Whenever someone from the office leaves to go back to the US, there’s a big celebration (see PT’s party for an example). Various employees get together and plan a series of musical performances, skits, games, and so on. There’s an MC, a guest of honor (of course), lots of food and drink, and there’s a movie. The people working on this take their personal time to prepare the events, something that would never happen in the US. Well, I’ve been nominated to write, film, edit, and direct Greg’s (center of photo) going away movie. Making videos is a lot of fun and this one will be good (look for it in about a week to ten days). One of the plans for this movie was to do a recording of a popular song by a Taiwanese trio called “S.H.E.”, the acronym formed by the first letter of each of the band member’s English names. Anyway, the song is called “Superstar” and a colleague wrote some lyrics particular to Greg. So, we went to a music studio to record the song (basically a karaoke session where you get a CD and a VCD for about $2.60). Three female colleagues sang the lyrics:

(above, 1st photo) Sally, Ivy, and Jennifer belt out “Superstar”

I brought the video camera along with the plan to insert some of the singing footage interspersed with scenes from Greg’s career in China. Pretty cool, eh? By the way, that will be the third and final part of the movie. As usual, the girls were enthusiastic and unabashed about singing, although only one was any good. But, without much musical training, it was easy to lose time, come in at the wrong time or whatever, so we ended up having to do many takes. The technician running the session wanted to make it really quick, but we managed to talk him into staying for like 3 or 4 extra takes, about an hour total.

(As an aside, I’ve started editing this part of the movie. I ripped the CD and discovered that the volume of the tracks are way too low. You get what you pay for, I guess. I just hope we can go back and get a better copy.)

Afterwards, Xiao Liu and I went out to eat some Hunan food, my favorite. As best I tried, he wouldn’t let me pay for the meal. At least I got him to concede to letting me take him out next time. Here’s a couple of shots from the restaurant. The first photo shows Xiao Liu holding up the plucked out fish eye. We didn’t eat it. It felt like a little marble.