Our first short film!

The girls were watching iCarly on Nickelodeon and kept asking me if it was real i.e. is there really a web show called iCarly where you can submit your own videos to. I explained to them that iCarly is really just a regular TV show (about some friends who have their own web show) but that they get their viewers involved by inviting them to submit videos which they feature at the end of the show.

The girls seemed interested in having their own show so I said we could actually do it if we could decide on the subject matter. At the same time, I had seen a series of Heritage TV videos at yesterday.sg which is the National Heritage Board's website and thought it might be interesting to do something along those lines.

And then it all came together the Sunday before last, when we were at the National Museum for the Christian Lacroix exhibition. While we were having lunch at a cafe there, I remembered that I had read somewhere that Singapore's first public drinking fountain could be found on the grounds of the museum. I half suspected that the fountain was removed during the recent major renovation. I asked a couple of museum staff but they had never heard of the Gemmill Fountain. Even a friend of mine who was involved in the renovation of the museum was not aware of it. Nevertheless we went around the museum on a futile search for the 145-year-old drinking fountain and I recorded it using the video function of my still camera.

I was intrigued by the idea of this forgotten fountain so I did some research at the library and showed the girls the old newspaper articles I found on the Gemmill Fountain, the earliest dating 1939. We then did some more filming for our documentary. The girls were very game and improvised on the lines I gave them. Then Tai Pi wrote to the director of the museum to ask about the fountain and got a reply the next day although she didn't see the email till a couple of days later.

After we got the reply from the museum, we completed the remaining voice-overs and filming and viola, we have our first documentary! It certainly isn't my first home-made video as I have edited many a holiday video and growing-up videos, that's one of my hobbies, but this one was different from my usual and we had fun putting it together.

And now to broadcast our show. I uploaded it onto YouTube and created a blog to link the video to and also sent it to yesterday.sg which is featuring the video as today's entry. The guys at yesterday.sg said they were impressed with the work that went into the video (actually it's probably not as much work as they thought!) and want to give us a present... ooh I wonder what it could be.