National Day Parade 2011

I always tell myself that I will update regularly, but it really seemed impossible with all the homework now.

The event that I wanted to update is National Day Parade 2011 @ Marina Floating Platform. Don't get the idea that I'm very lucky. My luck was ran out after getting back my lost IC. Haha. Anyway, the tickets were given by my aunt, who is the real lucky one. My mum and I went together to watch for the second time. The first time was back when my brother was marching for the parade on 2007. It was still at Kallang Outdoor Stadium. So, it was my first time watching at the Floating Platform.

I preferred the queuing in system now, as they have a better system to control the flow of people. My mum and I could get to our seats in around 15-20 mins. However, our seats were at the side, and I already knew the stage setup, so we were going to see almost nothing when the musical segment started.

PS: Sorry, no photos as I lazy to extract them out from the SD card...

The parade started rather differently. Because in the past, it was always the marching contingent first before the other performances. This time, they started with a mini introduction and a tacky show on how Singapore Defense Forces deal with all the possible land, sea and air threats. The content was like... Bleah... But because of the location of the stage, they could make use of the sea element in the performance as well, and also the use of chinook, helicopter, and some jet planes, which I thought was ok. However, another problem came, the sea performance was all on the right side of the stage! And I could only catch a bit on the left...

Then, the marching contingent came in. The contingent marched off in another special way. The teenage cadets marched and climbed up towards the audience seats and disappeared into the stairway on the top. That was totally unexpected. But I quite like it.

Then it was all the usual stuff about the Red Lions, the flag flying past the parade location, etc. Finally, the performance segment. This year, the designer specially made it into a musical story theme, in which there would be main characters to depict the past, the present and the future of Singapore. The idea was very original, but I heard the camera focused too much on the main characters, and they just went on singing "In my Heartbeat..." again, again and again... Furthermore, as I expected, they were quite a few performances on the stage setup, which I totally could not see a single thing from my angle.So the performance still failed in some sense.

Well, it was more exaggerating when I looked across the Marina Bay Sands direction. The outside of MBS was totally packed with damn lots of people! I even heard the hotel even sold tickets for people to enter the roof to view the performance and most importantly, the Fireworks. Yup, the fireworks. Still beautiful as ever, but it would not as magnificent as China Fireworks @ Beijing Olympics. The fireworks was the only annual event in the NDP that people appreciate to see how their taxes are spent.

Overall, it was still alright. But the stage director must seriously consider the problem of whether the audience could see the whole performance live.