Momento Mori : Shouting Out?

Their natural state.

Their natural state. Well, technically when I caught them like this was when they had finished the day’s work!

Don’t forget to like Momento Mori on the N.E.mation’s facebook. Click the top ten teams and then like Momento Mori!

Drink water!

Here’s Momento Mori cheering you on with water.

Drink water, it’s good for you.

Playing with the lights?

Anyway, somehow they were called on by the filming team by MOE? For some educational thing who visited N.E.mation to go around to the other groups and give shout outs to them.

Yes, it’s pretty much them going to each group and cheering them on.

It’s really random but it’s nice?

They are hard working though.

Finally they have learned that even by being ‘extras’ for a video, it takes a lot of time too.

Anyway they were happy to get back into their tent to do their own work!

The girl in the hoodie is not another student, that is their instructor. She was looking through the day’s work and giving comments on what was needed to be refined.

I gasped as she scrutinized TINY RAIN DROPS that bounced off an umbrella and circled them and gave suggestions to make it look more organic.

Animuuuu.

This is not their production but hey while they had the opportunity to use wacoms and just a bit of time, they’re just trying out the software on their own!

It’s no often you get to use these items anyway.

Sort of drawing.

And then they showed me their extent of their art skills which in THEIR opinion was not much.

In my opinion, it was quite a bit!

Even if their art skills were ‘not much’ they really are being stubborn and getting their animation done! So see, if you’re ever afraid in entering the competition because you can’t ‘draw’, don’t worry, the instructors are there to help you out.

While they won’t MAKE everything for you, they will be able to teach you enough and guide you to get your productions done.

Momento Mori is definitely giving their all to do this.

ALSO!!

Did you know their story’s voice over is actually Chua Enlai?

They were terribly excited when they listened to the voice over he did for their production.

Momento Mori didn’t get to meet him but they do get to listen to him over and over to get the timing right in their animation.

The girls hoped he’ll also support them by liking their team over at N.E.mation, hahaha.

Substicky Laufeyson. Kneel!

And now, I leave you with Substicky Laufeyson (it’s the pokemon Substitute) with all their other toys kneeling to him.

The 4 of Us II: The Middle

Animating awaay!

I visited The 4 of Us II on Tuesday, their second week. How did they fare?

I wanted to know how they were besides all the animating. Or at least with all the animating, how ARE they?

Apparently from the last I met them on the Friday before and in that short span of a day, everyone has gotten hyper and all “AUUGH” already.

Woosh, woosh!

They’ve been ‘over timing’ and will do so until the next week before one of their team members have gone off holiday with their parents. (See! Told you this was happening with a lot of groups.)

Even their instructor told them to take a walk on Monday when they’ve gotten really silly and doing weird things.

But hey, look. They’re indeed having good progress on their production anyway.

Perseverance, girls. You all can do it!

Cookie Monster!

Yes, that is a lot of Cookie Monster stuff.

Also, don’t forget to like the team on the N.E.mation facebook, under the top 10 teams app on the top and click The 4 of Us II!

Briefing for the day!

Naturally, they had to take a break too. If you don’t know the process, they come in around 8am and then continue working on, besides for lunch and dinner.

Oh and also for the ‘nightly’ briefing by the instructors. The briefing consists of any announcements to be made and about if their progress is ok and if the systems they are working on are doing well and that back ups have been done properly.

Eating food!

This is usually followed by dinner that the groups go down to get some food to buy at Koufu. Not to worry though if you ever want to join this competition, they got food coupons to spend on so that their food is already paid for!

They just need to ‘buy’ and eat.

Playing with shadows

It was during their dinner they told me what shenanigans have already been done in this second week. For one thing, after working so much, they’ve started to do shadow puppets against their tents.

London Choco Rolls

And that they got so hyper that they started to stuff as many London choco rolls into their hoodies and run back into the tents.

The current maximum number of London Choco Rolls that can be stuffed into a hoodie is 8, by the way.

Have you ever… heard the London Choco Roll song?

Just… Just sing that to your friends when you are bored.

Also, this is probably why their instructor told them to take a break and have a walk outside instead of continuing animating.

THE PRESSURE IS ON FOR ALL TEAAAAMS TO COMPLETE!

Their expressions.

Anyway, we also found out that the top 10 teams… Well, those who aren’t the top 3 (I think) will get Nintendo 3ds!

Guess who said that she will sell/donate her 3ds to someone if she gets it since she doesn’t play the games. And then guess who is appalled with the suggestion.

I think they’re doing OK. They’re still cheery and they’re still being ever so hardworking. Work on girls!

It’s just one more week to go and you’ll be done!

Momento Mori! Aka the girls from Tumblr

With their glorious purpose

“I like your shoelaces,” I said cautiously.

“I STOLE THEM FROM THE PRESIDENT!!” they screamed excitedly.

Momento Mori.

Apparently it was actually a typo of memento mori but it still kept the meaning pretty cool (moment of death).

These girls from CHIJ Saint Nicholas Girls’ School are really from tumblr.

Each one has their own fandom and they know if one is not working when their tumblr dashboard is refreshing with their own fandoms. This sentence totally does not make unless you are from tumblr too.

Hui Fen, Clara, Phoebe and Janelle are here holding up their carrot neck pillow called glorious purpose because… it looks like Loki’s horns.

It actually really does when you put it on your head.

Theirs is a colourful one.

BUT LET US GET to know more about what their production is! Their storyboard looks quite colourful, isn’t it?

Well, it’s all 2d and it will be typographically cute with vectory animations going here and there.

Think in the style of My Little Pony or Powerpuff Girls. That kind of vector graphics but with funky text fonts.

They're using wacoms too

They’re charging on all the way in week 1 because one of their members have to go by week 2, for a holiday. In fact I think this problem is amongst the other teams too!

You can’t say no to parents after all when it’s for a holiday.

But you can make up the work while you’re there.

Now, what IS their story about? Well, what I can say is that it has a lot of puns.

MORE THAN A PUNNET LOAD OF PUNS.

Puns enough to make me laugh hysterically and shove them in people’s faces to vote for the animation when it is completed.

That amount of puns.

Spot the odd one out.

Fun fact:

When you do get to see their video after everything, if you watch it carefully, you might notice one of the three soldiers is different! He’s the one with the pudgy stomach.

Food loot!

So far, these girls are one of the most excitable in the N.E.mation studio (it’s really just large tents in the NYP lounge room) and you can hear them once you enter the room.

They’ve made themselves home by having a boxful of food.

They would like to ALSO have a small shout out to team Dairy Products for giving them some food.

So team Dairy Products, thanks for the food.

It's totally Homestuck.

This is just the first week but from what I’ve seen of their work, they’ve pretty much have done a lot already.

Nothing to near completion of course but if they do keep up at this pace and if nothing dies or if no files get corrupted, wow.

They’d be done with some time to spare for double checking?

If they don’t get distracted by Tumblr, of course.

And here’s a few words from them:

Yessssssss. Can you believe that during their final pitch, they used this AWESOME line that they’ll get there “pun way or another” and it was met with “…” by the judges?

LIKE HOW I DON’T KNOW. But they got in and YOU can support their punny ways by liking their page here.

Or you can go to the N.E.mation Facebook page, click the top 10 team app and then find their name there! Do iiiiit. They need the support to win once their productions are up too!

Oh and this is set up by them if you want to follow too:

Find us on Tumblr: momento-mori-ne8.tumblr.com
Follow us on Twitter: @MomentoMoriNE8

The 4 of Us II ! Aka an abundance of Sarahs

Showing us how they are drawing it

One of the coordinators for N.E.mation, Sara from Animagine brought me over to The 4 of Us II‘s tents to introduce me to Sarah to tell them I was their ambassador, Sarah.

Sara, Sarah, Sarah.

Lots of Sarahs.

IN ANY CASE, once we got over that, the team said hello to me and they’re from Tanglin Secondary School! Wooh.

I said, “So, they are The 4 of Us…”

“Two!” added Sara of Animagine.

You must remember the two because this is their second try into the competition but they hadn’t got into it that far until THIS YEAR. Hurray for them!

OH WAIT. If you haven’t read my blog before, here’s tl:dr version of N.E.mation.

N.E.mation is a yearly competition where students get to animate their stories according to the theme of the year and get to win a trip to the USA to the various animation studios!

In other words, you have the top 10 teams trying to finish their animated shorts within 3 weeks.

4 of Us II's storyboard

This is their storyboard and well, I won’t show EVERYTHING because it’ll be funner for you guys to watch the final product then.

The girls, Jia Yi, Sarah, Sri Safwanah and Xena, showed me that their story will be real life interviews but with mixed media!

So expect swooshy things going about the videos like graphics. It’ll be cool, like those funky MTV things you see in the latest trend.

 

Boom!

All of them are true stories by the way. If you don’t know the theme of this year’s competition it is “Because You Played A Part”.

Chrysanthemum!

FUN FACT:

This chrysanthemum took at least 3 days to complete. Well, there were a few sets of chrysanthemums but the final bit for that flower, you will notice that it is animated REALLY smoothly.

So many of them.

And yet, they’re going to be super tiny in the actual production.

So when you get to see the final video, note that even a tiny flower takes a heck load of time to create and they painstakingly took a lot of effort for it.

With their fans

For the first week, they are pretty much on time and are ‘okay’. We’ll see how they are in the second week though…

And a word from them!

Yes, I totally asked them to say the last line.

HAHAHAHA.

PLEASE click “LIKE” at their page here, it’s the small button below their picture. It’ll help a lot since they need the support of others to like their page to win too!

On this page, you can also check out their instagram and twitter!

Or you can go to the N.E.mation Facebook page, click the top 10 team app and then find their name there!

Everything but Fries!

The top 10!

This is going to be a post with a lot of adventure and announcements, you guys.

You guys need to know for the next three weeks I’ll be blogging about  N.E.mation 8! And wow, ok just imagine the next few lines as said by Tyra Banks or something:

IN CYCLE 8, THE RULES HAVE CHANGED (for the ambassador) AND I WILL PRESENT TO YOU… TWO TEAMS!

These two teams will be the choice of Seriously Sarah and you are invited, no, ENCOURAGED to support them!

THESE TWO TEAMS ARE: The 4 of Us II and Momento Mori.

I will inform you how to like their pages and whatnot as I BRING TO YOU behind the scenes of these two teams. And you will like their two teams for reasonssss, yes.

Reasons which I will tell you tomorrow!

And now, to our IKEA adventure.

It's a Flygdrake.

This is a Flygdrake. It’s Swedish for flying dragon.

Continue reading Everything but Fries!

Losing It

If this was one of those Upworthy headlines or Viral Nova articles, it would have started with “SHE IS THE BIGGEST LOSER BUT WHAT SHE DOES WILL MAKE YOU WEEP – So amazing” or something like that.

But no, this is a State of Sarah post so really.

Whatever.

Hey, yesterday I went to NLB‘s Customer Appreciation Dinner.

The food was great and wow, the libraries DO make note of those customers who contribute to the libraries whether as contributors or people who give talks there, write suggestions, role model library users etc. For each library, the staff do make note of those who come by and all.

And loooook. Besides the great food (and getting my friends to come along too), I won a pencil box at pre-event games there.

Oh yeah and this:

Online advocate award!

Not the phones, those are mine. I didn’t win those.

They are Nokia bar phones to be censor bars on it. HEH HEH, get it?

Anyway I got the Online Advocate Award by them for twittering/talking about library events and talking to their twitter/instagram accounts and also besides the cert, I got an upgrade of my library membership for a year!

And then I realized I was the greatest loser.

Continue reading Losing It

Are you Singaporean?

The tents!

“Are you Singaporean?” a middle aged Chinese man asked us.

We were in queue to get our books autographed by a writer at the festival. “Uh, yes?” answered Max who actually wasn’t. And he should have proclaimed his Malaysian-ness to all instead of answering for the majority of us if we would have known what would happen next.

The man continued with, “Did you know this festival is by tax payers money?”.

I turned around, facing towards the start of the queue, my backpack towards him with the sudden need to see how many was left in line. My other friend, Raven looked into her bag as if it was the most interesting thing in the world. That left Max and Jo to face him.

Why. Why was this happening.

Continue reading Are you Singaporean?

Being Fictional

Golden Shoe Complex

Last Saturday’s Nanowrimo write-in was at Golden Shoe complex. BECAUSE IT WAS DEEPAVALI AND THE SHOPS WERE CLOSED.

AUUUGH.

But it was one of the most effective write-ins ever because:

a) No food or distractions

b) You had limited battery

c) No internet (unless you plugged in your own)

The coming Saturday’s write-in should be at the usual place though so I don’t know if productivity will be as much as when we had nothing, heh heh.

Continue reading Being Fictional