The Will To Wheel is a short film based on a true story of wheelchair bound food delivery lady in Singapore and her will to be a useful member of the society.
"Sure, you could say that we should treat the disabled no different than the able-bodied. But folks are finding it inspiring that even someone with limited mobility would (be) willing to go beyond what was expected of her and find work that involves traveling distances to pick up and distribute food orders."
- Yahoo! News 23 November 2018
The film is directed by Florence Look and produced by a bunch of students from Ngee Ann Polytechnic's Film Sound and Video School (FSV) which I have acted for in many of their films over the last ten years.
The Will To Wheel has also been shotlisted by ciNE65 for the Favourite Actor, Favourite Actress, Best Sound Design & Best Cinematography awards!
3. The Favourite Actor and the Favourite Actress Voting Page appear.
4. Vote for Michael Chua and Agnes Goh ☺
Thank you in anticipation.☺
The awards ceremony will happen on the 15th June 2021. I supposed the winners will be announced then. Will keep you posted.
ciNE65 is a an annual short film competition that explores the Singapore Identity and expresses what Singapore means from the perspective of the film makers. It is supported by Nexus, a Singapore Government initiative.
Here is the film:
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Behind-The-Scenes...
With Agnes Goh.
For all the cINE65 videos that I have acted in over the years, including this one, click here.
At the time of writing, this episode of Titan Academy has hit 1 million views, 71k Likes and 14.5k comments, barely 48 hours from being released online. From their recent track record, the viewership will likely grow to 3 million hits by the end of its 4th week. These numbers are music to the ears of advertisers and the Titan team.
JianHao is currently the number one Youtube channel in Singapore, with a subscriber base of 4.7 million and growing. It is likely that their subscriber base has already extended beyond Singapore, to include Malaysia, India and other English speaking countries.
Perhaps it is time to consider creating content for the Chinese market and distribute it via iQiyi, QQ and Youku. It is a vast market waiting and the Chinese are curious about how life in Singapore is like. Singapore is to China, what Australia is to Americans. Same same, but different. The latter is evident in 1986 when the Aussie movie Crocodile Dundee took America by storm.
Currently, JianHao's channels comprise mostly listicles, but we may see more short film style episodes in future.
This is my second time working with JianHao and his company Titan Digital Media, but my first in a Youtuber style video.
My first time working with them was in a short film called "Majid The Legend", commissioned by 15 Shorts. In that short film, I acted as Singapore's football legend and coach Uncle Choo Seng Quee, in Pulau Ubin, an offshore island of Singapore.
In this short film episode "Welcome to Titan Academy", I played the corporate raider that buys over the school to run it ruthlessly for profits.
Compared to my first time working with them 18 months ago, they have made impressive strides forward in film making. There is now a lot more focus, precision and efficiency. The team's youthful enthusiasm and energy are also a breath of fresh air.
Most of the cast you see in their videos play multiple roles in front and behind the camera. So the girls and guys you see on screen, will also be running around adjusting lights, supervising scripts, setting up props, buying lunch,...etc, when they are not in front of the camera. Even the camera guy appears in some of the videos. But most of all, it is JianHao, who writes, produces, directs and acts; and I guess, runs the company too. How does he ever find such time and energy?
TRIVIA:
Did you know that Titan Digital Media's
real-life accountant also plays a
reel-life role in Titan Academy?
This is the kind of efficiency that mainstream media companies will find hard to fathom, let alone catch up with. In some jurisdictions, such flexibility in labour deployment may not even be permissible, as the unions will come down on you like a pile of bricks.
JianHao and several other celebrity-influencers in Singapore are chipping away at advertising revenues that traditionally went to mainstream media companies like Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and Mediacorp, in the context of Singapore.
SPH's revenue has dipped so much, that their media arm is now hived off to form a non-profit charity organisation that will tolerate losses, even huge ones, as they will be propped up by government funding. See SPHMedia. In other words, they have surrendered.
Let's see what will happen to Mediacorp in a few years' time, as it is also suffering from sharp falls in revenues. Will they be restructured into an entity insulated from the harsh competition of the real world too?
The morning after the episode was released, I woke up with a lot of new followers on my Instagram account MichaelChuaActor. I didn't see that coming, as I don't get new followers at all on my social media platforms when Mediacorp TV programmes that I am in, got broadcast.
JianHao's subscribers are young (18 to 35 years old), thus inferring that in future, this may be how content will be created and distributed.
Traditional free-to-air TV will continue to struggle to stay relevant and respond to their viewers' changing tastes, interests and demands; and also the disruption by yet more cheaply available new technologies. They will face rapidly declining viewership and advertising revenues that will eventually compel them to transform into the new media or face their own demise.
This is a documentary about the 'Perfect Language' for humans. I was there because I speak Teochew.
For the documentary, I was asked to bring an item that is symbolic of the language. It was hard to think of something, so I asked around. Unsurprisingly, all my Teochew friends came up with something to do with food. lol
Eventually everyone agreed on the Teochew Glutinous Rice Cake mould.
Can you think of something else symbolically or uniquely Teochew?
9 Nyawa (9 Lives) (2016), written by Christopher Yeo, is a Mediacorp Suria TV police and crime drama series. Chris is also the writer and director of "A Land Imagined" (2018) that won the Lugano International Film Festival's prestigious Golden Leopard Award.
I played the factory supervisor of a glue factory, incidentally also called "Mr Chua".
There was supposed to be a stunt double for the dunking and drowning of Mr Chua, but he turned out to be a lot shorter and smaller build than I am, so it did not work. As the show had to go on, I did the stunt myself.
This is what appeared in the final cut:
This (below) is the behind-the-scene shot. It wasn't as difficult as it looks, as there is a method to the struggle. The difficult part was when I had to remain totally motionless in the water while playing dead. Then, the water rushed into the nose along with the piercing and stinging pain. It probably only lasted for about 15 seconds, but it felt a lot longer. Such a relief when I heard 'cut'.
We did about 3 takes and it was done. We got it. It actually felt quite relaxing after that, just like how it feels after a good swim.
To check out the Malay shows I have been in (including this post), click here
Some of the movies that I have acted in have done famously in the theatres and are now screened on Netflix.
While others are less successful in their distribution routes.
Yet others only need Deep Fake inserts to look like I have acted in them. This one is from Spiderman. It couldn't quite fit my face into the Caucasian face structure. Not so convincing.
This one is better and even synchronised the lip movements quite convincingly.
This one fits my face more seamlessly because I cleaned up extraneous facial lines in my input image. It seems that the app is not capable of rendering shadows cast by facial features.
This one is very well done, as it morphed my face very well into both the characters and also lip-synced the dialogue neatly.
Makes me wonder what the future of cinema and films will be with this rapid advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology.
Will actors be still needed the way they are now?
I have also posted about the future of TV and Films in this blog in the past, if you are curisous, click here.
This is a summary of a 4-part series interview by the Self Awareness Society Singapore in November 2020. We spoke about how meditation has helped me in healing, acting and writing over the last 20 years.
I participated in the Self Awareness Centre's 7-Day Transformation Journey (7DTJ) programme in the year 2002 and have benefited from it immensely. Therefore I am sharing this here, so that you too may benefit from it. The 7DTJ is a time-tested and money-back guarantee programme. Over 40,000 attendees have benefited from the programme over the last 26 years.
- What is your aspiration? Is it very different from what you are doing every day?
- How does meditation help you in acting?
- What is success to you?
- When you quit, that means that your passion is not strong enough?
- Street fighting analogy to fearlessness.
PART 2:
My novel "Maid In Singapore"
- Writing it amid the silence of the Covid-19 Lockdown.
- The inspiring maids behind the story.
- Why it is written as a romantic comedy, instead of a social realistic drama.
- The difference between a novel and a movie in storytelling.
- 1 in 5 homes in Singapore has a maid - very alien to US, Canadian and European cultures.
- The difference between a theatrical release and a video-on-demand drama series.
- Why I have meditated regularly since the year 2002.
- Why busy people need to meditate more.
- Why we should always be vibrating at the highest level even in the bleakest of times.
- How meditation keeps you looking young.
- Meditation helps me to get into character more easily in acting.
- How I navigated myself in the TV and film industry.
I have also appeared in other interviews in the past. Click here.
THE SELF AWARENESS CENTRE (SAC), since 1988, is an institute for Human Resource Development and Spiritual Upliftment. It is a non-religious, non-communal and non-political organisation. SAC conducts transformational, motivational and spiritual programmes. The core to its programme module is the 7-Day Transformational Journey (7DTJ).
