Life Is Indeed Like A Game Of Chess .

The first time I heard this proverb was when I was watching a Ghanaian movie called Playboy. It happened to be that the main character, Jesse was a gold digger. In the beginning he lured 3 girls (all at the same time without them knowing) into thinking that he loved them all and deceived them into thinking that he would do anything for them and give them the world in pretty little pink gift boxes. His character was very sly and cunning, and you could identify all these characteristics right from when his character first showed up on the screen.
Eventually, when he got tired of them he figured out a very clever way to get them to nearly clear out their whole bank accounts and give to him. When he got ahold of all that money, he got someone to make a breaking news report on the #1 news channel in the country to make an announcement that a car with his registration number had gotten into a fatal car accident and the driver had not survived. All three of the girls saw this breaking news report and believed he had passed away, began to mourn his death.
Of course Jesse wasn't dead though, he had simply packed and moved to another major city which was far away. When he got to the other city, he began his search for his next prey, which came to be a very sweet and innocent young lady named Nadia who happened to come from a very wealthy home. He also deceived her into thinking he loved her to the absolute extreme and would grab stars out of the sky and put them in her palm. Nadia fell "unconditionally in love" with him and eagerly awaited his proposal for marriage to her. Jesse eventually proposed to her, figuring that if he did marry her he would have non-stop access to her money and her bank account. Now, of course he would have to meet Nadia's father if anything. And surprisingly, Nadia's father seemed to be as clever as Jesse.
Old people are very wise, Nadia's father accused Jesse of only "loving" her to chase after their family's money just by hearing the way Jesse spoke for the first time! Nadia, being so infatuated with Jesse stood up to defend him.
And that's when her father said it..... "Life is like a game of chess" And I lay there wondering why he would say such a thing, when he later repeated himself and added onto that saying, "Life is like a game of chess, one wrong move and the game could be over... do you think you know the game more than I do?" He didn't believe Jesse loved his daughter one bit. So what did Jesse do? He went to the extent of paying armed robbers to beat him up in the presence of Nadia. The robbers were to act as if they were going to take her wallet from her handbag where all her credit cards and cash were and then shoot her. Then Jesse would stand in front of her in an effort to "put his life on the line for her" then the robbers intentionally beat him up instead and leave. Which is supposed to convince Nadia and her father that Jesse really loves her, and it did. "Boy, oh boy, the things people do for money"... but that's not the point.

After the movie was done, I thought about it... and realized it made all the sense in the world. Life is indeed like a game of chess, one wrong move and the game could be over for you also every move you make in chess has an effect; whether immediate or delayed, just like life. Have you ever played a good game of chess before?

Lights, Camera... ACTION !

Hellooo world! Today for TV & Film class we were finishing up commercials that we started in the middle of last week, I happened to be the last one. I went today and I was very nervous. What happened was our wonderful teacher, Mrs. Thomas gave us each sheets with commercial scripts on them and we were to memorize and present them in front of a filming camera and our class. My script was for 'Skin Glow Facial Cleanser'. 

I walked onto the stage feeling like my heart was about to jump out of my chest for various reasons.. but one, because the house lights were on so I could see every face clearly whilst the performance from earlier days the house lights weren't on, I couldn't exactly do anything about it so I just forced myself to focus on the camera. I began from the top and I could hear my voice trembling so my natural instinct was to rush through it in an attempt to disguise it. Which obviously wasn't a really good idea, cause I ended up having to do it all over again. 

On my last line, when I had to hold my product to the camera and hold a pose (which was a smile) I could feel my cheeks trembling, I didn't think it was that noticeable but it appeared to be so, because after I asked one of my friends if she noticed my voice trembling and she said no, but she saw my cheeks trembling.. how embarassing! Imagine that, having a full room with classmates, grade 12 leaders, and a teacher seeing your cheeks trembling like that... yikes! Anyways, I'm now over that. 

All my classmates did really well though, they all had really interesting commercials so it was really fun watching theirs. I had a few friends telling me I did really good but I didn't feel it, part of the reason most likely being because I surely don't have all the confidence in the world! But it was overall a pretty interesting day, it was the first time we had solos in our TV & Film class.. and well, we all survived, so that's a good sign... right??

The Branding Experience .

Two weeks ago, in my Acting for TV & Film class we were given a branding assignment. Our class was split into two and we were required to come up with a production company name, logo, mission and vision statement, company colours etc. It was also like a competition so the other group couldn't know what we were doing and we couldn't know what they were doing. My company name was 'Prolific Productions'.

We came up with prolific because it meant to thrive for something, which was exactly what we were doing ! And our colours were black, purple (my favourite!), and silver. And we had exactly one week to get ourselves together for our branding presentation. Let me tell you now, it was a pretty stressful week! On the day of our presentation, we had to come to school at 7:30 so we had enough time to practice a bit and set ourselves up. Luckily though, the other team was presenting first, so we had quite a bit of time. Enough time to run down to the caf at 8:20 ish and quickly put together a whole bunch of cherries, pineapples, and cheese blocks onto toothpicks as snacks for our audiences and make it to class RIGHT on time. We also had lots of other fancy food for our adjudicators because one of our team members' father worked at a catering restaurant. But anyways, since the other group was going first, me and 3 other girls who were helping us with the food rushed right back into a 'waiting area'. Where the rest of our group stood and the adjudicators sat, flipping through some magazines.

I am really shy, so I had to FORCE myself to greet at least one of them, which I did eventually. When we were finally allowed into the room, I was dazed everything on the stage looked so professional and elegant.. I was soo in the moment. The other teams name was 'Enigma Productions' and their colours were black, teal, and silver which if you were there, you would've known because the room was so elegantly decorated in these colours. Enigma did a very great job and I was very happy for them. We even had about 2 traitors in our groups (not mentioning any names) saying they did so well they wished they were in Enigma.

Our group also did a good job except for some errors, like in our choral script where we were missing 2 or 3 people because some issues with the food not being heated and our video. So our choral script was a bit messy but we managed to kind of brush it off. I was in charge of stage managing and the tech. So when there was problems with the video, it didn't make me look too good. But we managed to get it to work at the VERY end of our presentation when we were beginning to clean up. After that my whole group went backstage and started pigging out on the food (it was really good!). I had to come back out from backstage though, to thank each and every one of our adjudicators, which I did nervously, I believe there was 6 or 7 of them!

The room was pretty messy and alot of us had lunch right after so we used that to try and get the room back in order. As a little gift, we gave the adjudicators martini glasses with our company colours painted on the outside of them. And that was it! I went home later on that day feeling like I had accomplished something big, it was a really great feeling, I think since it was Friday, my favourite day of the week also added onto that. A week later we retrieved our results from our awesome grade 12 leaders and our lovely teacher Mrs. Thomas...... we won! Prolific Productions, that is! I wasn't really expecting it, but to be honest I wasn't to concerned about it competition-wise, I was just happy we got good marks! It was a wonderful experience I won't forget!

About Me .

Hi , my name is Layla. I had this blog created to share whatever exciting thing that may occur in my life and whatever interesting thing in my head with you (yeah , that's right... YOU!) And just a little heads up.. I always have ALOT in my head, I'm a very introverted type of person and I often like to be by myself but don't get me wrong.. I never close anybody off ! Me, being introverted of course results in me not being very social, I never really say much in class or any other place with a big group of people whom I don't know completely well. As my Aunt would say, "Quiet people have the loudest minds". I think blogging is an excellent way to communicate for introverted people like myself even though I was a bit doubtful at first. Feel free to share anything from your perspective if you see anything on my blog that interests you!