School Of War

Getting to the filming location was a walk in a monster-infested swamp. First, I gotta meet up with the rest of the group at Sri Petaling LRT and that took me 2 hours to reach. That’s one bus to reach Kelana Jaya LRT and from there heading to Masjid Jamek LRT to change lines and disembark yet again at Chow Soi Lin LRT (if I’m not mistaken) to change lines yet again! To make matters worst, it’s Saturday so the LRT was packed and I have no place to sit throughout the journey. At the Chow Soi Lin LRT I changed into the wrong line twice! Did I mention that I didn’t sleep at all that day?

The location is an abandoned school in Taman Desa. It was extremely deserted and full of dead animals. In fact, throughout the time the filming took place, no one had even encountered one single living animal in the compound! It goes without saying that the place stinks to high heaven with rotting animal corpses, but what better place to film an action-packed hostage rescue than abandoned buildings?

I was exhausted at the end of filming. Really, making a movie is harder than it looks. Four hours of filming felt like forever. I nearly quit when I thought the filming took a whole day when in fact it had only been less than an hour and a half! The heat combined with the weight of the gears as well as the stress and pressure from repeating a scene again and again was both demoralizing and tiring. Now I know how Christian Bale must’ve felt while acting in Terminator Salvation. Even so, participating in a film is one of the best experience in my life. I look forward to work alongside my group with Dan Khoo and Brian Lee again in the future.

PS: As I reached home and unpacked my stuff after filming was over, I realized my uniform left a shallow puddle inside the bag (and I mean shallow and splashy!). I sweat a bottle worth of water in my gear! D:

Don't forget to check out the director's behind-the-scenes entry for his film!