sorted out everything satisfactorily, I found myself with nothing much to do. So to soothe my conscience at listening to Never Let You Go I find myself writing this.

And... now I have nothing else to write.

Uh oh.

So I'm now in this project organized by my University's Office of Student Affairs that tries to help people who have poor english improve it by having someone speak english to them an hour every week. Of course, an hour a week is hardly going to help you improve your english, but the idea is that hopefully some of the conversation peers(as we hepers are called) will form friendships with the foreigners and speak to each other more in their free time.

And they want to produce this video for the training session that the conversation peers will have to go through, see? But they don't want to spend any money, see? And that all adds up to Student Power(ie free labour). I was called up last week to see if I was interested in helping out with the video editting of aforementioned training video. Having had a very little experience in this, I thought it would be a good chance to improve my not-so-l33t skills and get to know some foreign friends at the same time, so I said yes. Then they called me again to tell me they didn't have a cameraman, so could I do the recording. It was only gonna be a handycam anyway, which I've used before, so that was also okay. Then I went for the shoot and it was realized that there was no script, no planning and no one had any idea what to do. And the nice lady in charge told me to help direct, too.

So many people in the movie industry would be happy to have such rapid promotions(cross-production-line movement?), I'm sure.

Now, directing a video isn't quite as easy as you might think it is. And I ended up not doing anything - luckily the "actors" had enough initiative to go it on their own. Unforuntely for some poor girl named Woogle(name changed to protect her identity), who came for the filming in a tiny mini-skirt and who was the most animated and talkative AND was possessed of a pair of very long and beguiling legs, the camera caught as it's primary focus the legs.

Even my inexperienced film-critic eye can see that, for reasons I cannot explain, my filming was centred on her legs. They sit there in the middle of the screen, twitching slightly from time to time, staring out at the rest of the world like two... bronzed, long, thin legs(I am only thankful she never did the crossing thing Sharon Stone did in Basic Instinct). The guy sitting beside her, though I'm sure he harboured no ill-intent, seemed like he was staring at her legs every five seconds. And when she talked to me, I should have turned the camera off before I answered - with the camera centred on those legs, even my most innocuous replies made me sound like a porn director directing the girl to perform acts of minor(or major, depending on your religion and your sexual experience) immoral nature.

When we viewed the tape later, the lecturer had few requests. She trusted that I knew what she wanted and that I'd do a satisfactory job. And I tried my best to live up to her expectations, but one thing I couldn't get rid of, though... you guessed it - the legs.

They were in the centre of the screen. There was no cropping method I could use that could get rid of the legs. Not without severely reducing the quality of the video.

I hope the presence of the legs will turn out to be a good thing. Maybe the video will attract more attention during the lecture with rather than without them.