Category: About me

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Electricity: Economics, Infrastructure & Access Exploration

Passion and work. I have found my passion, acting, and fictional writing. In this round, there are three other explorations, which are storytelling, household garden, and outdoor leadership. Since fictional writing is my passion, I wanted to be in storytelling exploration, which is about writing and publishing children’s books. I had planned during holiday. First my name was there, However, I am in electricity exploration at the end. I was so disappointed.

“Don’t always go with your passion, learn something new”

In this exploration, we learn about different ways to produce electricity, some history of electricity and electricity in Cambodia. Electricity is something brand new to me. I have no idea about it. Not even to define “electricity”. During the exploration, we do a lot of research, went to different places, and interview different people. The goal of this exploration is to explore electricity and also to produce some documents such as writing or video for our senior project, Cambodia Economy website. We did a lot of research about solar power, thermal power, hydropower and wind power. We do some research, went to some of trips then come back and continue our writing. During this exploration, I become a specialist in wind power. I have done a lot of research about wind power and have written an article about it at the end of the exploration. I think I am a big fan of wind power. Cambodia has not had any wind turbines yet. However, there is a company called Blue Circle is planning on building wind turbines on Bokor Mountain, Kampot Province which is my hometown. Other than wind power, I have learned about other resources of electricity. Even though it’s not my passion, I still learn so many things new things from this exploration. I have also explored something I like and support, which is wind power. Learn something new to explore more. 

  • Villager house using solar panels from Okra Company in Kampong Speu province. know more about Okra: https://www.okrasolar.com/
Trip to ISPP to see their solar system.
https://www.ispp.edu.kh/

 

Presentation from Mr. Sophorn from Blue circle company.
Know more about blue circle: http://www.thebluecircle.sg/ 
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Filming/Acting

To be honest, I have been excited for this exploration since the beginning of the year and still excited in the last round of the school year. Acting is always on my passion list. When I set plans or goals, it would always be on the top. In addition, I have heard that we have abroad facilitators from LA – Los Angeles is always been my dream city- which makes me, even more, exhilarating for this exploration. 

The two stars from LA

Lianne O’Shea
Aviv Rubinstien

 Finally, round five is coming. Lianne O’ shea is our acting facilitator and Aviv Rubinstien as our filming and writer facilitator. They are quite famous. Lianne has been in a lot of movies. Aviv has been a director, writer, and editor a lot. We spend the first week to know each other. The rest are all learning about different thing in the film industry. 

Story

Storytelling, everyone loves story. Everyone can tell stories in different ways with different techniques. However, the best story will always need something called, Conflict. If your story has no conflict, it would be a documentary or a boring story. We also learn about monomyth, known as the hero’s journey, which is another step leading your story to be even more interesting. Screenplay, is the script for filming. After learning about everything, we wrote it all in screenplay application call Fade In.

Cinematography

“There are 2, 799, 360 shots that you can have in your film, so don’t only just have wide shot and wide shot the whole movie,” Aviv told us with caution. We explored size of shots, angle of shot, lens, aperture, motion, and iso, which is short for SALAMI. We learn a lot, by a lot I meant a lot.

Acting

I had two weeks to learn acting with Lianne. Acting is so much fun. I just realize that actors also need as much warm up as the athletics, since they need to express their feeling and emotion a lot. We had a lot of warm up and learn different fun activities with Lianne. She teaches us different techniques to be a successful actor. “You need to know about your character,” she told us gently. In order to know about your character, you need to know their desire, and the given circumstance to the character. It sounds really simple, but it’s not that straightforward either. We also practice by using different scene. One of them is the shoulder touching from Into the Spider Verse movie. It was really gratification to try it with our friend and it’s also challenging.

My Screenplay

We have two weeks to produce a short film ( about ten minutes). First, our facilitators, Aviv, Lianne, A-J and Jillian ( A-J and Jillian are coming from Los Angeles to assist us with filming) select the top three script, that is producible, has a good story plot and fun to make. My screenplay was one of the top three. Wow, UNBELIEVABLE! Next, we read the three screenplays together in order to select the one that we all want to produce. Reach and Raksa screenplays are really amazing. I can imagine when we shoot Reach’s screenplay, it is going to be really fun to shot this film. Raksa’s screenplay is really marvelous with a really cool story plot. When it’s the turn to read my script, everyone started to blush with surprise reactions. When it comes to decision, mine was selected. However, I like everyone screenplay, and I think they are unique in different ways.

Read: The Three of You (Stupid Love)

The Three of You is the title of my screenplay. The Three of You is about teenage love. Selfishness, switching couple, triangle love, selfish love – love someone for self-benefit – are the reasons for writing this story. “One day, I’ll write the story” I have promised myself until I am in this exploration. On the last week of our exploration, I and my classmate are working on producing the film. Wait to watch this mind-blowing short film! 

Watch our film: The Three of You

Big Thanks to Aviv and Lianne. What you have gave: me is more a precious diamond because instead of giving me the diamond, you give me the knowledge of finding diamonds by myself. 

 

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Indigenous Community

My round 3 exploration is indigenous community. In Cambodia, there are at least 19 groups of different indigenous people all over in Cambodia. Some of them such as Pnong, and Kreung. However, the other indigenous groups, not many of Cambodians know that they exist. After my facilitator, Bunthan saw this problem, he created an exploration which is indigenous community to promote and to raise everyone’s awareness that they actually exist. The two indigenous groups that we were focusing on are Stieng in Krate and Kui in Preh Vihear. There are 16 of us and we were divided into two groups, which are video group with 7 members and 9 members of the book group. By the end of our exploration, we expected to create 7 videos about Stieng and one book about Kui. I am one of the book members.

We went to Krate and Preah Vihear to collect all of the information about their community. During the trip, I’ve noticed that they were just like us, accept their daily life and their langue. For Stieng, I think they are no longer an indigenous group anymore because of their daily life, clothes, langue, and tradition is time by time turn into typical Cambodians. However, Kui people still speak their langue and follow their belief with the big population.

When we back from the trip, we were trying to write a book and editing our video. After we finished our book, we think we should come back to the community to verify the things that need to be changed. We’ve print our first version of the book along the trip. We finally, made a lot of changes. Hopefully, we can print our second version book soon and hand it out to different places to promote Cambodia indigenous groups.

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Traditional Food

 

In the second round of the year, my exploration was traditional food. As the name of this exploration, we were doing research on the different type of Khmer traditional food, how do food interact with humans, and story behind those foods. The goals of this exploration are to have knowledge of Khmer traditional food and one website that contains documentary film, photo essay, and journalism writing.

  • Group photo at Cuisine Wat Damnak

To reach our goal, we went to different restaurants in Siem Reap to seek out different Khmer cuisine in this tourism province. The restaurants that we went to are Mahob, Cuisine Watdomnak, and the Sugar Palm.

  • Khmer rice noodle maker is sitting on the wood, so the noodle would press out from the noodle press machine.

One of our traditional food is Khmer rice noodle. This food is so common for Cambodians, but I’ve never seen how’s it made. Until this four days trip, I can know clearly of each process to make Khmer rice noodle.

My teammates and I started interviewing, filming and taking photos to get all the sources that we need to create each of our products. During the trip, we met some problems such as losing some footages and interviewing problems.   

With all the hard work, We’ve done all of our products and have it post into our blog.