My Game of Life

Saturday, January 20, 2007

A bunch of us sec 3s, sec 4s and councillors went over to the studio at Caldecott Hill today to support our Hwachong team at The Arena Qurater Finals today. We were up against RI, strong rivals as usual.

The first thing we realised when we went in was: "Wah, the studio's so small?!" It consisted only of a tiny round stand with two red buttons in the centre (the one the debaters stand around), encircled by some white wooden steps which acted as benches.

Managed to sneak a few photos during commercial breaks (even though they said no photographing or video recording devices allowed, else they would confiscate it.) So here's how the studio looks like:

(That's the host Adrain Pang putting on makeup at the corner of the pic.)

Its amazing how they manage to make the area look so big on TV, eh?

The honourable judges. Note that the brightly lighted "pillars" you see don't actually reach all the way to the ceiling, but are in fact just translucent plastic cylinders which sway quite a bit if you hit them.

Before we started, we had to do some cheers, then repeat them again twice for the sake of national TV. And when the contestants and Adrian entered the studio, we had to clap loudly and cheer again. So for the first 1 hour or so it was nothing but retakes of cheers, applause and miscellanous clips of us pretending to look very excited.

Perhaps the worst thing about it was that whenever Adrain made a blooper, we had to retake everything again. Like there was this time when he said "The winners of the grand finals will walk away with The Arena championship trophy and a grand...mother." It's really funny what people say when they screw up.

So the opening 5 minute intro you see on TV had to be taken 5 times before the director was finally satisfied. And we have to wait up to 5 minutes between each retake for the crew to set up the equipment again. <_<

After all that later, we finally got the debate started. The notion was "Singaporean youths are politically apathetic", and HCI was on the opposing force. For the first round, we trounced RI 20-0. A great start. =D

After that was the commercial break. It's seriously much better to spend commercials at home than in the studio, because the only thing you can do there is to stone around being hypnotised by those swirling lights, while the makeup lady goes around brushing up everyone's appearance with face powder. Sian.

When we "returned", we had to "UPROAR!" very loudly for the resuming of the show. And just for that mere few seconds of breainless whacking of palms together, we had to do muliple retakes again. D:

For the second round, HCI faltered a little, but we still managed to draw the score for that round at 12-12. So far, the scores were 32-12 to Hwachong's advantage. Still quite a good lead.

We'll skip the break and appluase section and jump to the third round - the team rebuttal round. I thought both teams didn't fare quite well in this, with snappy questions and rebuttals flying all over the place. But considering the stress of the situation, i guess that's understandable. If it were me, i probably would have died of nervousness.

The judges didn't reveal their votes for this round, so as to lengthen the show with a "Results Show" later which consisted of about 75% of recaps. Waste of time.

Finally, the fourth round. RI sent out their famous Kartik (thanks to Andrew for pointing out how to spell his name), known for his cuteness and wit. I thought he concluded and summed his team's arguments up better than the HCI team though. Again, the judges did not reveal their scores, for the sake of suspense for the results show.

After that, the first part of the recording was finally over, and the judges went out to take a looong break and have a discussion over their decisions, leaving us poor students sitting around in the studio. Time for more photos.

Watch your back! It's a steep drop down behind those benches. ("Oooh, Brownian Motion!" Mr. LeeF.Y. commented.)

*fast forward past all the random chatter, sudden outbreaks of cheers and one-minute rounds of applause*

The recording for the Results Show began at last. The main part of it was just quite a lot of crap, reviewing video clips and all that stuff. After the judges made some comments about the performance of the teams, the result for Round 3 was revealed. The score: 21-7 to RI. That makes the score 39-33. Oh damn, they caught up. If we managed to tie for the last round, HCI would win. Otherwise, if RI scores 3 or more votes out of a possible 4, then they would win.

And the decisive results for round 4 were released. 21-7. To RI. The final score was 54-46, with HCI barely losing by 1 vote. At this point the Rafflesians were cheering like crazy, whereas we simply sat there and followed the monotonous beat of *clap. clap. clap.*

And so we lost. But then again, i think the HCI team should still be able to make it to the semis through the wildcard round, just as how RI managed to get to the quarter-finals after being beaten by Loyang Sec School in the prelims.

I guess now i know how much effort goes into producing a show, and how innocent supporters are terribly victimised with the three-letter word "Cut". Even a small bottle of New Moon Chicken Essence with Collagen doesn't make up for it, though i appreciate the marketing ploy of sponsors.

'Twas teh winnar at 11:35 pm.