What should be a good way to start off the last week running up to Unspoken? An exam?! Hmmmmm…one exam only? How about two? One on working in correctional settings and the other on working in healthcare settings? A good idea?
“Of course, why not!” our lecturers exclaimed. “Oh please nooo…” we groaned.
Who won? Well, you know the answer. Such are the lives of poor students.
Lecturer: 1 Student: 0
So, amid learning to apply the Risk, Needs and Responsivity framework, memorising a list of over 100 medical terminologies and explaining the Health Belief Model, we were given the arduous task to prepare for the final run before that Sunday marked on our calendars. Unspoken, The Voice Within. Let’s run through how this week had went...
We began the week with an examination to sit for on Monday, 10:00am sharp. With groans and moans that sounded like, “Aiya…forgot what RNR meant!” upon leaving the examination hall, we quickly volunteered to help the logistics sub-comm with their stage props preparation. This whole week was filled with pockets of opportunities for committed volunteerism, wholehearted ownership, strong interpersonal communication and zealous passion over our event to blossom. One would expect the last week of preparation to be plagued with scheduled meetings and rehearsals, but that is not so for us. Instead, we asked for our friends within the Unspoken committee to volunteer and help us out, not out of obligation but of sincerity. A quick summary of our week’s agenda is as follows:
Monday: Assist publicity comm to do public outreach near Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Singapore Polytechnic.
Tuesday: Assist logistics comm to construct the puzzle pieces (it is the largest stage prop, as mentioned and kept as a secret in Week 12’s blog post). Assist sponsorship comm to collect final collaterals and prepare materials needed for the support board.
Wednesday: Free Day! That good? Not really…we had to study for an exam tomorrow.
Thursday: Assist sponsorship comm to collect exhibition boards at Tampines and pack goodie bags. Assist them to also carry and move around boxes of goodie bags up and down floors. Assist logistics comm to continue with the puzzle pieces. Assist programs comm to fold programme booklets and organise experiential learning logistics.
Friday: Gather for a mass comm briefing on the event day’s action plan, duty list and Standard Order of Practice. Later, a drama rehearsal at a substitute theatre to improve on our drama skills. Assist sponsorship comm to organise the packed goodie bags and support board. Assist logistics comm to make finishing touches on the puzzle and to sneak it into the theatre.
Saturday: Gather at TFA for a full-dress rehearsal. When? 5:30pm. That simple? That’s if you think it’s simple to carry 32 small tables, 2 medium tables, 2 large tables, 38 chairs, 5 potted plants, 1 two-seater sofa, 1 ginormous cardboard structure, 20 board stands, 20 boxes of goodie bags, 3 instruments, 2 microphone stands…(I should not continue, words could not suffice in describing this) down four to five floors within an hour and a half. We also set-upped the experiential learning and exhibition booths before midnight struck.
Sunday: This is the day we are waiting for…with strained muscles, anxious hearts and an indwelling yet silent hope that our work the past 6 days were worth the effort. (you can read more in our future blog post)
That is all for what we collectively did as a committee. We worked much more closely. You can see everything coming together. It is indeed a spectacular observation to see how inter-connected the 5 sub-comms have been integrating their individual efforts into a shared common space where co-operation and communication become integral into all they do. I do not know how better to describe this.
Let’s not dabber into fanciful language any longer. Here, quick updates from what each sub-comm had been doing!
Logistics, let’s begin with you!
“The highlight of this week was how we went shopping for logistics on Thursday to two separate locations. One at Mustafa Centre and the other at Plaza Singapura. We had to split into two teams to get the materials we needed for our puzzle pieces stage prop. We also had to decorate Shane’s table to be more ‘study-table’ like. We bought black vanguard sheets, cloths, boards, tape rolls and much more. Upon arriving school around 7:30pm from shopping, we joked about the dreading pain when we saw how other students are leaving the school the very moment we walked in.
After consultation with Saras, we had a better idea on how our puzzle prop ought to look like. We had our talented friends who drew aesthetically looking images onto the puzzle pieces. It took hours…no…days…wait no…weeks to prepare this prop from scratch. We had to fold this cardboard structure, cut it into smaller portions, make markings, cut out curves on cardboard backings, print pictures, tape papers down…etc. It was an exhausting endeavour we desired to complete. This whole week was solely dedicated to building this puzzle structure…sigh…there goes our sleep…maybe that’s why we subconsciously built a makeshift shelter for us to sleep in.
We familiarised ourselves, together with our stage crew volunteers, with the stage and control room management during the full-dress rehearsal on Saturday. Our scene transitions had greatly improved! We also managed to indicate to our comm members which stage prop logistics needed to be brought down to the theatre. Lastly, we sent personalised messages to the drama casts to remind them which side of the stage they should be entering from and which microphone they are assigned to use.”
Programs!
“We edited the duty list (after countless of times!) and did a trial run for our static experiential booths! After the trial, we felt that it could be further improved. We made some changes and re-recorded the audio recording played for the depression booth and made some minor tweaks to the interactive activities to better suit the booths. And you know what that means? We had to also re-edit and do up the instruction sheets as well...mmm…
We searched and sourced out logistics needed such as easels and books. Lots and lots of books…probably weigh a total of 10 kilograms when putted together. We also journeyed around Singapore to source out the best and cheapest noise-cancelling earphones to deliver you crisp clear audio quality of our recordings at our experiential learning booths.
We printed various documents that we needed such as the instruction sheets and signage to lead you to find your way to our Theatre For the Arts (TFA). We completed preparing our photo booth props and decorated an evaluation form box for you to place your evaluation forms in (that’s kinda obvious)! We folded 800 programme booklets too!
We briefed the whole committee on the action plan and duty roster for the event day itself. To assist our comm members to have better access to these information, we even used an online app (airtable) for each of our comm member to receive a personalised duty schedule. Cool right? Lastly, we are gonna buy cup noodles (yay!!!) as quick meals for our comm on event day!”
Publicity!
“We went to Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Singapore Institute of Management for our publicity outreach on Monday, after our first examination (why these two? Well…cause they’re both one bus-stop away from each other)! However, we were not as successful as we hoped. We were faced with lots of rejection :( . Oh well…we did not give up as we tried to be creative in our outreach…ahahaha…we tried to “subtly” promote our event in our public transportation travels by strategically holding our program poster and talking about our event in an unusually louder volume.
We sent our first batch of emails to all our registered participants on Tuesday! This email includes the directions to our theatre, our event poster and our event ticket with a unique reference code that is personalised to the participant’s name. Please do show this ticket to our friendly classmates at the registration counter when you enter our theatre. Sending these emails was a long laborious process as we had to manually send almost 600 emails. It was funny (and yes, distressing too) when our unspokenclarity@gmail.com crashed because of the overwhelming number of emails sent to all of you. Probably we’re suspected of sending spam mail. Our quick solution? Create more Google accounts! So if you were to receive an email from unspokenenquiries@gmail.com, unspokenpublicity@gmail.com, and unspokenpubs@gmail.com, just know that it’s us and our creative juices at work. We were also notified that some mails we sent were missing some attachments and we are working hard to promptly rectify this!
We closed registration for the evening show as we received more than 352 registrations! Whoopee! Matinee show registration remains open, but not for long, seats are running out quick! For our giving.sg campaign, we raised a total of $2400 dollars as of Friday! Thank you all who so generously provided us the funding needed for this event!
We are hoping to continue posting more posts on our social media accounts and counting down the days left till this Sunday! We are considering our options such as featuring short snippets of our drama on Instagram Stories or even the possibility of going live! We want you to be hype for our event! And we mean HYPE!”
Sponsorship! Quick!
“We collected our last few collaterals on Tuesday! NEWater bottles (almost 40 boxes of them), SOS notebooks, Wah Mee recyclable bags, pens and rulers were all brought in. SACA also gave us some cool 2018 planners! We also sent all the strong muscular boys from the Unspoken comm together with Indah, our spons comm member, to collect the printed exhibition boards and programme booklets at Tampines! It was pure amusement when the boys started to carry the boards and found that they were lighter than expected, hence having more manpower than needed.
In the meantime, while some of us were away at Tampines, the rest stayed at school to pack 800 goodie bags, investing our concentration and muscles to give you a treat upon your arrival. From opening up boxes, packing in goodies, sorting them out into separate boxes and transporting them into our classrooms for storage…there was never an hour for the lazy bums. Our volunteers who helped us to pack were so patient with us especially amidst the confusion and hassle of the seemingly endless number of bags to prepare, giving us the occasional encouraging, “It’s okay! It’s okay! Jiayou!”
We prepared materials needed for the support board. This includes the header wordings “Small Actions, Big Impact” and small tag-like cards for you to write your message of support to anybody or everybody who is going through a real yet unspoken battle in the mind!
We sent a survey for our Unspoken comm members and volunteers to fill in their dietary requirements. This is because REACH is sponsoring our whole team around 80 meal packets for the event day!!! What great news to hear! Free food! And lastly, before we get carried away with free food…we contacted and finalised the details of when NYP Makeup Artistry would arrive to beautify our casts! They have done us a wonderful favour to prepare every cast to look #flawless on stage!”
And finally, to the Documenters (that’s us!)
“As per usual, we carried on taking videos of the what’s most interesting that is happening each day (read our Week 12 blog post!). We compiled these videos for editing before sending them to Saras to vet. Beyond just the videos, we are also doing our weekly blog updates. Nothing new, but hey, don’t underplay our comm’s consistency. As this documenter is typing, he is challenged by an immense difficulty to portray the emotional roller coaster and tenacity of the Unspoken committee the past two weeks. Another posing challenge was to accurately present the work we all did without being too wordy or too dismissive of the amount of effort. Words are so finite...hmmm…and that’s why we try to feature more photographs into our blog postings. As they always say, “A picture is a thousand words.” So, it shall be in our blog.
Atika, our good friend and documenter, helped us to record our full-dress rehearsals the previous week and upload them onto a shared Google Drive for all the casts to access to. She made a meticulous effort to record every scene that took place on stage. These recordings were helpful for our drama casts to relook at how they could better posture themselves and improve their facial impressions to be in character.
We discussed on how our final post-event documentation report had to be crafted as our final comm submission to Saras. We also discussed on how we wanted to conduct interviews with the participants on how they felt about our event, so if we ever approached you, please do say hi and share your thoughts openly!
As for our OICs, the awkward potato (Huda) and her friend (Gen) were in for a ride! They continued to familiarise themselves with the event’s action plan and duty roster with the help of Helena from Programs comm. With almost only 3 hours of sleep, they had to be ready for the big day ahead. Their main responsibility is time management, ensuring that the right people are at the right place at the right time and also stepping into a position of authority (similar to a proxy) if Saras is busy with something else. This includes passing down instructions or even welcoming invited guests!”
You stayed reading…amazing feat you had accomplished!
We would like to end this blog post with a final photo:
This photo was taken exactly at 12:03am midnight. That blueish glow in the photo was from Saras’ office, burning deeply into the night. As much as we students tire ourselves out, we also remember that Saras, our lecturer, is in this together with us. We shall continue fighting and taking this final showdown to the very end till we can confidently boast with firmest conviction, “We gave our best for Unspoken!”