What: A video gift to Rui En, our All Time Favourite Artiste, from RBKD and fans from all over the globe

Where: Across 17 cities in 10 countries

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Xinyi, Club President (Singapore):

“I wonder if we can mobilize a flash mob, and if Ch8 SA team would be keen.

Get fans to gather at a place and get everyone a mortar board. Then we do a class photo in video style, congratulate her and then throw our mortar boards.

Doing it at the new MCS’ 50 steps would be nice. What do you think?”

That’s how the “50 Steps Mortar Boards” idea started, exactly one month before Star Awards, a really last minute project.

It’s an unprecedented attempt, Channel 8 has never done this before, but heck, I was determined to try. I’m so glad that they agreed.

The next few days were crazy. Reaching out to fans without telling them anything about the idea, it does make you wonder if anyone would sign up for the unknown.

But the response was so overwhelming, we had to scramble to order more mortar boards with just days to go.

What about our members & fans overseas? There’s no way we are going to exclude them. And so this morphed into the ambitious “Fans of the World” project you are seeing today.

Coordinating fans from around the world was no easy feat, not with the tight timeline and difference in time zones. If we had more time, we would have been able to cover a few more cities & states in Australia, UK, China, Malaysia and USA, and also countries such as Germany, Philippines, Hong Kong and Brunei.

But it was still heartwarming for the fans from around the world to step forth, especially the ones who drove hours to film the 10s video in front of a representative landmark. It was really touching to hear them do that.

Over in Singapore, we may not have the Hollywood sign or snowscape, we have instead, strong winds that would blow our mortar boards off our heads and super strong sun that caused us sunburns even though it was supposed to be sheltered.

The video looks short enough, but coordinating close to a hundred people, and capturing the right angle meant that we probably “graduated” more than 30 times that day.

Cheer > Throw > Pick up > Get in position > Repeat.

Yea, we did that at least 30 times across 2 hours. A few of us even sustained bruises when the mortar boards hit us after we sent it flying in the air.

Interestingly, none of the graduates present threw their mortar boards at their convocation. Did you realise that there was a heart formation by the way?

The SG video was split into 2 components – the Sarang Haeyo video involving only the members and the mortar boards video involving both fans and members.

Even the Sarang Haeyo video was not much easier. We had to record so many versions because often, what we imagined isn’t what transpired in reality.

Just like the editing process too.

We thought this was a simple enough video and we would take no more than 2 hours. In the end, we took more than 6 hours before finalising on this version.

But I am sure, that very night when the video played on the screen, everyone who participated was glad that they did.

The video couldn’t have been more timely.

Sarang Haeyo.

PS: Just like this project, this entry was a last minute one. Wrote this within an hour and a half after my dear blogmaster realised we should have done a post from the SG perspective as well. Hope this gives you a glimpse of the thoughts behind this project even though this was written in haste.

All Time Favourite: Our 10 Years' Gifts